Send Lizzy Borden to
Washington
By Ann Coulter
AnnCoulter.com
Any Republican governor of a blue state who
manages to balance the budget without raising
taxes should be a nominee for Mount Rushmore, to
say nothing of president.
Mitt Romney was governor of a state so blue,
it's North Korea with more Irish people, and he
balanced the budget without raising taxes.
Even Ronald Reagan raised taxes as governor of
California, imposing a $1 billion tax increase
his first year in office. It was the largest tax
hike by a governor in the nation's history,
raising income, corporate, sales and inheritance
taxes. Five years later, Reagan raised taxes
again by another $1.5 billion.
To be fair, unlike liberals, he also provided
tax rebates that, over his tenure in office,
totaled $5.7 billion, including $4 billion in
property tax rebates.
But even Reagan didn't stop the growth of state
government: While he was governor of California,
the budget increased from $4.6 billion to $10.2
billion.
Republicans are able to contextualize Reagan's
record -– it was California! -- but seem unable
to contextualize Mitt Romney's record, even
though he had to govern a state far more liberal
than California was half a century ago.
When Reagan was governor, the California
Assembly was majority Democrat, but the Senate
was evenly split between Republicans and
Democrats.
Gov. Romney had to contend with a 200-person
state Legislature that included only 29
Republicans.
As Reagan tax guru Arthur Laffer has admitted,
Reagan's specialty was cutting taxes, not
spending. Reagan, he said, found "it hard to say
no" and cutting spending is a "green-eyeshade
budget thing," that requires poring over
budgets, whereas cutting taxes can be done in
the abstract.
Romney is a green-eyeshade guy.
Like Reagan, Romney inherited a huge,
Democrat-created budget deficit. The existing
Massachusetts deficit was already more than half
a billion dollars when Romney took office
halfway through a fiscal year, with a projected
deficit of $3 billion for the following fiscal
year.
And yet, Romney balanced Massachusetts'
budget each year he was in office and left the
state with a surplus, without raising taxes.
To the contrary, every single budget Romney
submitted included income tax cuts -- all of
which were rejected by the 85-percent Democratic
Legislature. (The last time Massachusetts
legislators approved an income tax cut was when
it was attached to a bill raising their own
salaries by 55 percent.)
Romney balanced the budget by slashing spending,
eliminating ridiculous corporate tax loopholes
and increasing user fees for government services
consumed by only some citizens, such as court
filings, taking the bar exam, boating, hunting
and golf licenses.
He cut state spending by $600 million, including
reducing his own staff budget by $1.2 million,
and hacked the largest government agency, Health
and Human Services, down from 13 divisions to
four. He did this largely by persuading the
Legislature to give him emergency powers his
first year in office to cut government programs
without their consent.
Although Romney was not able to get any income
tax cuts past the Democratic Legislature, he won
other tax cuts totaling nearly $400 million,
including a one-time capital gains tax rebate
and a two-day sales tax holiday for all
purchases under $2,500.
He also vetoed more bills than any other
governor in Massachusetts history, before or
since. He vetoed bills concerning access to
birth control, more spending on state zoos, and
the creation of an Asian-American commission --
all of which were reversed by the Legislature.
As Barbara Anderson, executive director of
Citizens for Limited Taxation, said, "What else
could he do?"
Romney left his successor, Deval Patrick,
Democrat and friend of Obama, with a "rainy day
fund" of $2.1 billion, more than tripled from
$640 million when Romney took office. (Of
course, as soon as Romney was gone, Patrick
raided the rainy day fund, increased government
spending and raised taxes.)
Meanwhile, when he was in Congress, Santorum
wouldn't even vote to eliminate federal funding
for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Santorum supported all sorts of big-government
spending plans -- No Child Left Behind,
prescription drug coverage for seniors and the
"bridge to nowhere."
But you'd think we would at least have
Santorum's vote against federal funding for
pornographers and deviants. Alas, no.
The NEA, you will recall, uses federal taxpayer
money to subsidize crucifixes submerged in
urine, photos of bullwhips up a man's derriere,
poems celebrating the Central Park jogger's
rapists, photos of amputated human genitalia,
vomit, mutilated corpses and dead fetuses. (And
that was just the children's wing of the
museum!)
But Rick Santorum voted against cutting funding
for the NEA every time a vote was taken both as
a representative and a senator -- in 1991, 1992,
1993, 1994, 1997 and 1998. These weren't
accidental votes. Each one was deemed a key
conservative vote on which members of Congress
would be graded by the American Conservative
Union.
There's your "true conservative," values voters.
Unfortunately, the more time a person spends in
Washington, the more likely he is to consider it
perfectly reasonable for the federal government
to redistribute money from hardworking taxpayers
to pornographers, con men, charlatans and
thieves.
America is on a precipice. Unless we send Lizzie
Borden to Washington next January, our country
will begin an inevitable decline into a useless
socialist country, with no money for national
defense, no entrepreneurship, no new businesses
being created, no new pharmaceuticals or cancer
cures -- just the endless redistribution of an
ever-dwindling pool of wealth from the makers to
the takers, overseen by career politicians like
Rick Santorum.
Mitt Romney has spent no time in Washington. He
was a rabidly frugal fiscal conservative in a
state where cutting government spending was as
foreign an idea as it is in Washington today.
Do you think a man who slashed government
spending in North Korea, put the corrupt and
financially bleeding Olympics on solid financial
footing and rescued dozens of companies from
bankruptcy would consider a photo of a bullwhip
stuck in a man's buttocks a wise investment of
the taxpayers' money?
COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER
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