Living in Massachusetts, I'm not accustomed to the barrage of political ads that must come with living in Ohio or Florida. But the Scott Brown-Elizabeth Warren race for the Senate is a hot one and the spots have been coming in a relentless stream. Brown seems to be running on personality and bipartisanship; many of his recent ads feature Democrats like former Boston mayor Ray Flynn talking up Brown's ability to play well with others.
Warren, on the other hand, is playing what I call the "Candy for Everyone!" strategy: it's great stuff for all, paid by somebody else. Her latest ad deplores the fact that China is spending 9% of GDP on infrastructure while, darn it, we're only spending 2.4% and "we can do better." Hit & Run adds it up:
U.S. gross domestic product is about $15 trillion a year. Increasing infrastructure “investment” to the 9% Chinese level that Warren cites would mean an additional $1 trillion a year in government spending. That’s an immense spending increase. To put it in context, the entire federal government spent about $3.6 trillion in 2011, on revenues of about $2.3 trillion.
How will Elizabeth Warren pay for this extra trillion dollars in spending? Well - heaven help me - I went to her web site and it's all gonna be covered by a "small" tax hike on the rich. Just for context, repealing the Bush tax cuts on higher-income Americans is projected to raise $80 billion/year. We are heading into the fifth straight year of a trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits, Medicare is going broke, Social Security will be underwater in twenty years, and the costs for Obamacare haven't kicked in yet. There is no mathematical way that Warren can pay for all her goodies when we're already borrowing $4 billion every day.
But we can't say that, can we? Instead, Uncle Moneybags is going to pave us a new road. Hooray!
5 comments:
Libs are stealing wealth yet to be earned from generations yet to be born, and they still have the nerve to call it "compassion".
Yeah, and we need that money for off-budget oil wars and Wall Street tax cuts!
Can we re-build our infrastructure Chine style? No unions, no standards, no cronies siphoning off the money?
The ironic part of her promises is that MA wrecked "infrastructure" projects for everyone with the Big Dig. Even the DC politicians and bureaucrats were appalled at the levels of waste, graft, and incompetence of that Billion dollar money hole.
Brown will 'seem' to be doing whatever you wish to see.
Bipartisan?
Brown explicitly pledged during his campaign to do everything he could to obstruct the Democrats.
Ray Flynn is a pro-life conservative who routinely backs Republican candidates. He backed Bush in 2000. He did back Clinton, but that was after Wild Bill promised to name him Ambassador to the Holy See. Ray's a Democrat because he wanted to get elected mayor of Boston.
Don't make me bring up that 'Jesus in the toast thing again'...I'll do it...
It'll be very funny if Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown perishes on the cross of Romneycare.
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