Misplaced Rhetoric
Yeah, this is really old (July of last year!), but I never got around to posting it. Excuse the partially formed thoughts here…
Repealing Financial Reform?
Congressman Boehner called for the repeal of the financial regulation bill as soon as it passed the Senate. Yeah, we get it – you don’t like the bill. But how idiotic is it to call for repeal of anything Obama wants while he’s still President – the earliest you could actually repeal this Wall Street bill or the healthcare law would be January 2013 and by then Wall Street would have already adjusted to and manipulate the loopholes inherent in the new rules.
Federal Spending… A Sweet Deal For The States Who Want It The Least
Conservatives and Libertarians love to argue for “federalist” solutions of dismantling federal programs and letting states decide whether to recreate them and pay for them. Aside from the terrible waste involved in ending and restarting programs for nothing but ideological reasons, consider this – the biggest benefactors of federal spending are also its harshest critics. Rand Paul, for one, has made government spending a crusade, yet his home state is near the top of the list for the ratio of federal expenditures to revenue. I’m sure California and New York would love to save money by no longer bailing out the Alabamas and Kentuckys of the world, but is that what any of us really want, for the income gap (to say nothing of the disparity in available government programs) between the states to grow even more? I didn’t think so.
