A sampling of recent editorials from Colorado newspapers:
NATIONAL:
The Pueblo Chieftain, Sept. 26, on President Barack Obama’s jobs plan:
President Barack Obama’s plan announced this month to ostensibly spur job growth would do just the opposite.
He had announced a new $447 billion stimulus of new and temporary spending, then turned around to propose offsetting that spending with $1.5 trillion over 10 years in permanent tax hikes. He certainly knows this will not fly in the Republican-controlled House, but guess who else is opposed to these huge tax increases.
Democrats who control the Senate. Senators from energy-producing states object to targeting the oil and gas industry. Those include Mark Begich of Alaska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.
New York’s Chuck Schumer, a liberal lion in the Senate, objects to allowing the Bush tax cuts on taxpayers earning more than $200,000—$250,000 for married couples—expire. He notes that $250,000 does not make anybody rich in his high-cost state.
Nebraska’s Ben Nelson says his constituents want spending cuts, not tax hikes. Tom Carper of Delaware favors a long-term deficit-reduction plan to spur new job creation.
Besides reduced spending, Washington needs to rework our convoluted tax code to make it more transparent and easier to comprehend. The president’s own Simpson-Bowles commission recommended doing just that, along with a number of common-sense proposals that Mr. Obama has ignored.
One of the president’s proposals was a cap on tax deductions for charitable giving. Various charities have reacted loudly that their work would be greatly hampered if this provision ever saw the light of day.
The massive tax increases come ostensibly as part of the president’s plan to reduce the nation’s out-of-control debt, but rather than address the underlying spending problem, it will further deepen America’s economic quagmire and only serves to stall the real reform America needs in order to get on a path of fiscal sanity.
Besides Simpson-Bowles, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has identified $1.4 trillion in savings over 10 years without cutting back on services that many voters demand. Scaling back the federal payroll through attrition and salary freezes would accomplish much of the savings.
Pundits on the right and left alike have correctly noted that the president’s proposals amount to the opening round of his re-election campaign. We’ll see how the American people judge the direction he’s headed when they vote in next year’s presidential election.
Editorial:
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The (Colorado Springs) Gazette, Sept. 21, on Obama’s calls to increase taxes on the rich:
Yes, President Barack Obama, it is time to panic.
Advice to “panic” was given to Obama by close ally James Carville, former adviser to President Bill Clinton, after Republicans won the special election in New York’s ultra-liberal Ninth District this month with a candidate who ran an anti-Obama campaign. The Ninth hasn’t elected a Republican since 1923. To grasp the magnitude of this Republican victory, Democrats should imagine voters in Colorado’s Fifth Congressional District—dominated by Colorado Springs—electing a pro-choice, raise-my-taxes liberal with a peace symbol tattooed on her face.
The Ninth District’s newest member of Congress, Robert Turner, created and launched Rush Limbaugh’s 1990s TV show. He is a staunch opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Turner wants intelligent design taught in public schools. He seeks to eliminate capital gains taxes. He signed Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes under any circumstances” pledge in 2010. The left’s worst nightmare was just elected to represent a bastion of liberals by a margin of nearly 10 percent.
Panic? At the very least, President Obama. You may have managed, in three years, to destroy faith in liberalism even among liberals.
On Sept. 21, things got even worse for Obama—a man elected to the highest executive office in the land without a day of executive experience. On that day, the mainstream media carried a story by The Associated Press—hardly a critical Obama watchdog—that said his class warfare campaign is based on mythology.
Obama has traveled the country trying to incite anger by saying the rich don’t pay their fair share, and even claiming that wealthy Americans pay lower tax rates than the middle class and poor. So the AP went on a fact-checking mission, perhaps expecting to prove Obama’s case. Analyzing government and private data, the AP found that America’s wealthiest citizens pay “a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor. … They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.”
The AP reported that 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes. Fewer than 1 percent of millionaires pay tax rates lower than middle-income workers.
Relying on data from the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, the AP explained how the tax code’s $1 trillion in annual deductions, exemptions and credits “benefit people at every income level,” not just the rich. In other words, The Associated Press—often accused of pro-Obama bias—exposed the president’s pitch for higher taxes as a sham.
Obama talks about billionaire Warren Buffett paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, a tale Buffett promotes himself. Why does Buffet want a soak-the-rich tax increase? Because it will make him richer.
“His company that made him rich, Berkshire Hathaway, itself is a sophisticated tax shelter,” wrote Peter Ferrara, general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union and author of “America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb” (HarperCollins). “If tax rates are raised, that will only lead more of the wealthy to flee to investing in his company to avoid the abusive multiple taxation. The IRS claims that Buffett’s company owes a billion dollars in back taxes. If Buffett thinks the rich don’t pay their fair share, why is he fighting this? Why doesn’t he just pay his fair share as required under current law?”
