Andre's Executive Order

This is part two of a series of articles challenging the Republican establishment to defend their representation of Conservative interests and to challenge current Republican talking points with common sense. Today's topic: Taxation Every single Republican running for federal elected office is asked (rather heavy handedly) to sign Grover Norquist's pledge to never raise, or cause to be raised, any income tax for corporations or individuals or to reduce any deduction available that in effect raises those taxes. The effects of this pledge and the mentality behind it saturate the Republican political landscape these days and was plainly visible in the debt ceiling debate earlier this month. The suggestion of raising revenues caused Cantor to storm out of a critical meeting and was a hard line in the sand drawn by all Republican leadership in both the Senate and the House. The opposition to tax increases was so vehement that the Republican party passed up two trillion in addit...

Alright, I didn't really want to go here because it's being hammered to death, but I'm getting a lot of questions about the debt ceiling, and most of the explanations I'm seeing from the media suck. So here's my take. Why do we have a debt ceiling? A government the size of the United States has an amazingly large financial gray area lurking in predicting the funding necessary to do its job. This gray area is the necessary costs to running the government that we can't predict in advance of a regular budget. By way of example, a single day of operations in Iraq or Afghanistan costs roughly 720 million dollars. Generally speaking, nobody can predict the outbreak, start, or end of war. Similar expenses include natural disasters such as Katrina or man made disasters such as the Wall Street scandals. Not all such gray expenses are negative either. Unexpected opportunities can arise that defy the planned budget or were dependent on unlikely legislation for infrastru...