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EDITOR OF REDSTATE

The Need For New Talking Points #EERS

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  April 13th, 2012 at 05:50 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Tonight on the show I’m going to talk about the need for new talking points on taxes. i think a lot of Republicans don’t get the issue and I’m going to do my best to explain why. When Barack Obama is trying to make a moral case for tax increases, it’s never good to see the GOP fall back to “tax cuts” and accounting explanations. They must fight fire with fire.

You can listen live tonight on the WSB live stream and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

The show starts at 6pm ET. At 7pm, we’ll replay the hour I filled in for Neal Boortz and then on to Herman Cain.

Consider this an open thread.

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COMMENTS

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  • garfieldjl

    Whenever they start talking about the rich needing to be taxed more and pay their fair share.

    We should respond by saying that taxing retirees that saved up their money for retirement, have already paid their share. Then we should continue by saying hiking taxes on small business owners is stupid cause they drive our economy. Then follow up, by saying if there are “Rich People” that want to donate more money to the Government, they have a checkbook, they have a pen, they can send a check to the government.

    That is all we should say, whenever they start on the “rich don’t pay their fair share” routine, keep responding by talking about retirees and small business owners.

    Make it clear who Obama is really trying to hurt.

  • CarolT

    Neither Obama or Biden chose to pay the extra taxes they could have. Therefore they are unpatriotic. I am using their logic about paying taxes and being a patriot for wanting to pay taxes.
    Biden gave 1.5% to charity. I can’t remember how much the Cheneys gave to charity but it was at least 30% if not more.

    The republicans have to stop being the stupid party.

  • lastgopinillinois

    both liberals agree that the Buffet Rule would not solve the problem with the debt.
    Not that it is any big news to any of us. But, they made their views known on tonights PBS newshour, a program that is watched by many liberal voters.

  • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

    If you don’t get radical reform, if it is just tinkering, then it only adds to instability and uncertainty.

    Right now it’s spending, spending, spending.

    And if you want economic growth there are two things a new administration could do right away, Repeal all regulations promulgated in the last 24 months, and a moratorium on new regulations.

    and… stop printing phoney money. A strong dollar helps propel growth and makes things cheaper for the consumer.

  • http://impudent.edublogs.org/ kyle8

    nt

  • lastgopinillinois

    The typical “drive-by” voter, who doesn’t have cable TV news or wireless smartphone contraption is watching that stuff. It may have some influence.
    Although, usually, their punditry is a bad influence.
    Shields is an outright communist, and Brooks should label himself as a democrat, at least, if not an outright socialist.

  • northeastred

    that Obama plans to soak with Secretary-type tax rates. It is disgusting beyond belief. I love my administrative staff, but who are they hiring with the money I pay them? No one. They are not the job creators. In fact, if my tax rates were reduced, I’m sure I’d hire more workers. And these workers throw all their money back into the economy on rent, groceries, health care costs, and from what I can tell, lottery tickets, because they have zero savings and investments. It’s a no brainer. Aside from the last few years of Bush’s second term, that economy was completely sound and functioning on all cylinders. With Romney in office and less regulations, we can return to that kind of economy, and nobody will care about spending again.

  • redcal

    …and this year, 70% of independents support the ‘Buffett rule’. I agree with EE — we need new messaging. Where’s Frank Luntz when you need him?

  • ohiohistorian

    Republicans can’t win on the subject because the current crop wants the money to hand out to their friends. Reagan did not cut the total tax collection; he really revised the code to eliminate all of the crazy loopholes which are now back, many of them by “compassionate” conservatives who want to give deductions for social engineering causes like number of family members, college education, buying an energy-efficient blender, etc instead of cutting the rate. The income tax was created by the Democrats to soak the rich to get them to pay their “fair share”. This whole argument of “fair” started with William Jennings Bryan in the 1890′s.

    Republicans need a long-term strategy. They need to point out how unfair the IT is to base it on income rather than purchases. Of course, then R’s are asked why they don’t support the new Obama tax on house sales coming up. Good luck on THAT argument.

    Republicans have to FIRST cut the budget DRAMATICALLY before they can talk seriously about taxes. The discussion has to go to budget bloat, entitlement reform, and even tax reform before taxes get cut.

  • YnotNOW

    The need for higher taxes is a symptom of the overspending our government currently does. And then becomes more and more intrusive into idvidual lives, and traps more and more into dependency. So the winning response is to reduce government to promote FREEDOM. Freedom from high taxes is only part of it.

  • YnotNOW

    Partly because government spending increases the size and scope that government intrudes into our daily lives. And partly because no matter how much revenue, liberals can always spend more.

  • northeastred

    but only when Democrats are in office. George Bush was an embarrassment and let spending get out of control. If Ronald Reagan were anonymous with the same track record, he would be laughed out of the tea party today. I don’t think spending is every taken seriously once Republicans take office. We have our own priorities like wars and defense spending that take tax paying Americans for a ride, too.

