Fred the big winner

Fred Thompson did fantastic in the debate, while most reports show him being the clear winner the bigger picture was on display.  Fred shows himself to be the consistent conservative that we know he is but in the process he showed the remaining top tier candidates to be what they truly are, moderate republicans.

Now typically the leader of the conservative movement doesn’t endorse candidates during the primaries and this election is no different.  Rush Limbaugh stated Thursday what we have said here for the last six months:

There was one candidate who did not display any moderateness or liberalism or have any of his past forays into those areas displayed, and that candidate was Fred Thompson.

While it would be better for Rush to come out and endorse Fred I am more than satisfied that he shows Rudy, Romney, McCain and Huckabee for what they are, liberals and moderates who have no hope for beating Hillary.  We have had seven years of a moderate in the White House.  We need a true conservative as the nominee and that candidate is clearly Fred Thompson!

Technorati Tags: Fred Thompson, Rush Limbaugh

Thompson Tax Proposal Endorses The Flat Tax

Hat tip to mornincoffee…

Fred Thompson’s tax plan, released this morning, seperated his position from some of the other contenders. Thompson is one of the few GOP hopefuls that offers the flat tax. The plan is a qualified endorsement of the Taxpayers Choice Act, or the “flat tax.” With this plan, which is outlined here, in pdf, Thompson has taken a pretty bold step, as he did with his social security plan.

From the AP:

Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson proposed an income tax plan Sunday that would allow Americans to choose a simplified system with only two rates: 10 percent and 25 percent.
Thompson’s proposal, announced on “Fox News Sunday,” would allow filers to remain under the current, complex tax code or use the flat tax rates.
Asked whether the plan would cut too deeply into federal revenues, the former Tennessee senator and actor said experts “always overestimate the losses to the government” when taxes are cut.

“We’ve known for years any time we have lowered taxes and any time we’ve lowered tax rates, we’ve seen growth in the economy,” Thompson said.
Thompson added that money would be saved by his Social Security reform plan. He proposed that workers younger than 58 receive smaller monthly Social Security checks than they are now promised. Individuals could contribute 2 percent of their paycheck to a personal retirement account, an amount that would be matched by the Social Security trust fund.
The retirement plan “faces up to the fact that Social Security is going bankrupt and we’re going to have to do something about it,” he said.

The fact is that he has followed up on his promise of overhauling the current tax code. The plan has been supported by the Heritage Foundation, Steve Forbes, the Club for Growth, the CATO Institute, Chief Justice John Roberts, Sam Brownback, and Dick Armey, to name a few.

Among the other GOP contenders, John McCain has been supportive of it. Mike Huckabee favored the tax, but has now become an advocate of the FAIR Tax, which is not the same thing (see below). Tancredo and Ron Paul support it (he supports no tax). Rudy Giuliani’s position on the issue is not that clear, but I was late to the whole debate on his position. He seems to favor a more moderate form of revision, but does not endorse the tax. Romney also favors a simplification, but has criticized the flat tax as recently as April, and has said that he is opposed to it. Sam Brownback proposed a very similar plan to Thompson’s before he departed from the race.

However, according to CNBC, no major Republican candidate was, as of 10/9:

“currently running on a flat income tax,though Mike Huckabee is pushing a flat consumption (sales) tax to replace the income tax altogether “

Well, I guess we have one now.

The Flat Tax was originally authored by Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka in this book, published and assisted by the Hoover Institute.

In arguing for the proposal, Race42008 contributor DeRoy Murdocke, in April of this year, wrote that:

Americans deserve a voluntary flat tax. Those who love this gargantuan Tax Code, its multiple rates, and baroque intricacies, should be free to keep filing form after form, if that makes them happy. Meanwhile, those who prefer a flat rate with few if any deductions should be free to choose a postcard that would ask one’s name, address, and income, and a simple calculation for, say, 17 percent thereof.

Politically, a voluntary flat tax would let issue-starved Republicans and conservatives avoid a wrestling match with Democrats and liberals over keeping or scrapping the charitable or home-mortgage deductions. Instead, the Right can argue for giving Americans the freedom to select between two available systems. The sales slogan is simple: “It’s your tax. It’s your choice.” Let the Left argue against granting Americans that option. The Right can win that fight.

Next year, Utahans will choose between either a traditional, six-bracket tax (from 2.3 to 6.98 percent) with exemptions and write-offs, or a simple 5.35 percent flat tax without deductions. The Beehive State will join flat-taxing Estonia, Slovakia, and Ukraine, all of which have seen their economies energized by a single tax rate on income. Even Russia has jettisoned its three-bracket system and its 30 percent top rate on incomes above $5,000. Instead, it has embraced a 13 percent flat-rate tax.

“Before the flat tax, most salaries were paid as cash under the table. That almost has disappeared,” said Yuri Mamchur, director of the Real Russia Project at Seattle’s Discovery Institute. “It’s easier to pay 13 percent than to avoid it.” The former Muscovite added: “The flat tax contributed to economic growth, but more importantly, it sped Russia’s return to the rule of law.”

Hoover Institution economist Alvin Rabushka concurs. “The low flat rate contributed to the decline in capital flight [and] improved taxpayer compliance [in Russia],” he said. In fact, tax evasion in Russia has gone the way of the Gulag. Since the Kremlin adopted the flat tax on January 1, 2001, revenues have swelled 128 percent after inflation.

If the flat tax is good enough for the former Evil Empire, it’s good enough for America’s embattled taxpayers.

Venezuelan’s should be worried

The people of Venezuela should stand up and vote next week against the proposed changes to their constitution.  It appears likely that they will but they should be worried about what comes next.  If history is our guide then after Hugo Chavez loses the vote he will start implementing it anyway.  When power hungry dictators like Chavez think that the people are rejecting them then they begin to move forward with wholesale takeover.