Even before Obama took office, as Ferrara points out, the top 1 percent of income earners took in 22 percent of income but paid 40.4 percent of the government’s income taxes. IRS data in 2007 showed they paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent combined. We are thoroughly soaking the rich, which explains why they buy Buffet’s tax shelters with capital they might otherwise invest in production and jobs.
“Pass the bill,” Obama chanted while promoting a massive tax increase disguised as a jobs bill.
He must be joking. Soon, Americans will start chanting “kill the bill.” Almost no one—not even those in the Obama-friendly mainstream national press—believes that soaking over-taxed Americans will create jobs. It can’t possibly achieve this. It can only increase the size and cost of government, a move that may serve a final blow to our beleaguered economy.
Editorial:
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STATE:
The Denver Post, Sept. 24, on plans to move up the state’s GOP caucus:
Colorado Republicans have a plan to become players in the 2012 presidential nomination game.
They wouldn’t be big players. They would be just slightly bigger players than before. It’s not a bold plan they’re pursuing, which is good. In fact, it’s the lack of boldness in the plan that makes it a likely winner.
Here’s how it would work.
Colorado, which used to have its caucus night on the so-called Super Tuesday in March, was in a dead zone. We received no candidate attention. We received no media attention. We were just a small hill—to employ a locally understood metaphor—in a big mountain range. That’s very unlike Colorado’s current swing-state importance in the general election, when we enjoy—if that’s the right word—TV campaign-ad bonanza status.
Under the new plan, which Colorado GOP Chairman Ryan Call says is not opposed by national Republicans, Colorado would move its caucus night to Feb. 7—one night after Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus and just ahead of New Hampshire’s also-first primary.
The Colorado Republican Central Committee voted last week in Colorado Springs, and the outcome was pretty much assured.
The reason national Republicans won’t object, Call says, is because the Colorado caucus is non-binding, meaning state Republicans won’t pick delegates to the national convention that night. They won’t pick them until a state convention in April.
The non-binding caucus loophole, as it may become known, is also being played by Minnesota and Maine and possibly Missouri. Minnesota and Maine have already made clear they want to move up to Feb. 7.
For a good while, we have worried that, with so many states clamoring to move up in the primary-season calendar, the race will become too compressed, nominees will be chosen too quickly, and the national presidential race will be at risk of becoming too drawn out.
We don’t think this plan will do much, though, to change the political landscape. Iowa and New Hampshire will still be the dominant players. South Carolina and Nevada will still play their roles. But the path is still not clear. Michigan and Florida, which shook up the primary calendar in 2008 and were sanctioned for it, may try to shake it up again. That year, Iowa and New Hampshire voted in early January.
In any case, we doubt that candidates will spend much time in Colorado with the Iowa caucus just the day before. But, as was pointed out on the Frontloading HQ blog (frontloading.blogspot.com), that could be good news for Mitt Romney.
At this stage, Romney is not expected to win in Iowa. In 2008, though, he did win caucuses in, yes, Colorado, Maine and Minnesota. The Republican establishment in Colorado is largely in the Romney camp, and the move could provide Romney a small bump one day after Iowa.
For our purposes, though, the question is whether a move would give Colorado more impact in the nomination process without also having an undue impact on the nominating calendar. We think that it would.
Editorial:
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Loveland Reporter-Herald, Sept. 23, on legislative redistricting in Colorado:
Every 10 years, a small group of political junkies holds its breath pending the outcome of reapportionment. That process, in which a state committee takes figures from the U.S. Census to draw the boundaries for Colorado General Assembly districts, can have a major effect on the course of state government for a decade.
Unlike the congressional boundaries, which will determine the future for the seven districts in the state, the legislative boundaries affect 100 local lawmakers and every community of interest. The issues decided by those lawmakers will have a tremendous impact on the daily lives of the state’s residents, such as the funding of education for children, improvements to transportation or even whether same-sex couples can be included in civil unions with each other.
Under proposals sent by the state’s reapportionment commission to the courts for review, Larimer County will have very few changes. Loveland will continue to have a representative of its own, and Fort Collins will have two. In the outlying reaches of the county, Berthoud, Estes Park and Wellington will continue to be represented by a single lawmaker. The one change is that the lawmaker for those communities will also have all of Windsor added to the mix, which will consolidate that city’s representation. The two Senate districts also will be very similar to those currently in use.
While the congressional redistricting process has a higher profile, redrawing legislative districts can affect many of the day-to-day interactions between Colorado residents and their government. This year’s efforts should be commended for keeping Northern Colorado’s communities of interest intact.
Editorial:
