The Tax Debate Our Country Needs

With Chairman Mao, or uh, Obama in charge on the nation, we can expect little in the way of positive tax reform that would relieve the burden on the American population.

Enter the Republican Presidential candidates.  There are many good ideas on the table, and most of them reform the current system.  If we continue to just tinker with the current system, we will continue to get nowhere.  Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, even Jon Huntsman, and now Rick Perry have offered attempts to change the tax system.

The Wall Street Journal has written this piece called The Flat-Tax Sweepstakes.  The column is a good read, but here are three paragraphs that make the case:

Rick Perry joined the GOP's tax reform sweepstakes on Tuesday, proposing an optional flat income tax of 20%, among other fiscal and economic reforms. We'll get to the details, but the larger story is how the drive for a flatter, simpler, more pro-growth tax code is taking center stage in the Republican Presidential contest.

Mr. Perry joins Newt Gingrich, who has proposed a 15% optional flat tax; Jon Huntsman, whose reform proposal would cut the top individual rate to 23%; and Herman Cain and his now famous 9-9-9 plan. House Republicans included a reform with a 25% top rate in their budget earlier this year. All of this ferment shows that whatever one thinks of the candidates as potential Presidents, most of them are trying to meet the political moment with reforms to address our major economic challenges.

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The good news is that Mr. Perry and most of his competitors are thinking big, with proposals that will reverse the U.S. slide to high-debt, slow-growth stagnation. President Obama wants to portray the economic debate as pro-growth government spenders vs. the austerity of budget cutting. But the real debate is over whether government or the private economy is the main engine of prosperity. The flat tax puts Republicans on the side of private growth and government reform, a potent combination. Perhaps Mr. Perry and his comrades can even coax Mitt Romney to join the party.

Are Political Consultants Stupid?

I was intrigued by a tweet today and it led me to a couple of articles about political consultants.

I am a political consultant. Please keep reading anyway. I consider myself one of the good guys though, and I'll tell you why. It's for the very reasons that political consultants were disparaged in these articles. To elaborate further, the points that Newt Gingrich made in the Washington Post are exactly right, and our firm does the opposite of what Newt wrote about.

GPH Consulting is made up of people who grew up in the activist side of politics, some of us are still precinct chairs at the grassroots level. We believe in building the conservative movement, through the Republican party, in every race that we are involved in. We look for candidates willing to work their communities and go door to door to deliver their message, because only when we talk with everyone will we all win. We know our history, we have conservative principles and we try to elect good, competent people to office each year. We're not marketers turned political consultants who view a man (or woman) in a suit as a product we're trying to push with a couple of soundbites. We believe in more than just direct mail and tv ads. We believe in the conservative cause.

We are and have been supportive of groups like RagingElephants.org and Latino National Republican Coalition, groups going into communities that our party will traditionally write off and engaging voters who rarely if ever hear from Republican candidates.

I feel that no race, no district anywhere, should be seen as "off the table". When we cede ground to the opposition, the voters lose by not having a real choice, and eventually we all lose by having unchecked representation that can run wild in the halls of power.

Matt Lewis did a nice summation of what Newt said, and he also went back as far as 2007 to show that Newt was saying these things about consultants back then. In some of Newt's 2008 and 2009 speeches he would also make similar comments about political consultants. Melissa Clouthier also followed up with some insights. I appreciate that Matt and Melissa both used identifiers like "most" and "many" rather than "all" or "every", so I did not take offense to what either of them said.

I posted this blog back in April trying to warn our side not to give up ground so early in 2010, to keep fighting, to keep engaging, because we have the opportunity before us to build a long term movement based on freedom and prosperity. Just assuming we're going to win and assuming we have enough districts to have a majority is not enough. Let's make sure we're building our databases of emails and voter interests so that when 2012 comes around, we can be on better footing with the Obama machine than we were in 2008.

I would say to Matt and Melissa both; I understand your concerns and what you're saying, but rest assured that there is at least one consulting firm out here doing right by our cause. You may recall, just two weekends ago, I was with both of you at the AFP Summit in Austin, how many other consultants did you count in that crowd?