Let's Make a 'Bailout' Deal. The Republican Party wants to obstruct the Obama Administration's plan to rescue the economy from the ever worsening track it is on, toward another Great Depression. Let's make a deal: we will carve out Republican districts and Republican states from the rescue and not burden them with so much as one cent of the Federal spending at issue. In that the bulk of Red States and districts are poor, despite our pumping trillions of (current) dollars into them over the course of the last 70 years, we don't have to worry about their minimal contributions to the Federal budget. We could offer them a tax credit for their share of any tax increase (if any) that would have to be passed to pay for the rescue plan. But since there is not supposed to be any tax increase, there wouldn't be any need to pass a tax credit.
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Let's just write this provision into the stimulus bill:

Out of respect for the unwillingness of some Americans to take the approach the rest of us want, we hereby exclude from the expenditures to be made as a consequence of this measure every state whose Senators vote against this bill, and every district whose Representative votes against it. No moneys whatsoever from this act will go to those areas. They may proceed by their own free-market, tax-cutting and other economic strategies of their own choosing, consonant with the United States Constitution, to restore their local economy without intrusion of any Federal moneys that may flow from this current measure.

If you don't want the money, you don't have to take the money.
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If they believe that cutting taxes is all they have to do, and cutting Big Government is the way to save society from encroachments on personal liberty, they are free to cut all the state, county, and local taxes they wish, trim local and state government budgets, cut their own governments' payrolls, cut the number of non-Federal employees, cut services to the people of their areas, and see if that works!
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If they want to be included in the moneys to be "doled" out by the stimulus plan, they are hypocrites. If they genuinely don't want these measures for the rest of us, they plainly don't want them for themselves. So let them do without.
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Why would Republicans want to change a plan they pretend to be sure will not work? Why try to make little changes that would allow them to vote for a bill they pretend to believe cannot work? If it won't work, just vote against it, period. And then WHEN it doesn't work, you will be proved right, the Democrats will be proved wrong, and you can blame them alone for that failure, not contaminate yourselves and lay yourself open to blame too
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You can also enact locally, as I say above, all the measures that you assert are the true and proper cures to our difficulties. Make your philosophy work in your own states and districts, and you will teach the world — not just the Blue States, but the entire world — that free-market economics and the total defeat of Big Government is in fact the way to solve our economic — and social — problems. Put YOUR money, not OURS, where your mouth is.
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It's time for the Blue States to stop shipping money by the boatload to the worthless white trash of the South. Tell them plainly, "Pay your own way. You keep talking free market while cashing Government checks. Have the integrity to turn away Government aid. Prove that you are right the only way you can: by practicing what you preach."
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:14 PM