Democrats' Spend and Tax Frenzy Won’t Stop

By recent standards, Monday was just another day in Washington. Republican Senator Judd Gregg and erstwhile Obama cabinet nominee now tells us that the unending reckless spending of Obama and the national Democrats is risking sending the US into bankruptcy, not that many people with a pulse need to be informed or reminded of that. And Treasury and tax-man Geithner, after months of deep thought, announces another installment in a semi-formed plan to rescue banks from the stranglehold “toxic” assets have on their balance sheets – if this plan is half-baked then it’s more than twice-baked compared to his last one. This time the idea is some sort of public-private investment partnership which would buy these assets from banks, and despite a lack of details (what else is new) and the horrific thought that capitalists must have of having anything to do with the anti-business lynch-mob crazed Democrats in Washington, the stock market moved dramatically higher. Hard to figure.

Meanwhile, in Illinois new Democrat Governor Quinn, having just proposed a 50% increase in individual and corporate taxes to cover a budget deficit caused by years of reckless and irresponsible spending, yesterday announced a plan to spend more money (link):

Quinn has proposed $25 billion in projects paid for by raising fees on license plates and driver's licenses. But legislative leaders have floated raising the gas tax to come up with the cash…. To get the ball rolling, however, Quinn wants lawmakers to use about $150 million in taxpayer dollars set aside for road building to acquire $1 billion in loans and federal dollars for immediate road projects…. The Chicago Democrat said he wants that legislation on his desk before lawmakers are set to go on spring break in about two weeks. "We have got to respond urgently," Quinn said. "This is an emergency."

About 80% of the Illinois state budget is social welfare such as Medicaid and pensions, I have read. And not to be left out of the spend and tax and spend mania, even my Village has a referendum on next month’s ballot to increase the local sales tax.

Democrats at all levels of government have gone on a massive, unprecedented spending and taxing orgy. Camouflaged under the pretext of doing something to stall the recession, the real aim is to dramatically increase the size and reach and power of government. For the true intelligentsia in the vanguard of the party, this recession is a “crisis too good to waste.”

Dick Morris, on the Hannity show on Fox News Channel last night, voiced what many I suspect are thinking – that Obama is vilifying capitalists even while his Administration is ostensibly trying to foster some sort of public-private partnership because he wants those efforts to fail, so that in the end the unresolving crisis will give him political cover, as it did FDR in the 1930s, for ever more government control of all facets of American society and the realization of his ultimate goal of transforming America into a nominally- but only superficially-democratic European-type social welfare state.


John M Greco