reaction in Congress
Jan. 21st, 2004 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerNPR this morning, reporting on the SOTU, hit on a point I noticed at the time but forgot to remark on: the negative reaction within the chamber at points to the president's speech.
As well as the number of members who started applauding when the president noted that the Patriot Act was about to expire, there was visible division when people rose to applaud. Not during most of the foreign policy portions of the speech (more's the pity), but when the president was speaking about the economy, Democrats often failed to applaud and failed to stand. There was one point, when the president was hectoring the Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, when there was something that came as close to actual booing as I have ever heard during a SOTU address, a sort of low, but sustained murmuring. I understand the need for decorum, folks, but it doesn't kill British prime ministers when people shout "shame" at them. I think it's OK to actually say "boo" out loud when the president proposes making permanent a series of tax cuts (the income tax cuts, the capital gains cuts, and the *estate* tax cuts) that are designed primarily to help the wealthy and which have balooned the federal deficit.
And whilw we're on taxes, let me just make a plea that I know will fall on deaf ears. Can we stop the name games with tax cuts? Not making a temporary reduction in tax rates permanent is not a "tax increase." The estate tax is not a tax on death and dying, it's a tax on passing wealth (*wealth*) from one generation to another; it only affects a tiny proportion of Americans, the ones who can most easily afford it.
And here's another little rhetorical device of the Republican conservatives that drives me up the wall: the attitude that taxes are somehow money that is unjustly being seized from average Americans by a hosilte (perhaps even foreign, the way they talk about it) government that just wastes it on nonsense. But even the Republican president and Congress that got elected on this kind of nonsense are only too eager to spend more and more money. Is it somehow different moeny? Does it appear out of thin air? Or grow on trees?
Taxes are paid by all Americans, a share of our earnings and our wealth passed voluntarily to our government (*OUR* government) so that it can do things *we* ask it to do. WE. All of us together. Just because I don't agree with the rest of my fellow citizens on a spending measure doesn't give me the right to withold my taxes. That's not the social compact we're part of. But the Republican act as if it were. They want to say "We're in favour only of our spending programs, and if government doesn't do exactly what we want, then they're the enemy, a foreign, alien power. But the exact same government, when it does what we want, is the Good Guys." Doesn't work like that, guys. All that attitude does is suggest its proponenet sare not willing to live in a civilized society and accept that sometimes each of us doesn't get exactly what we want. This is a violation of the social contract, and every time a Republican politician talks about the government (that he's trying to get elected or reelected to serve in!) as if it were the enemy, he or she drives a wedge just a little bit further between the people and the government, drives a stake just a little bit closer to the heart of democracy. Make no mistake: this platform (the government is the enemy) is a fundamentally anti-democratic one, and its widesprread adoption by conservative Republicans is a dangerous and self-serving gamble.
As well as the number of members who started applauding when the president noted that the Patriot Act was about to expire, there was visible division when people rose to applaud. Not during most of the foreign policy portions of the speech (more's the pity), but when the president was speaking about the economy, Democrats often failed to applaud and failed to stand. There was one point, when the president was hectoring the Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, when there was something that came as close to actual booing as I have ever heard during a SOTU address, a sort of low, but sustained murmuring. I understand the need for decorum, folks, but it doesn't kill British prime ministers when people shout "shame" at them. I think it's OK to actually say "boo" out loud when the president proposes making permanent a series of tax cuts (the income tax cuts, the capital gains cuts, and the *estate* tax cuts) that are designed primarily to help the wealthy and which have balooned the federal deficit.
And whilw we're on taxes, let me just make a plea that I know will fall on deaf ears. Can we stop the name games with tax cuts? Not making a temporary reduction in tax rates permanent is not a "tax increase." The estate tax is not a tax on death and dying, it's a tax on passing wealth (*wealth*) from one generation to another; it only affects a tiny proportion of Americans, the ones who can most easily afford it.
And here's another little rhetorical device of the Republican conservatives that drives me up the wall: the attitude that taxes are somehow money that is unjustly being seized from average Americans by a hosilte (perhaps even foreign, the way they talk about it) government that just wastes it on nonsense. But even the Republican president and Congress that got elected on this kind of nonsense are only too eager to spend more and more money. Is it somehow different moeny? Does it appear out of thin air? Or grow on trees?
Taxes are paid by all Americans, a share of our earnings and our wealth passed voluntarily to our government (*OUR* government) so that it can do things *we* ask it to do. WE. All of us together. Just because I don't agree with the rest of my fellow citizens on a spending measure doesn't give me the right to withold my taxes. That's not the social compact we're part of. But the Republican act as if it were. They want to say "We're in favour only of our spending programs, and if government doesn't do exactly what we want, then they're the enemy, a foreign, alien power. But the exact same government, when it does what we want, is the Good Guys." Doesn't work like that, guys. All that attitude does is suggest its proponenet sare not willing to live in a civilized society and accept that sometimes each of us doesn't get exactly what we want. This is a violation of the social contract, and every time a Republican politician talks about the government (that he's trying to get elected or reelected to serve in!) as if it were the enemy, he or she drives a wedge just a little bit further between the people and the government, drives a stake just a little bit closer to the heart of democracy. Make no mistake: this platform (the government is the enemy) is a fundamentally anti-democratic one, and its widesprread adoption by conservative Republicans is a dangerous and self-serving gamble.