    We would do well to take a page out of Ron Paul’s book and get serious about cutting defense spending and stop pretending that a certain amount of waste is necessary for America’s freedom.

  • Flagstaff

    The only thing you got right is that Republicans need to take spending seriously when they control things, too.

    Bush spent too much? Yes. Out of control? No. Not with the country under attack from within and without. While fighting a foreign war, our deficits were still within the “grow out of them” range. Today, they are out of control. Do we even know where all that money is going?

    RP says “cut military spending,” not defense spending; there is a difference and I agree. But that isn’t a problem for the Obama administration. Defense spending has already been targeted for the only major cuts anywhere.

    There is a reason why we have no budget from the Senate. As long as they operate by extending the last budget passed, they operate from the elevated level of the financial/housing/Dodd-Frank emergency budget, with huge overruns approved.

    When Bush tried to get people to seriously attack the SocSec entitlement problem, where were you ? Supporting him or his opponents. Even our own Congressmen didn’t want to get on his side in that fight. Now where are we? Worse off than then.

    In case you haven’t noticed, our priorities are national security, fiscal sanity, and tax reform. I agree with your comment above, but don’t quite get where you’re going with the final sentence. Of the candidates we had running, Romney seems the most likely of any to understand that spending has to be controlled all the time, good and bad times, and that’s where his focus will be. Combined with his tax proposals, which should actually bring in more revenue than the current high rates do, that is a big step towards getting the deficit under control.

  • bobmark

    and how much worse it has gotten since Oblamer took office will be hard for them to refute .All they can do is blame Bush, and that’s been done so much it’s now cliche’ .
    It’s been said, and I think it’s right, that conservatives tend to be Joe Friday “Just the facts” types and the libs play on emotion. Sooooo, why not take the emotion away from them? Has to be a tug on the heartstrings, no $ for this because little Joey already owes … EMOTION, NOT LOGIC!
    I really doubt that many folks really understand that every kid born already owes 40+k for the priviledge of living here.
    To reach the center, take emotional argument away from Dems.

  • northeastred

    by this constant use of the words freedom and liberty. They cause a Pavlovian response and too many people fall into the “yes, freedom isn’t free” line of thinking that defense spending should be off the table. If I operated my business this way, I’d go under. It’s no different that whining liberals complaining about social security cuts. If we’re serious, everything should be on the table.

    Why is throwing money at education a waste, but throwing money at defense contractors something different? We can do better than this without the knee jerk reactions of defense spending cuts=weak on defense. You make it sound like the war on Iraq was an accident. Or unavoidable expenditures of money and lives. Not every republican believes that.

  • Flagstaff

    but I said none of that, nor did I imply it.

    I didn’t use the words liberty or freedom. Didn’t even imply anything about either one. My comments were directed towards doing the right job in the most cost-effective way.

    RP says ?cut military spending,? not defense spending; there is a difference and I agree. But that isn?t a problem for the Obama administration. Defense spending has already been targeted for the only major cuts anywhere.

    What part of that isn’t clearly an alternative expression of “don’t shirk on defense (a constitutional requirement, after all), but do eliminate wasteful spending on anything, including military spending“? I thought you would recognize the approximate quote from Ron Paul. Is he not your “go to” resource?

    Whoops. To verify that, I looked at a few of your comments. If they are representative, I’m wasting my time.

  • Flagstaff

    I just wasted two hours of my life listening to NPR news and commentary programming. Some of the broadcast work would have been torn to shreds if they’d written it on Redstate.

    The coverage is almost uniformly superficial. An interview with an Associated Press voice about press freedom in North Korea made the point that Western newsmen in the communist basket case can speak with a man-on-the-street, and the man-on-the-street probably wouldn’t face being sent to a gulag.

    No follow-up was made regarding the necessity of inserting the word “probably” (IIRC, they may have been even worse and left it out), nor did the fact that gulags exist in the PRK even elicit a comment.

    That’s just a single example out of many I could expound on. If you were curious, NPR is still an apologist for everything left-wing. No need to check it for yourself. It’s just a waste of time.

    You have been warned.

  • northeastred

    I viewed the post below about FREEDOM and didn’t mean to imply that you had written that.

    I’m not a Ron Paul supporter at all, but there were times during the debates that he was the only one who made any sense.

  • northeastred

    I’ve railed about NPR, especially about how they treated Juan Williams to liberals before. All they ever do is bring up Sean Hannity and FOX, and the level of fairness on that network. And frankly, the two are not comparable. NPR pretends to do journalism. FOX makes no bones about being an entertainment news opinion platform. Anyone seeking to get news from either is usually uninformed.

  • Flagstaff

    has been making a point of saying at the end of his broadcast before O’Reilly, “That’s the news. Now comes opinion and analysis.”

