More Tax Talk from Huck.
By Mr. Ed Posted in 2008 — Comments (47) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Frank Pastore at TownHall recently challenged Governor Huckabee to "Win Our Minds" and convince GOP voters he was a conservative. Governor Huckabee responded today to all of Pastore's questions, which you can read here:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MikeHuckabee/2008/01/17/governor_huck...
However, Huck's response to the Pastore's tax question is particularly interesting. He asked Huck what short to mid term actions he'd take while trying to implement the longer term, Fair Tax approach. Here's Huck's reply, which includes some new stuff which RedState readers should appreciate:
"As a pathway to the FairTax, there are several steps we can take. I would make the Bush tax cuts permanent and fix the alternative minimum tax once and for all. I would expand upon the Bush marginal rate reductions, capital gains rate reductions, and dividend rate reductions. I would reduce the marginal corporate tax rate.
"I would eliminate the death tax.
"I would make all tuition deductible, because I believe that education is an investment in human capital and should be treated at least as favorably as a business is treated when making a capital equipment purchase. Our best means of remaining competitive in the ever-expanding global marketplace is a well-educated American workforce. Education not only improves our national well-being, but is also the path to personal upward mobility.
"I would provide a maximum 15.3 percent tax credit for tuition expenditures, tied to employment income and carried forward indefinitely. This replicates the effects of the FairTax by allowing workers to offset their payroll taxes with their tuition costs. The 15.3 percent cap equals the payroll taxes the family paid for the year.
"We also need to consider increasing the IRA deduction limit. We should consider increasing small business and manufacturers expensing allowances. I would also investigate providing tax credits for healthcare. So there are short-term steps we can take on the path to the FairTax."
I ask for my RedState colleagues' reaction to the merits of his ideas. Please, no responses such as "He's lying" or "If I could only believe him." I already know many of you question his sincerety. I'm really looking for comments/debate on the merits.
Thanks, everybody!
If so, you're not being geniune in your remarks. There would NOT be a 30% tax increase, or even a 23% tax increase because all other taxes would be eliminated. But of course, you know that, and you're just trying to sling inflammatory rejoinders.
Mr. Ed
Straight from the Horse's Mouth
...rejoinders"; just assessing what the implementation of the FT would do. However, in response to your original post, I simply think this:
Huck is saying some very good things. I don't believe a single one of them would make it through, intact, the Democrat-majority Congress the next President will have to work with. Further, I think that Huckabee is a serious risk to compromise with that Democrat legislature on just this and other sensitive topics -- a very, very bad prospect.
He has absolutely no credibility when making these kinds of promises given his record and how dishonest he has been about it. I don't care what he's promising. I don't believe that he actually believes anything he is saying on economic issues. It's just one big scam.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
None of the top 5 has less credibility than Huck. At least the other guys don't lie to my face about their easily verified record as governor. Or heck, lie to those who would give them endorsements.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
...are rough indicators of the credibility of each candidate. Huck has already won a state and is still a national front-runner. He's credible to the voters.
And show me a link where Gilchrist reversed his endorsement.
Huckabee is still featured on the front page of Numbers USA today, check it out:
The only reason Huck has done as well as he has is because it is a 5 man race. If it somehow ends up as a 2 man race with Huck vs anybody, he's done.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
or Huck vs. Giuliani, you can expect NumbersUSA to come out in full force for him.
Huck can win in any situation.
Huck gets my vote against NO ONE in the current 5.
"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." ~Professor Dumbledore
It is the record that matters, not rhetoric.
Huckabee is taking a cue from Clinton and saying what voters want to hear to get elected.
"I ask for my RedState colleagues' reaction to the merits of his ideas. Please, no responses such as "He's lying" or "If I could only believe him." I already know many of you question his sincerety. I'm really looking for comments/debate on the merits."
Please respect the OP's request.
Fred Thompson is the "worst" on taxes according to Grover Norquist.
Fred Thompson is terrible on marriage, according to James Dobson.
Fred isn't the full-spectrum conservative that people think he is.
He is a dinosaur. Why did he slam Fred? He was in the sack with Gingrich who he forgave of his multiple affairs during a time he claimed to be a Christian, once telling a cancer stricken wife in the hospital he was leaving her...YUCK.
