Stefanik’s GOP study group wants to raise social security age (Corrected)
Bethlehem latest library to host drag Queen story hour in Capital District
By Ken Tingley
Rep. Elise Stefanik is one 175 members of the Republican Study Committee which last week released its 2024 “Blueprint to Save America.”
Yeah, things have been bad, but I didn’t think they were that bad.
It’s a first look at what Republicans believe the federal budget should look like.
Its plan calls for gradually raising the retirement age from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, slashing total spending by $16.3 trillion over a decade and enacting dramatic tax cuts so it can balance the federal budget in seven years, although defense spending would be allowed to grow.
Have your eyes glazed over yet?
It’s the never-ending debate over the role of the federal government in our lives and whether cutting taxes for the rich helps all of us.
Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, provided some insights on her Substack newsletter “Letters From An American.”
Richardson’s newsletter uses history to put the events of today into perspective and give them context. Every time I start reading her newsletter, I end up reading to the end.
After seeing the plans of Stefanik’s group, Richardson tried to put in perspective the economics of federal spending.
There is a lot to digest in the 122-page plan, but Richardson boils it down to this overriding Republican principle: “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “individuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government” while Democrats believe the opposite.
She points out that Grover Norquist - you may remember him as the guy who forced Republicans to take a “no-tax pledge” believes that tax cuts will grow the economy and that government spending should never be higher than 8 percent of gross national product.
Richardson points out the last time it was that low was at the dawn of the Great Depression in 1933. Richardson writes this:
In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.
That was the dawn of the Great Depression.
Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected president and began spending money with the government-funded programs to help pull us out of the depression. Most of us know this history, but it had longer lasting affects beyond the economy.
“The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed,” Richardson wrote in her newsletter. “Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.”
The percentage of spending compared to GDP dropped after the war and by the mid-1970s settled into about 20 percent, although there were recent spikes after the financial crash in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020.
Richardson explains that the reason debt is growing is rather simple: Because tax revenues have plummeted. Richardson explains it this way:
“Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.”
What Republicans keep insisting, according to Richardson, is that the best way to deal with growing debt “is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent.”
I imagine Rep. Elise Stefanik would describe Heather Cox Richardson as a radical with a liberal agenda, but there does seem to be some history on her side.
The question comes back to what type of country you want the United States to be and for that, Richardson returns to Franklin Roosevelt during his campaign for president.
“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman,” Roosevelt said in his acceptance speech. The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”
Stefanik and her study committee, who also call for ending funding for a “radical green agenda” aimed at combating climate change, derailing Community Development Block Grants for curbing poverty in low-income neighborhoods and eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting don’t seem to have the working class in mind.
In conclusion, Richardson returns to Roosevelt one more time: The question for each of us is simple: Are we getting what we need? And will cutting federal spending ensure that for the future?
Another drag show
It appears this may be the summer of the drag show.
The Bethlehem Public Library will be holding a drag story hour as part of its summer reading program on July 13 with Albany drag performer Noelle Diamond reading to preschool-age children.
The library website describes the event as an age-appropriate offering designed to help children “develop empathy, learn about gender diversity and difference, and tap into their own creativity.”
There has already been pushback with the Times Union reporting a post by the Bethlehem Republican Committee: “The Bethlehem Republican Committee does not support drag shows or story times with young children in our public institutions. It’s predatory, an abuse of public trust, and a gross error in judgment. One only needs to go to the Facebook page of the performer, where ‘Slay these hoes’ can be seen at the top of the page. Yet another revered place that we ALL pay for has become a political battleground for the far left.”
Librarian Geoff Kirkpatrick said he expects the event to go off as scheduled unlike a previous event in Lake Luzerne.
“Our job as a library is to provide the opportunity for a program that talks about the existing gender diversity that already exists in the community,” Kirkpatrick told the T-U “Children are not immune from being aware that these conversations are happening and this program is is an opportunity for parents to have those conversations with their children right there. Parents are with kids in the program.”
The T-U also reported that Diamond has been doing story hours for four years and has regularly received backlash and sometimes has to take service entrances in order to safely enter libraries so she can read to children.
That is shocking to hear.
She told the T-U that events like these are important to kids who do not fit in.
Elise on Fox
Our local congresswoman appears on television so much that sometimes I wonder if she is auditioning to be a Fox host.
He wanted to know what the country should do with the five million illegal immigrants already in the country.
Stefanik tried to steer the blame to Democrats and President Biden, but Varney was insistent she answer his question: What do we do with those already here?
Over nearly two minutes, Varney repeated the question over and over and Rep. Stefanik never answered.
As someone who sat in on multiple editorial boards, it was frustrating reminder of how good she has become of not answering questions.
Re: Rep. Elise, Orwell had an apt description of her kind:
“...she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. 'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind.” History repeats...again.
And the economic hit if we send those millions of working people packing.