rssGrover and the Bears
Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 11:45 am
- 2 Comments
Grover Norquist’s testimony before the Republican Working Committee on Economic Recovery doesn’t travel far from the documents he passed out or his long record of supply-side policies. “We have a history of what works,” says Norquist. “We lowered marginal tax rates in the 1920s.” Also: “FDR didn’t do anything that Hoover didn’t do first.”
Norquist then tells a fable about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and President-elect Barack Obama holding buckets and walking around a lake, occasionally filling the bucket, passing it on, then pouring the water back in. “That’s the theory of the economic stimulus,” says Norquist.
Conservative activist Eric Odom gets the third citizen YouTube. “First of all,” he says, “congratulations to Eric Cantor on his Twitter feed.” Cantor smiles, but criticizes Odom for wearing a Chicago Bears hat.
“I would add to that, that there’s a hole in the bucket. And as he walks around the lake he’s taking water out of it.”
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2 Comments
Comment posted January 16, 2009 @ 6:42 am
Norquist gets away with his specious reasoning by avoiding inconvenient facts. In the hearing he notes with significance that through the 20th century it was tax breaks that unfailingly resulted in economic robustness, which each time were cut short by tax increases. All examples are of unsustained growth. Conspicuously missing is the post-war period of the 1950s and 1960s when the country's economy had one of its longest periods of expansion while marginal tax rates on individuals were what Norquist would claim today as a guaranteed formula for economic disaster. Corporations also supported a much larger percentage of federal tax revenue. His Tommy Two Note song that everyone pays too much to the Fed, citing the top rate, while ignoring the loopholes driven through consistently by corporations and high income individuals, which results in effective rates well below the stated 35%. With Washington on the verge of washing out the extremist Republican component with the new administrations intention to attend to the K St. indecent rise to corrupt influence I look forward to the day when Grover crawls back into the hole from which he was hatched.
Comment posted January 16, 2009 @ 2:42 pm
Norquist gets away with his specious reasoning by avoiding inconvenient facts. In the hearing he notes with significance that through the 20th century it was tax breaks that unfailingly resulted in economic robustness, which each time were cut short by tax increases. All examples are of unsustained growth. Conspicuously missing is the post-war period of the 1950s and 1960s when the country's economy had one of its longest periods of expansion while marginal tax rates on individuals were what Norquist would claim today as a guaranteed formula for economic disaster. Corporations also supported a much larger percentage of federal tax revenue. His Tommy Two Note song that everyone pays too much to the Fed, citing the top rate, while ignoring the loopholes driven through consistently by corporations and high income individuals, which results in effective rates well below the stated 35%. With Washington on the verge of washing out the extremist Republican component with the new administrations intention to attend to the K St. indecent rise to corrupt influence I look forward to the day when Grover crawls back into the hole from which he was hatched.
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