Dobson is done. His tattooed son with a lisp cannot take over his ministry and Focus on the Family will halve within a year of his death which is coming within the decade. He backed the wrong horse and attacked Thompson at the bidding of a slimeball.
By the way, being opposed to AMENDING THE CONSTITUTION willy nily which is a political impossibility as well as incredibly unwise is a reason to like and not dislike someone.
He has a long term vision for serious change and reform regarding the way American's are taxed. But he doesn't stop solely at the long term vision, but has what it takes to implement short term solutions.
Everyone knows the Fair Tax is years off, and therefore many state we shouldn't even try. I want a President who will articulate those serious changes over and over again while being practical in the short term.
Huckabee campaigned in 1996 on putting through Arkansas's first broad based tax decrease and he did. He got it done and fulfilled on that promise. It's nice to know you can rely on a politician to deliver on short term promises while carrying out a long term vision of serious reform.
revolutionary proposals on the table in regards to energy, taxes, and social issues. For me that is a plus.
He did not keep that promise and kept Clinton appointees in the department.
The bottom line is if Huckabee is the nominee, Lou Dobbs will enter the race as an independant.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
that before. Seriously, every candidate running has stuff floating around where they advocated a position different than the one they hold today. -- Old news.
That's not the only time he's lied about his record on taxes.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
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Disclaimer: I am a member of a state-wide executive committee that is affiliated with Governor Mike Huckabee's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination
If actually watching a 30 second video is incompatible with your programming. I thought Fox... sorry, you probably prefer "Faux," was pretty clear on it. Then of course there's the gas tax approved by 80% of the voters. He's still going around telling that whopper.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
http://www.arkansasleader.com/2007/12/editorialspure-fiction-from-rollin...
“The state Supreme Court ordered him to raise $300 million. . . .”
The Supreme Court never ordered the governor or the state to raise a dime of taxes. It said the quality of education across the state was uneven and by and large inadequate. It left it to the legislature how to equalize and strengthen the schools.
The legislators and Gov. Huckabee decided to do it by raising taxes rather than redirecting existing resources. Huckabee also wanted to achieve equality by consolidating most of the state’s school districts, which the Supreme Court did not order and the legislature ultimately did not accept.
“The voters in the state had voted for a highway program that was totally unfunded.” What Rollins was talking about we have no idea. The voters approved an interstate highway program in 1999 but it was 100 percent funded. It was a bond issue supported by Huckabee. The bond issue was paid off from existing state taxes and federal receipts.
“He went forth and made it an issue. And then the voters themselves voted for a three-cent increase in taxes.” Didn’t happen. The voters never voted for a tax increase of any size to pay for highways. That three-cent gasoline tax, which Huckabee proposed, was passed into law by the legislature and was collected before people voted on the highway bond issue. Again: Although Huckabee has said so repeatedly, voters never had a chance to vote on taxes.
“He cut income taxes.” Okay, a grain of truth here. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker proposed an omnibus income tax cut — actually, seven separate tax cuts rolled into one bill — but he resigned from office in 1996 before the legislature assembled.
Democratic legislators — 83 of them and not one Republican— picked up Tucker’s proposal and sponsored it in the session that assembled soon after Huckabee became governor.
His own tax plan (a $25-a-person rebate) having foundered, Huckabee capitulated and signed the Democratic tax cut. The lawmakers were amazed when, during his re-election campaign the next year, Huckabee took credit for forcing the tax cut through the legislature. That has been his account of it ever since.
“At the end of the day the story that’s not told is this is a guy who inherited a $250 million deficit. And, at the end of the day, he left $850 million in the treasury.” Not true. Huckabee did not inherit a $250 million deficit but a SURPLUS of close to that sum.
Conservative budgeting by the legislature and Gov. Tucker in 1995 produced a surplus that was $107.4 million the day that Huckabee took over from Tucker in July 1996.
The Tucker budget produced another surplus of $118 million in the new fiscal year that was beginning and which Huckabee had absolutely nothing to do with. So Huckabee and the new legislature had a surplus of about $225 million to spend when it assembled in January 1997. It was that surplus that gave them the leeway to cut income taxes.
