GOP Governors Fight Tax Limits -WP

[Rose Siding]

Foes of Big Government Blame Crunch on Cuts in Federal Aid

snip>
Owens thus becomes another low-tax, limited-government advocate who has found those principles hard to hold onto amid a sluggish economy and a sharply diminished flow of federal money to the states.....
In the past two years, Republican governors including Nevada's Kenny Guinn, Idaho's Dirk Kempthorne, Georgia's Sonny Perdue and Ohio's Bob Taft have dumped no-new-taxes pledges to push for major new revenue and increased state spending.

Perhaps the most stinging reversal for tax-limitation groups in Washington was the quick conversion of Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. (R), who was President Bush's first budget director and an outspoken advocate of lower taxes -- until he was elected governor of Indiana last November. In his first state budget, Daniels recently proposed a 29 percent increase in the income tax, targeted at the upper brackets. Daniels cited a $250 million revenue shortfall and said spending cuts of that size were untenable.
...
Guinn provided a similar explanation after he pushed through the biggest tax increase in Nevada history.

"Some people say that makes me a bad Republican," said the former banker and corporate executive. "Well, I would be a worse Republican, and a worse grandfather, and a worse citizen, if I didn't find enough money to educate our children and fund our Medicaid program and provide decent prenatal care."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3903-2005Mar26.html?nav=rss_politics

[Toots]

1. Which ever way the wind blows for these folks

"Well, I would be a worse Republican, and a worse grandfather, and a worse citizen, if I didn't find enough money to educate our children and fund our Medicaid program and provide decent prenatal care."

This would make him a Democrat because it goes against everything Republicans believe in. They want Medicaid to "whither on the vine" they hate public education and prenatal care...give me a break. Republicans have shut down every family planning clinic in the entire world that they could. What an absolute ass. Talking out of both sides of his mouth.

[scarletlib]

2. great response

you are absolutely correct. that would indeed make him a democrat (at least at this time given the extreme far right running the gop)

it is always easy in theory to do lots of things like cutting taxes, raising children etc. when you actually do have the responsibility of running a state government, rearing children, etc. the practice is always different than the theory. the real world has a way of intruding its facts into the world of theory.

[NNguyenMD]

3. if only the rest of the public could realize the same thing

[aquart]

4. God, they're slow learners.

[TahitiNut]

5. "limited government" is NOT the same as "small government."

There is no "limited government" advocate in the Republican party today. None. They are rabid advocates of overwhelming abuses of Constitutional limits on federal power, from the abrogation of human rights worldwide to the intrusions on individual sovereignty within the U.S. The neocon addiction to power and "might makes right" has resulted in the largest militarist state in the history of the world and the longest implacable war on the working class in our nation's history since slavery.

The only "limited government" advocates are on the left ... and it's by no means a shared perspective even on the left.

Likewise, there is no "small government" advocate on either the right or the left. Those who hurl (or run from) the epithets of "soft on crime" or "soft on defense" have created the largest prison population and criminalized class in the world along with a Police State Industry with unconstrained appetites and have created the most all-consuming Military-Industrial Complex in world history. At the same time, those who profit from sickness and injury are a plague, making inevitable the nationalization of health care. Sooner or later, the rampant abuses and profiteering will make "Socialized Medicine" unavoidable.