Congressman Tom McClintock: The Eve of the American Reawakening
I’ve had the honor of knowing Tom McClintock and considering him a friend for ten years now. I first worked on his 1999 effort to roll back the “temporary” car tax increases that Governor Wilson had proposed during another one of our state budget crises. (Isn’t it interesting how “temporary” tax increases always become permanent?)
Tom just delivered a great speech entitled “The Eve of the American Reawakening” at the Council for National Policy.
His point — that for all of President Bush’s strengths, the “conservatism” that voters rejected in 2008 was not actually conservatism at all — is right on.
To those who say we should put the Reagan era behind us – I have a better idea. Let’s put the Bush era behind us.
To those who say we should redefine our principles, I have a better idea: we don’t need to redefine our principles; we need to return to them.
To those of the Republican establishment, who misled our party for years, who dismantled so much of what Ronald Reagan accomplished and now tell us “the other side has something” and we have nothing. To them I can’t improve upon Cromwell’s words: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing; it is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You shall now give way to better men. Now depart and let us have done with you, I say, in the name of God, GO!”
“The other side has something and we have nothing?”
What is the something the other side has – that some say we have to be respectful and mindful of?
Statism. Shortage. Paternalism. That’s their “something” that seems to so overawe and over-impress these scions of a failed party establishment.
Statism, Shortage and Paternalism is what we are told to be mindful and respectful of? I don’t think so.
Their statism is “something” so extreme that the entire national debt accumulated from the first day of the George Washington administration to the very last day of the George W. Bush administration will literally double in the next five years and triple in the next ten.
The tax increases already proposed to support it will rob every family of more than $2,500 from its purchasing power every year. We’re supposed to respect that? The American people don’t respect it. The American people know that you cannot spend your way rich; that you cannot borrow your way out of debt and you cannot tax your way to prosperity. And they know that if you live well beyond your means today, you must of necessity live well BELOW your means in the future. And that’s not a future we want for our children.