As for the $850 million surplus that Huckabee left, there is some substance to it. The surplus, built by tight budgeting under the direction of House Speaker Bill Stovall, was actually about $470 million when Huckabee left office in January but a batch of tax increases that he had helped pass between 2001 and 2005 sent the surplus soaring to $850 million by the end of this June, six months after he left office.
All those tax increases help account for the increase in size of the state government from $7.1 billion a year when Huckabee took office to about $17.1 billion when he left 10 ½ years later.
No court ordered him to do it and Arkansas voters had almost nothing to do with it. That is a Reagan-sized accomplishment all right — remember that Reagan tripled the national debt in eight years — but fiscal conservatism is a description that only Ed Rollins could apply.
Should every bot just append a "don't say anything bad about my guy's record or credibility" to every diary and expect everyone to honor it? It seems to me there are places for this kind of thing (www.hucksarmy.com) and this isn't it. I'm just surprised nobody has thought of it till now.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
We've always given diarists that latitude. Please respect it.
You *know* my position on the subject of the thread. Please let me stop playing mod on this and move on :-)
When you watch this ad, do you believe him? Do you think he is being sincere when he tries to call the Democrats' bluff that they will block any of his proposals to close the budget gap for that year?
What about what he is saying NOW (as described in this post)? Do you believe what he is saying NOW? I suspect not. If you're unwilling to believe him NOW, why would you be willing to believe him in 2003?
As for me, I believe what he said in 2003 is genuine and what he thought was best for his state as a governor. I also believe what he says today is genuine and was is best for the country and what he'd do as POTUS.
Mr. Ed
Straight from the Horse's Mouth
But I don't want to get in trouble. Stop threadjacking your own diary! Hah!
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
Here I am rushing in to be fair, and enforcing your own request... then you cut my legs out from under me, heh.
Have at it, Zuiko, he just opened the door!
Is university tuition not expensive enough already? Is that why he is talking about subsidizing it even more than it already is today? How is that going to improve the situation? How about we take away some of the subsidies that are already in place? Then maybe you wouldn't see so many frivolous degree programs or people hanging out at college for no reason other than to go to keggers and maybe show up hung over at class once or twice a week.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
I know he's explained why he thought the Bush foreign policy was arrogant, but now he says he does not believe it's arrogant. Man, he's moved far to the right this week. I wonder what Jim Pinkerton is telling him about all his views that lean to the left.
"I do not believe that we have an arrogant foreign policy. I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld behaved arrogantly in not listening to the military about how many troops we needed to invade Iraq initially and then in refusing for years to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy. It is the counterinsurgency strategy finally adopted under General Petraeus and Secretary Gates that has been so successful this past year in Iraq."
http://www.arkansasleader.com/2008/01/editorial-huckabee-can-rejoice.htm...
Even the right-leaning commentators tended to dismiss Huckabee as a one-state phenomenon because of the unrepresentative evangelical vote in that state, but they underestimate him and the nature of his appeal. It may speak badly of the rest of the field, but he is the glibbest and, at a surface level, the most likeable of the Republicans. No one can be sure what Mike Huckabee really stands for — he has been at some point or another in the past 10 years on different sides of just about every issue — but humor and easy grace will carry a politician a long way once people think they know him. Huckabee had a full year to define himself without much interference.
The peril for Mike Huckabee remains what it has been from the first, his inveterate inclination to fudge the truth or to lie outright, even when the truth would serve him well, and to make up facts and policy on the spot when he has neither. Candidates to be the leader of the free world must not be seen to be so rash. That weakness has been on display since the opening salvos of his campaign, when he fabricated much of his fiscal record in Arkansas, and then when he issued numerous statements that misled people on what he had done to free the rapist and murderer Wayne DuMond.
You spew the same stuff over and over in every thread. Stop thread-jacking and answer the op's questions. If you don't have and answer, refrain from posting.
I know you think he's a no-good, SOB-of-a-liar. You've made that clear, despite my pleas in the post to avoid these statements.
Let's assume these statements re: tax cuts came from Fred. Would you find them to be meritorious? There are some new ideas here and I'm interesting in your opinion on the ideas, not the integrity of the messenger.
