Fight the Good Fight

It's the middle of February in New England, it's cold, and there are weeks and weeks to go before the weather warms up. What keeps New Englanders going through the heart of winter? The anticipation of baseball returning - of hot dogs and base hits and green grass and warm sunny days. Everything that is the beauty of summer in New England flashes to mind right now with the start of spring training in Florida.

When New Englanders bleed, they bleed Red Sox red. The passion for the team is in our DNA, because the baseball season is the embodiment of everything winter is not. When the 2009 season kicks off at Fenway Park on April 6th, it is likely to be 35 degrees - and standing room only. For the people in the park that day, it will feel like 75.

As the optimism of pre-season baseball ramps up once again, Red Sox Nation finds itself missing one of its leading citizens: Dean Barnett who passed away last October, at the age of 41.

Dean was a huge Sox fan, a strong voice for rational thought and for Republican principles, broadcasting from the heart of the liberal bastion that is Massachusetts. I started reading his Soxblog many years ago, and it was the first blog I ever bookmarked. When he went national with Hugh Hewitt, and then wrote for the The Weekly Standard, it was truly a story of local-boy-makes-good. Dean was a great Red Sox fan, a great Republican, a great writer, and a great person. And as the cycle of seasons once again brings us to the hope that is Red Sox spring training, I believe it is important to remember Dean Barnett, to remember his passion for baseball and politics, his passion for life in general, and the class and wit he displayed in fighting the good fight.

Seize the day, fight for what you believe in, cheer for the Red Sox. It's that simple.

Gas Tax - It's Time

Before I begin, let me first state that the following opinion is certainly not a universal opinion of the Natick Republican Town Committee. It may not even be the opinion of a majority. I don’t know. I haven’t asked. If others disagree, feel free to post the counter argument. But here’s my thesis: it’s time to raise the gas tax in Massachusetts.

A Republican in favor of a tax increase? Blasphemous! But hear me out. First, I will stipulate that there is a tremendous amount of wasted spending in the state that could be a rich source of additional funding for the decrepit transportation system. We certainly should go after that source, but with the macro economy weakening, we will need that recouped wasted spending to fund other priorities such as schools.

As people within the state know all too well, the lack of transportation funding is due in large part to the Big Dig money sink-hole. The Big Dig, originally estimated to cost $2.8 billion, eventually topped $22 billion. I could fill a blog just with the problems surrounding the Big Dig, but I’ll leave that for another day. The point is, much of the $22 billion was borrowed, and the interest and principle have to be paid back, and those payments are so onerous that there is little money left over to fund other transportation projects. One solution to raise additional revenue is to hike the tolls on the Mass Turnpike – hike them WAY up. Besides being unfair to ask users of the Mass Pike (mostly commuters west of Boston, as the Pike runs east/west) to fund the Big Dig, a toll increase will do little to encourage fuel efficiency. And fuel efficiency is what we need to strive for.

Why fuel efficiency? It has nothing to do with ‘global warming’. Check out Whoops! Never Mind! to see my skepticism of global warming. Fuel efficiency is needed to break the US dependence on foreign oil. When gas prices were high last summer, the US was sending billions of dollars out of the country to fund dictators in Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. With gas prices low, those three countries are in a world of hurt. If gas prices rally, they will be right back using those US dollars to undermine the US. We need to encourage the shifting behavior patterns seen with high energy prices, a behavior that can all too easily revert to oil dependency with low gas prices. A gas tax would make it more expensive to use gas, encourage conservation, and perhaps be a first small step to encourage energy independence from the oil dictators.

So mark me down as a supporter of a hike of the gas tax. It’s time.

Reading is Fundamental

In the end, no one read it. In too much of a hurry, too many more important things to do. So Congress passes a $787 BILLION budget buster, saddling our children with a tremendous debt burden, without even bothering to see where the pork is going. And the sad fact is, most economist say it won’t help the economy, and will likely hurt in the longer term. While President Obama assures us that with the passage of ‘stimulus’ Caterpillar Corporation will be able to hire back people recently laid off, the CEO of Caterpillar assures us that is not the case. What the ‘stimulus’ is likely to do is set in motion massive inflation.

So in the end, score one for the GOP in standing up against fiscal irresponsibility. Give points to Judd Gregg for finally coming to his senses and making a stand on principle. Points must certainly be deducted from Senators Snowe, Collins, and Specter for enabling the Democrat spending splurge. RINOs indeed.

The picture below perfectly captures the tone of the debate. For the Democrats, it’s party time – the spending taps are open!

