It has now been over a month since the nation re-elected President Obama and for some of us, that month has felt like a year in the desert with plenty of blame to go around.
The sad fact is that despite all of the factors that seemed to be in the GOP’s favor, the GOP managed to fail to articulate it’s position on the most important issues. Of course, the deck was stacked against Mitt Romney. The media wanted Obama to win…but we knew that going in. The media shielded Obama and put the spotlight on Romney and the GOP and they weren’t up to the challenge. It is true that Romney/GOP said things they shouldn’t have, they committed dumb mistakes and keep turning the ball over. Sometimes they had the ball snatched from them, like with the fuss over Romney’s Benghazi statements, when the story should have been about what happened in Libya. The Media worried about how Romney’s statements affected American emotions more than they worried about how bullets and mortars affected American lives.
However, the biggest failure of the campaign was the GOP’s inability to articulate what we believe. We are supposed to be the party of free markets, personal liberty and reason. Can anyone point out anything that Mitt Romney said that could convince a skeptic to believe in those ideas? He hinted around them, he winked at the true believers to keep the base inline, but when it came time to announce his beliefs, he hedged his bets and played to the dumbed-down middle….no one is going to beat the Left at being dumb.
Even the Free Market All-Star Paul Ryan failed to live up to expectations. He was supposed to be the poster boy for our thoughts, he was going to lead the charge and say the truths that needed to be said, but he quickly became a non-factor in the race.
The GOP played like a team that had the game in the bag, up by a field goal they decided to run out the last few minutes of the clock and walk away winners by a hair. Unfortunately, to do that you have to have a good defense or be up against a very poor offense, and in this case neither of those were true and the defense got rolled.
In the wake of the election, we have been dealing with the impending fiscal cliff. What makes the cliff even harder for us is that we lack a leader. Even if Romney failed as a candidate, he at least provided a face that wasn’t Boehner or McConnell. Now with Romney gone, they are back to running the circus and trying to make the circus look like a production of Hamlet.
The GOP has managed to take the good fight and look like fools doing it, while letting the absurd claims of the Left pass for facts. If the GOP is ever to regain control of the country and point it in the right direction, we have to begin making a coherent argument and highlight the major flaws in the Left’s dreamland.
So lets look at some facts…
In the 2009-10 tax year, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million to HM Revenue and Customs. This number fell to just 6,000 after Gordon Brown introduced the new 50p top rate of income tax shortly before the last general election.
The tax increase cost the Her Majesty’s Government 7 Billion in lost revenue. This clearly represents the argument that the GOP is trying and failing to make. Rich people will look out for themselves during tough times, they are as selfish as the rest of us.
The GOP is not the party of the rich. We believe that everyone is under a duty to fund the government and being rich does not exempt you from that service. However, this point in time is not the time to be raising taxes on anyone. We are stuck in a sluggish economy and all efforts should be devoted to growing the economy, not putting the brakes on. Raising taxes so we can spend more is a surefire way to continue our problems as the rest of the world is proving.
Meanwhile here in the USA, Warren Buffet is giving advice on how the economy works. According to the opening lines of his op-ed piece, no investor or businessman makes his decisions based on tax rates, never mind what they are doing in England. Now that Buffet has reached the highest levels of wealth, he can afford to pay less attention to the tax man, however his history is full of times when he made his decisions based on the tax implications…I guess figuring out business decisions so they provide you with the most benefit and turn over the least amount of money to the government is old fashioned. Good thing today’s businessmen are so selfless and giving, though that idea seems to clash with Obama’s assertions during the past two years.
Since Romney’s defeat, the nation has accepted that Obama will get his way and raise taxes. Oddly, despite Buffet’s assertions that rich people will not change their behavior to avoid paying more in taxes, numerous companies have announced that they will issue special dividends before the end of the year so that their investors will be rewarded prior to the new taxes taking effect.
The most interesting case of avoiding the increase in taxes is that of the Washington Post Company, which obviously owns the newspaper by the same name. This newspaper, which has a reputation for being Leftwing, endorsed Barack Obama for President during the last campaign, even though he made tax increases the most visible goal of his campaign platform.
The WaPo put its stamp of approval on Obama’s ideas… yet now that it is time to live under the ideas they endorsed, they are embracing the policies of George Bush. The WaPo proves the theory put forth by the GOP, that every single person or organization will attempt to avoid taxes to the fullest degree within the law. If even the WaPo is defying their professed beliefs by not paying their “fair share” as defined by the Left, what hope is there anyone else will blindly go along with funding the excessive government that the Left so dearly desires?
So, even those among us who argued so adamantly for the increase in taxes are equally dedicated to avoiding them. They must be from that greedy generation like Buffet, not the unselfish givers like the current generation of rich people.
Speaking of Buffett, it turns out that his company Berkshire Hathaway owns 23% of the Washington Post Company and stands to make $17 million off of the special dividend that will be paid out before the end of the year at the Bush Tax Rates instead of the coming Obama Tax Rates. Perhaps Buffett will volunteer to pay the difference that he will gain from the Bush tax rates he hates so much, but judging from his career, that is unlikely.
The cause of the free market and capitalism must be articulated more clearly by the GOP if they hope to continue to be backed by those who believe in such things. They can start by making a clear case that even those who so sanctimoniously preach the ideas of the Left Wing are unwilling to live by them.
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