Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Dems and taxes

Now that Rupert has sealed the deal with the WSJ, watch it go south in the next few years.

But even before that happens, Republicans will claim that lower taxes are spurring economic growth and we need them for the sake of the Republic. But the prescription for economic growth is far more complex than the tired mantra about lower taxes being the cure-all for everything. What actually IS our economy? Does it include the intangibles, like the actual costs of gasoline, health care, energy use, national security, education, cigarettes, obesity, or the myriad other things that cost real dollars? Or is it simply the balance sheets of raw numbers that make up the GNP? And what is "strong economic growth" (does that include the deficit we are handing down to our children?). Do lower taxes have any effect at all on those intangibles that Republican propagandists ignore?

As the country now faces new enemies who defy easy definition and targeting, I hope the country has finally shaken itself free from the juvenile either-or analysis of life that has become the legacy of the Bush Republican party (and which has hopefully sunk its electoral chances for a generation).

I am profoundly suspect of ANY single issue politics and the inane tactics they create. They have weakened us profoundly. The way we are all woven together resists our undoing by the unraveling of any single string. Yet, for some reason, the Republicans have tried, and in many ways succeeded in doing that. We need new leadership and new ideas desperately to restore our strength. Bring on the Dems. Please. Anything but these idiots now in charge.