Larry Grant Induces A Spit Take
Posted by Adam Graham in : Idaho Conservative, TheLarry Grant is at it again. He manages to agree with Bill Sali and then resume the partisanship:
What we don’t agree on is priorities. I would have voted for SCHIP, Head Start, and lowering interest rates on student loans. Bill Sali voted against them. I would have voted to end subsidies for big oil companies. Bill Sali voted for the oil companies. I would have voted for negotiating drug prices under Medicare. Bill Sali voted for the drug companies.More importantly, I believe we should balance the budget and would have voted for pay-as-you-go rules. Bill Sali didn’t. He continues to vote in ways that increase deficit spending and the soaring national debt.
So let’s get this straight.
1) Larry Grant is for the expansion of SCHIP to cover people up to 300 +% of poverty level, including adults up to age 25.
2) Larry Grant is for balancing the budget.
Yeah, I’ll buy that. Larry Grant states that he believes taxes should be as low as possible. The Democratic leadership he wants to keep in power doesn’t as they’ve proposed the mother of all tax increases.
In addition, the idea of introducing price controls into Medicare is a great way to kill the pharmaceutical industry. As for Sali voting for the Oil Industry, I wonder who exactly Larry Grant thinks the oil companies would turn to to make up their missing profits? The American consumer. The bill Sali voted against would actually have removed their tax deduction “for income attributable to domestic production of oil, natural gas, or their related primary products.” So, it was a tax increase that big spenders wanted to use to spend more money.
Larry Grant can talk generalities because he’s not in Congress. I challenge him to come up with specific plans and show us where he’d be any different from the flim flam doubletalk big spenders that inhabit Washington’s halls of power. He’s not. This is smoke and mirrors. This Democratic Congress has done nothing to reign in spending. By fiscal discipline, they mean raising our taxes.
Show me how the Democrats have reigned in spending on any program one iota, give me a list of programs that you’d favor cutting. According to his 2006 NPAT, the only things Larry Grant favors cutting are: Agriculture (Slightly), International Aid (slightly), Space Exploration (slightly with a shift to unmanned missions), and in a time of war he wants to cut back on Missile Defense and weapons research and development.
Some interesting priorities, but none of this addresses fundamental reasons for the deficit, nor the size of government. He has no interest in seriously addressing entitlements, nor do few in the Democratic majority. That’s what it will take to have a balanced budget without huge tax increases, but that’s okay, Larry wants to see all our taxes go up to the level they were under Clinton.
Comment by Bubblehead
You should put up Congressman Sali’s answers to the NPAT from 2006 so we can compare. Oh, yeah, that’s right… he never got around to answering it. Just like he never told us how he was going to vote on Prop 2 (after promising in the last debate that he would), and he still hasn’t told us how he’s going to “save Social Security and Medicare for all generations” by cutting the payroll tax.
And I’m pretty sure Larry Grant wants to retain the Bush tax cuts for most people…
Still, I applaud your call for more specifics from the candidates — I’m assuming you’d like some specifics from Congressman Sali as well, like exactly what he’d cut to balance the budget without tax hikes. He needs, oh, about 25% of total non-defense discretionary spending at a minimum.
Comment by Adam Graham
First, Larry Grant says right in the NPAT, “Making tax cuts permanent will have no additional impact on the economy, so we should let them expire.” Let them expire means let them expire unless Larry has said something else. If that’s the case, why should the Democrats be jumping all over Jim Risch for not mastering the Internet when Larry Grant hasn’t mastered the English language to be clear what he means in his NPAT?
Bubblehead, if you simply hold down the rate at which government grows, it’s doable. Plus, I’d add that we don’t have a tax problem. We’ve had record tax revenues under the Bush tax cuts what we have a spending problem which comes from a power hungry Congress. Bill Sali has shown himself to be in the reform wing of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill, he’s part of the solution. There’s no indication that Larry Grant will be any different than phonies like Chris Carney and the rest of the Democratic freshman class.