Chavez will likely implore more hit squads, people that oppose him, lead opposition against him, will find themselves killed or imprisoned.  He will blame the US and probably more to control the output of oil to the US.  As Chavez moves towards a full socialist society what will we do to stop him?  Chavez is much more dangerous than Castro, Castro had nothing other than cigars to export so it was easy to isolate him.  Chavez is different that he has something the world needs, oil.  Worse yet, he knows we can’t isolate him like we did Castro.  Even if we try to isolate him we will run into trouble with OPEC because the rest of the OPEC countries would likely go against increasing their production to offset blocking Venezuelan oil.

Does Bush have what it takes to deal with Chavez, maybe a better question would be do any of the current Presidential candidates have what it takes to remove Chavez?  We know that none of the Democrats do because he is creating in Venezuela what they hope to create here.

JB Williams gets it right

JB Williams over at The American Daily has an excellent article regarding the GOP race.  He correctly points out that Fred Thompson is the only candidate in this race because the people asked him to. 

Williams goes further to point out that Rudy has spent a ton of money to get his lead while Thompson has spent very little to stay right on Rudy’s heels, not to mention Romney spending his own money just make people believe he is in the hunt…  Anyway an excellent read!

The year of the RINO

It appears that 2008 will go down as the year of the RINO.  For those mind numbed libs that means “Republican In Name Only”.  With high profile candidates in the field like Rudy, Romney, and McCain I didn’t think there was room for anymore RINO’s but it appears I was mistaken.  Mike Huckabee has been surging in recent weeks as he goes the Romney route with extreme makeover Republican Edition.

Huckabee claims conservative credentials but it is common knowledge that basically he appears conservative on abortion but that’s about it.  He, like Rudy, Romney, and McCain before him, seem to have this great love for raising taxes and expanding government.  Earlier this year Jennifer Rubin at National Review Online had an informative article that in light of Huckabee’s recent surge is worth another read.

“By the end of his second term he had raised sales taxes 37 percent, fuel taxes 16 percent, and cigarettes taxes 103 percent, leading to a jump in total tax revenues from $3.9 billion to $6.8 billion. The Cato Institute gave him a failing grade of ‘F’ on its fiscal report card for 2006 and an only marginally better but still embarrassing ‘D’ for his entire term.”

Last month John Fund at Opinion Journal opined about Huckabee and noted .

“I have known and liked him for years; on the stump he often tells the story of how we first met outside his boarded-up office in the state Capitol, which had been sealed by Arkansas Democrats who refused to accept he had won an upset election for lieutenant governor in 1993. But I also know he is not the “consistent conservative” he now claims to be.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement but the opinion of Huckabee’s “consistent conservative” creds continues to get worse Fund went on to report:

Betsy Hagan, Arkansas director of the conservative Eagle Forum and a key backer of his early runs for office, was once “his No. 1 fan.” She was bitterly disappointed with his record. “He was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal,” she says. “Just like Bill Clinton he will charm you, but don’t be surprised if he takes a completely different turn in office.”

This is not what the Republican Party needs, this is not what the country needs.  We have had nearly seven years of no conservative leadership.  While President Bush has done mostly great things with regard to terrorism and dealing with the threats ignored in the Clinton years he has been a disaster in terms of spending and reducing the size of government.

They biggest problem with Romney, McCain, Rudy, and now Huckabee is that they are simply light versions of Hillary.  Rudy on social issues, Romney on Healthcare, McCain on immigration, and Huckabee on taxes.  Hillary recently noted that this country can’t afford all the ideas she has, she’s right but we also can’t afford to allow conservatism to be redefined to try to run towards the middle, we don’t win elections in the middle, we win elections when we are true to the conservative principles articulated by Ronald Reagan.

The death of diplomacy

Conservatives I ask you, do you remember when diplomacy wasn’t a dirty word?  I am a fairly young conservative but I have studied my history and from that I learned that in the far and distant past diplomacy used to be the art of letting your enemies know that if they messed with the United States of America that we would come over there and blow them back to the dark ages in such a way that it sounded nice.

Now Reagan got it right, when he would talk to the former Soviet Union he could convince them that we intended to build bigger, more advanced weapons than they could hope to develop in a hundred lifetimes and they didn’t see it his way he would simply walk away.  However I am not just talking about specific Presidents, I refer mostly to the culture that lives and festers at a State Department that is polluted mentality stuck in the late sixties.

Also the left wing media seems stuck in the same backwards thinking, take for example the story this last week about how relieved Condi Rice and her senior Management were that enough applicants had been found to go to Iraq that they wouldn’t have to “force” people to go.  We had certainly seen plenty of whining over the last several weeks from career diplomats that enjoy cushy assignments at all the popular places in the world.  Never mind the fact that this duty with the State Department is entirely voluntary to join but they can be assigned duty anywhere in the world.

Diplomats whined about their kids, going to a war zone where they might be killed, never mind the fact that no State Department diplomats have been killed in Iraq to this point.  I thought that this is what modern day diplomacy was all about, go to hot spots around the world and just talk to the people that don’t like us and let them know that we mean them no harm and then everything will be peachy and we can hold hands and sing cum-bi-ya.  Blah, ick.

No my friends, diplomacy was JFK convincing Khrushchev that we are prepared to invade Cuba, fight in Europe, or anywhere else for that matter and that we would not permit nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba.  It was the threat of overwhelming force that was clearly articulated that finally forced Khrushchev to believe that he was wrong.

So when we look for a Presidential candidate we need someone that can redefine diplomacy, someone who will literally clean house at the State Department because there are very few people there that are qualified to be diplomats in the this era.

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