NGU Skyliner

Cody Fields
Sports Editor

Cody Fields

During a two-year-long campaign, President Barack Obama promised us over and over that he would be bipartisan, working with Republicans to bring change to America. It has turned out to be just the opposite, and Obama’s proclaimed enemy, conservative talk pundit Rush Limbaugh, has been the one to propose true bipartisanship.

It started with a recent meeting Obama had with Capitol Hill Republicans at the White House about his $819 billion stimulus package. When an objection was raised, Obama shot it down with, “I won. I will trump you on that,” according to foxnews.com.

This is because the Democrats’ idea of bipartisanship is the Republicans caving into their socialist, big spending ideas. Limbaugh, however, has come up with a compromise that can make both sides happy.

On Jan. 26, Limbaugh proposed on his program what he called the Obama-Limbaugh Bipartisan Stimulus Plan of 2009. He cited that recessions generally end on their own if left alone, and that this is not close to the worst economy since the Great Depression. He also said that the liberal and conservative mindset has fundamentally different ways they think would effectively end the recession.

The Democrats’ plan, which includes frivolous spending on things such as ATV trails in national parks and $21 million to re-sod the National Mall, is on the Keynesian economic side, which says that governments should run up deficits to get out of recessions. That has already happened and obviously did not work.

The Republicans, however, are supply-side economists and believe that tax cuts across the board will create jobs that will actually last. This has been proven to work, even during the Clinton years.
Limbaugh’s plan is true bipartisanship and compromise. He rounds the total cost of the plan to an even $1 trillion. Then, he splits the amount given to each side by how the election went, so Obama and the Democrats get 54 percent, including the one percent of the independent vote, and the Republicans get 46 percent.

The Democrats could in turn spend their $540 billion on whatever they wanted – infrastructure and all the things they have pushed for.
The Republicans would then use the remaining $460 billion in the form of tax cuts. Some of that would go toward reducing income tax rates, but most of it would go to businesses. It has not that they would be looking out for the big guy, because this stimulus is supposed to be about creating jobs. Who hires people? Businesses hire people, and they have somehow been lost in the shuffle.

The corporate tax rate is a disturbing 35 percent, the highest in the industrialized world. Limbaugh’s solution is to cut it in half and to make capital gains go away for three months. When a business is paying half the taxes they used to be, they can then hire more people. When people don’t have to worry about the capital gains tax, Wall Street will boom.

With this method, we could directly compare which method worked better. If both work equally well, then that is even better, but we’ll know what to do in the future if only one works.

Limbaugh also brings up a great question. How is it that when businesses misspend money, people are furious, but when the government misspends nearly $1 trillion of our money on things like condoms and sod, people think they benefit?

The fact is they actually don’t, despite what the media says. Rasmussen released a poll that says 59 percent of people fear Congress will spend too much in the next couple of years.

This also brings up a great question. If Obama thought this plan was going to work so well, why does he not just go through with it and crush his opposition pretty much forever?

I will let that one stew in your brain, but it may be because he knows making the government even bigger is not going to solve anything.

The economy is not liberal or conservative. It just is. If Obama wants to really get things done, he may have to listen to Limbaugh after all. If the economy is really that bad, what do they have to lose? We’ll see what works, and it will not disenfranchise those who are not the majority, something the DNC is always peaching.

Tags: Spring 2009, Vol. 108 - Issue 2

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.