Mr. Ed
Straight from the Horse's Mouth
Gov. Huckabee has not been truthful about his fiscal record, his handling of the Dumond commutation, his college degrees and many other things like the wedding gift registry. He is telling voters what they want to hear to get elected. He has not been honest and we are supposed to believe him now?
Get real.
Record not rhetoric..
By the way I am a preacher's kid and a Christian and I think Huckabee will destroy the GOP.
Fred and others have proposed tax cuts. I do not support Fair Tax.
your diary I am glad to see that Huck has addressed an interim step on the pathway to the FairTax or some similarly simplistic tax structure. On the issue of interim steps Huck appears to be clearly within the boundaries of conservative thought.
I think eliminating the death tax is clearly a conservative and ethical stand to take.
The tuition issue is a new position I was not aware of but I like this as well. I especially like making tuition deductible vs. creating a new program to directly subsidize the costs of tuition. To me making it deductible is in keeping with allowing people to use their own money to make an investment in themselves. I also love his reasoning on this by comparing it to investment made in a business. That’s an excellent comparision.
I think the 15.3 percent credit needs a bit more work. A credit is much more powerful than a deduction and I don’t know that you need both. I’m also not sure what he means by “carried forward indefinitely”.
I think increasing the IRA limit is a great idea.
The great thing about these positions is they are much more innovative than what I hear form most of the rest of the candidates. To be fair, as I have said before, that is one of the reasons I like Huck.
1. FairTax is a pipe dream. Won't happen.
2. Tax credits for tuition is probably the worst idea I've heard today. The preferred involvement in education for the federal government is to do nothing and to eliminate student loan subsidies. No Pell Grants. Stop throwing money at the "education establishment", they just suck it up raise tuition.
3. Increasing the IRA deduction is OK, but privatizing SS would be better. I view this as a toss-off. Propose it, talk about it, give it up.
4. Tax credits for health care won't help. It will, like tuition credits, make the target more expensive.
5. Given that he has no history of tax reductions and he will have a Democrat Congress to work with, I don't see any chance at all of any of the stuff in the first paragraph happening. I have no expectation at all that he will fight for anything, the guy is a political wimp.
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CongressCritter™: Never have so few felt like they were owed so much by so many for so little.
You state several of Huck's ideas "won't happen" because of an anticipated Democratic congress.
Fair enough. Wouldn't that be the case for any GOP President? You believe he's a "political wimp" and won't "fight for anything."
If (and I know that's an incredibly in-your-dreams "if" for you, mbecker) Huck is elected POTUS, he will only be in his position due to his ability to have persuaded enough ficons that he will govern conservatively. Even if he doesn't genuinely hold these principles (which I believe he does), he'd sacrifice re-election if he so quickly abandoned them.
For me, any proposal providing for a tax cut, credit or deduction is a good idea for the federal government.
As for "he has no history of tax reductions," read the link I've posted in this diary. I'm sure you've heard his argument before, but he outlines the numerous tax reductions he led while governor. We knos the "net/net" was an increase but you can't say "he has not history of tax reductions." Sorry, no sale today. Perhaps you'll be able to sell another mortgage tomorrow to someone more receptive.
Mr. Ed
Straight from the Horse's Mouth
with the other GOP candidates. Huckabee & McCain have a long history of compromising with democrats when they don't get what they want. Romney sometimes compromises & sometimes stands firm. Giuliani and Thompson have a record of standing firm more often than not.
I think that's the difference mbecker's referring to. The concern is that after he doesn't get what he wants he'll cave in and give the dems what they want. There's a recent example of this, the SCHIP bill. Huckabee criticized Bush's refusal to get a deal done. Huckabee said he would've found a way to get a deal made so as not to veto the legislation. Bush held firm and got a renewal at the previous amount. That was exactly what conservatives want, not the compromise that Huckabee would've settled for.
What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.
Fred Thompson 2008
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Fred and McCain and Rudy will not make such a pledge.
If you are serious that the US collects enough taxes to even face national emergencies (during which we could redirect domestic spending to face security threats and temporarily fund whatever we need to do out of the Treasury), this should mean something also. I don't trust Fred RINO big-McCain-Feingold supporter who never supported strong conservative tax reform proposals in the Senate, nor moderate Rudy without making the same pledge Mitt and Huck were willing to make.