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Monday, August 23, 2010
Boomer with Attitude / News McHenry’s foreclosure remedy: More tax breaks for the rich (?!)
Posted By John Grooms on Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 1:59 PM
Our old friend, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who was already more conservative than even Reagan dreamed of, has now moved still farther right, well into Tim D’Annunzio/Tea Party La-La Land. McHenry, the one-time designated bulldog for the GOP on TV news shows – until he proved to be a little weak in the “thinking on his feet” department — held a town hall meeting in Catawba County recently, in which he revealed that if he had his druthers, he’d do away with that mean old Department of Education in Washington, and, while he’s at it, the Dept. of Labor. Great idea, Pat; why would your everyday constituents in the 10th District need schooling when they already know enough to manage the low-paying jobs your proposal would produce?
Lil' Pat outdid himself, though, when he answered people who wanted his help in keeping their homes out of foreclosure. McHenry answered by telling them to support the extension of the 2001 and ’03 tax cuts, because letting those cuts expire would “prevent people from investing.” Which shows again, if there was any doubt, just how out of touch McHenry is. You know, Pat, if you’re about to lose your home, the last thing you’re concerned about is investing your money; no, by that stage of the game, things are getting a little more nitty-gritty than worrying about your friggin’ stock portfolio. Maybe you should think about those citizens’ concerns a little more and lean a little less on your usual, stale trickle-down ideology. Even more to the point, no one — no one — in Washington is talking about doing away with the ‘01/’03 tax cuts for the middle class. What the White House wants to do is let the massive tax cuts Bush gave millionaires expire as scheduled, and leave the middle class tax cuts alone. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes in his New York Times column today, extending the Bush tax cuts for America’s super-rich would be the same as writing checks “averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the U.S." — not to mention that it would add nearly $400 billion to the national deficit, which Republicans are supposedly so riled up about. But that's McHenry's — and many GOP pols' — phony version of "populism": giveaways to the wealthy, thumbscrews for the rest of us. And these guys are supposed to take back the House of Representatives?!
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