$787 billion, and no one read it.

A Chip Off the Old Blockhead

The latest wackiness from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is a proposal to embed monitoring chips into auto inspection stickers. That way, government will always know your location, and can tax you accordingly. On the surface this appears outrageous, and simply stunning that anybody would actually propose such an Orwellian intrusion of personal privacy. However, when I read through the Massachusetts constitution, I was surprised to find that such drastic steps in the name of taxation are indeed permitted. You can read the relevant parts of the Massachusetts Constitution here.

Hey Governor, here’s another way to go: CUT SPENDING.

A Catastrophe Looms

The front page headline for the Boston Globe today: A Catastrophe Looms, Obama Tells the Nation.

When I first saw that, I was greatly relieved. At last, I thought, the President is going to insert sanity into the government take-over of the economy. Certainly the ‘catastrophe’ he referred to was the spending of TRILLIONS to fund every pork project Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank could come up with. Alas, it was not so. The generational theft continues apace.

Now, the “stimulus bill” is just one use of a trillion dollars. Another is a bank bail-out plan. At around 11:AM EST this morning Treasury Secretary Tim Geither decided it was necessary to explain how the government was going to help. That didn’t go so well, investors were not impressed, and the stock market tanked (see chart). Thanks Tim, thanks a lot.



Taking this conversation local, the interesting battle over the next few days will be between the House and Senate to reach a compromise bill, and one of the big differences between the two bills is that the Senate version offers significantly less largesse to bail out state governments. Without that money, states may actually be forced to live within their means. For Massachusetts, that means our Democrat Governor, Deval Patrick, may have to preside over some long-overdue down-sizing of state employees. His alternative is to raise taxes, which would really deep-six any hope of the state economy reviving. But hey, this is Massachusetts (TIM) – a fiscally sound plan to get out of the spending hole would be completely out of character.

Let's be Frank

Barney Frank, who blew up a perfectly good economy with his Fannie/Freddy time bomb, has more to say. His contribution to political discourse today: “We had an election last year which had pretty decisive results in the White House, the Senate, and the House. And it did say that public spending for improved infrastructure, to keep bridges from crumbling, to keep cops and firefighters working, is a good thing”.

Really? I’m sorry Barney, when exactly did President Obama offer a position paper that called for spending ONE TRILLION DOLLARS? I must have missed that. I'm quite sure there was no mandate for a massive expansion of the federal government. Representative Frank - as a resident of Massachusetts, I implore you - stop yapping. You are embarrassing us.

The Stimulus Bill Tragedy

It looks like it’s a done deal. With 3 Republican Senators breaking with the rest of the party, the Democrats, with the help of 3 turn-coat Republicans, are poised to pass a massive trillion dollar expansion of government at all levels. The states get bailed out for wastful spending, and every pet pork project gets funded. As the saying goes, “Elections have consequences”. The consequences of this massive move towards deficit spending are not going to be good.

The reaction to the generational theft has been fairly negative in the polls and across the blogosphere, so I will not rehash all the reasons this “stimulus” bill will not stimulate. But I did want to emphasize two points with this epic congressional shift to the left.

First, support for the pork bill from the Northeast is embarrassingly strong. In fact, two of the Senators who broke ranks with the Republican resistance are from New England: Senators Snowe and Collins from Maine. Without these two turning, the Republicans in the Senate could have joined their House colleagues and made a major statement on fiscal responsibility. Needless to say, the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation will vote for the massive expansion of government. More government please!

Second, it is alarming how many of our representatives truly do not understand how the economy works. When President Bush cut tax rates, the economy surged right out of a downturn. When ‘tax rebates’ were the choice for improving the economy in early 2007, there was a brief spurt of retail spending which lasted about 3 months and then faded. We are not in uncharted waters here – different solutions have been tried for kick-starting an economy, and the results observed. Tax cuts work. Tax rebates (even if called cuts) do not. The Democrats have no intention of letting economic reality get in the way of ideology.

So where are we headed? The stimulus bill as now constructed will not stimulate the economy. In fact, the economic cycle that would normally run its course and lead to an upturn will be hampered and delayed by this reallocation of capital from the private sector to the public sector. A stimulus bill that focused on direct “shovel ready” products might have helped speed up the cycle. Spending on transportation infrastructure, or the military, or improved broadband capability, or improving the electric grid would all put people to work directly, and provide a long-term benefit to the economy (or the defense of our economy, in the case of military spending).

A trillion is a lot of money. That is it going to be wasted on pork is a tragedy of epic proportions.