    Pretty straight-forward. Far better than NPR, which I have enjoyed beating on for years. Today’s comment was just a reminder that nothing has changed.

    Has nothing to do with fairness, it has everything to do with the truth.

  • Flagstaff

    that at times he makes sense.

  • YnotNOW

    because Bush strayed from his conservative roots in his second term (if indeed his roots were truly conservative, what with the “compassionate” part and all). The Tea Party sentiment was accurately a reflection of this, even if their breakthrough into public consciousness as a movement was delayed. They started emerging when Bush did the TARP bailout, and then broke into full bloom upon the proposal of ObamaCare.

    So your statement is accurate that SOME of the Republican party (which could be portrayed as the “moderate” or “establishment” wing – or RINO), ignored runaway spending when they got to control who received the largesse. But not ALL of the R’s.

    That is why the Tea Party movement so strongly stays away from being co-opted by the Republican Party, and instead wants to stay a grass-roots movement to hold BOTH parties to account.

  • YnotNOW

    then a careful reading of where I was applying it, was to get Government off the back of civil society. Less government is more freedom for the individual and civic groups.

    That is the way to “sell” less spending.

    I did not say anything about Defense being off the table on spending cuts, and most conservatives agree that Military spending must be on the table to consider, even if the core mission of National Security needs to be carefully considered before deciding where and how much to cut. A good example is my congressman, Mike Coffman (R-CO-6), proposing to close most (not all) military bases in Germany, since that is no longer where the threat comes from.

  • testing

    A talking point:
    Liberals want to equate effective tax rate paid to fairness.If a “rich” person pays a lower rate than a poorer one this is unfair. The liberal argument is a “rich” person is not contributing back to society as they should. However if giving back to society is truely the main point for liberals then I think you would have to include charitable contributions in addition to taxes paid to determine a persons overall give back to society.
    For example I have heard that Romney earned about $42 millon over the past 2 years and paid only about $6.5 million in taxes for an effective tax rate of about 15%. But in you add in $7 million he gave to charity his effective “give back to society rate” is over 30%. Wow this even meets the Buffet rule and I am sure this is similar to how many rich people give.( I haven’t verified the numbers). The truth is liberals want the money given to government so they control who get the money. Its about individualism vs statism control.

  • rightlane1111

    I will try to do this correctly…if I don’t…please forgive me:

    ?

    Now…if this is wrong….I am sorry…and I am hoping that this will get on the blogs…so here is the rest of it

    So….now that we have given a non-sovereign country the right to tally our votes…now … as I suspected…they come begging for money from the USA. No wonder Obama is making promises to foreign governments about his second election.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Next time put </a> at the end of the link. You forgot the slash but I fixed it for you.

  • rightlane1111

    <a href="http://investmentwatchblog.com/foreign-company-buys-u-s-election-results-reporting-firm/#.T4XJENVG0dW"

    <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-15/euro-area-to-seek-bigger-imf-war-chest-as-spain-concerns-mount.html"

  • rightlane1111

    “http://investmentwatchblog.com/foreign-company-buys-u-s-election-results-reporting-firm/#.T4XJENVG0dW”

    “http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-15/euro-area-to-seek-bigger-imf-war-chest-as-spain-concerns-mount.html”

    If this does not work … I am going to my computer person

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    .

  • gekster

    ]a href=”full url here”> words you want for the title on the front, and this one < on the end.
    I hope that helps.

  • gekster

    I can’t find the instructions he originally gave me.
    If I find them, I will post it for you.

  • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

    Our policies have proven to create more wealth and for more people. Results are moral. More later…

  • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

    time management is key for those of us over 30….smile

  • rightlane1111

    and she said…they had no control over your website. I tried to tell her that it worked for everyone else…was I missing some plug in…or some extension. She went into the computer…said it was my fault. I know that is an open thread…so I am not breaking rules. Your links says to do this: then it says in bold letters Descriptive test to put as link text here: don’t just say “Click here”

    So….my problem…the <a href shows up…where it does not with other people….and then I can get it where you all can just click on it..

    I even went into the Internet…because I don't want to get you mad at me..,.but I will be dipped…I don't know how to do this…I even tried this with my other Conservative Chat Board…does not work there either. SO…SOOOO SORRY

  • rightlane1111

    It seems that our American company that tallies our votes has been sold to an Internet company in Spain.

    Today’s news on Drudge states…that they are coming to the USA to help them through the IMF. They being Spain.

    My question…are we paying a foreign country to tally the votes in a particular way? Secondly…does Obama have SOLE discretion on our money!!! It appears he can spend anything he wants, i.e., more $$$ going to Kenya…also in Drudge today.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    I just wish you could do again what you did the first time… you were so close.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    There is HTML help there.

  • rightlane1111
  • rightlane1111

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-15/euro-area-to-seek-bigger-imf-war-chest-as-spain-concerns-mount.html