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Rockin' Huckabee
Archive for 200709 ( return to current blog )
Sunday September 30, 2007
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Apologies for the lateness of this posting, but here's a couple of comments on the PBS debate the other night. As you are probably aware the vaunted top tier candidates deigned not to appear at this debate aimed at the African-American audience.
Michelle Oddis has an article over at HumanEvents.com that covers the event. Here are two quotes from that article:
Steele told us that he thought Mike Huckabee benefited the most from the debate. “You can kind of see that presidential air about him,” said Steele. “I haven’t picked anyone yet so this isn’t a Huckebee commercial… but as a party activist he has the potential to galvanize the party.”
“From what I was hearing in that room there were a number of African Americans who were impressed enough to say, “You know, I could consider him if he gets the nomination…I thought that was telling,” Steele said “because the majority of the African Americans in the room were Democrats.”
Read the article here:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22633 | | Posted by postaldog at 4:08 PM - | |
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Thursday September 27, 2007
An excellent interview with the Gov. over at RealClearPolitics.com this week by Blake D. Dvorak. I've excerpted a few questions that don't get asked much and Huck's answers:
RCP: You're certainly one of the strongest social conservatives in the race, but so much of the debate is focusing on national security and foreign-policy issues, like the war, Iraq, but also Iran and rising countries like China. How do you hope to compete without much foreign-policy experience?
Huckabee: I would certainly say that even though the mayor [Giuliani] will talk about the experience of 9/11, that's not commanding an army in a war. I actually have more executive experience than anybody on the Republican or Democrat side, having been a governor 10 ½ years. Nobody's had that level or running and managing a government. Governors don't have what maybe some perceive as the level of foreign experience, but you know they have more than most people understand, because we actually negotiate contracts and sign agreements with foreign companies as well as with foreign government and trade agreements. Most governors have traveled extensively throughout the world, so it's not like we're devoid of any international experience.
RCP: Any particular example from your administration that you might use to highlight your foreign-policy experience?
Huckabee: Of course dealing with crises, whether it was dealing with 75,000 evacuees of Katrina that came to our state in less than five days. That's a massive undertaking to try to deal with housing, feeding, finding employement, clothing, medical care for 75,000 people at one time. I would challenge anybody to manage that sort of crisis.
We also had ice storms that obliterated 2/3 of our state's electrical supply for almost two weeks. It put us virtually in the dark ages. It would be the equivalent of a terrorist attack, if you went back and thought about what would happen if somebody was able to destroy your electric grid and took 2/3 of electricity away from your citizens. In some cases, it was restored within a few days, but there were areas of the state two and three weeks without electricity. So to manage that crisis of making sure that hospitals, nursing homes, that gas pumps could get gas to people. It was a significant event. All of those things are a part of what I've spent my ten years around here dealing with.
RCP: You've had a much publicized spat with the Club for Growth . . . Are there examples in your administration where you held the line with things like spending, where you vetoed spending proposals?
Huckabee: Sure. For example, one of the tax increases that the Club for Growth accuses me of I actually did not sign and I didn't sign it because I thought it was too little reform for too much money. And I told them that while I realized we needed more money in education, I would not support the fact that they didn't go far enough in some of the reforms I wanted to push.
In another case, we actually during the time of recession in 2001-02 cut 11% out of the general revenue budget. Now why that's so significant is 91% of our general revenue budget is in three things: Education, Medicaid, and prisons. All the rest of state government is funded within the final 9% percent of that general revenue. So when people talk about just cutting travel for the state employees, you can cut the entire agencies and it wouldn't make the big dent people think it would because where most of the money goes are in three and only three things.
So when we cut 11% out of the budget, I mean there were people who thought I had turned the water off and forced people to eat once a week, but we made significant budget changes to keep from having a tax increase at a time when the economy was really struggling. I never get credit for that. It was during that time that we did the "Tax Me More" fund, that's when the legislature was every day having a press conference demanding that I have a special session for higher taxes and I held the line and said no and in fact said, "You know there's nothing that keeps people from paying more tax if they feel like they're just not paying enough."
So I created the "Tax Me More" fund, had envelopes printed and passed them out whenever anyone said to me we needed to raise taxes. I said, "Here's your envelope, fill it out. Tell me what you think you ought to personally put in and you just go ahead and send it in." Because there's not a thing in the world prohibiting you from paying more if you feel like you're just not anteing up enough. And after a year I think we had, like, $1,200 in the account. So it was a great way to demonstrate that when people were screaming for more taxes, what they meant was somebody else being the ones to pay them.
Read the whole interview here:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/mike_huckabee_an_interview.html | | Posted by postaldog at 5:10 PM - | |
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Tuesday September 25, 2007
Here are Huck's thoughts on the Iraq war and the consequences:
How does a victory in Iraq lead to a defeat of Al Qaeda (or any terrorist for that matter) which knows no national borders?
Thanks Justin for the question. Iraq is the crossroads where Arab meets Persian and Kurd, Sunni meets Shiite, so if it’s not a peaceful buffer, it can easily become a tinder box. When we deposed Saddam, we emphasized Iraq’s central location as a prime place to establish democracy and have it spread. That was the potential dramatic upside. Now we face the potential dramatic downside that the terrorists are trying to take advantage of – Iraq’s central location as the perfect place to create anarchy and have it spread. That is both an unnecessary and an unacceptable outcome.
The Sunni tribes in Iraq have turned against Al Qaeda because of its brutality and religious extremism, they have figured out they don’t want to live in the 7 th century. They are now working with us. This is a dramatic turning of the tide for us both in the war in Iraq and the war on terror and a dramatic setback for the jihadists.
But these gains are fragile and tenuous, Al Qaeda is in retreat, but not defeated. If we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda will regain its power.
If we maintain these gains, we will win an enormous victory in the all-important battle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world because it is a rejection of Sunni Al Qaeda by fellow Sunnis who were so repulsed by the terrorists that they chose to work with the “infidels.” But if we leave too soon, and Al Qaeda moves back in, it will be an enormous propaganda victory for them. It would show that they have the patience and perseverance to prevail, and we don’t.
Al Qaeda has made Iraq a revolving door of terror. Fighters pour into Iraq to train and fight, then pour out to spread terror elsewhere. If we don’t succeed in Iraq, Al Qaeda will have a permanent base in the western part of the country from which to plot and train for attacks against us. Also, the terrorists are getting excellent training in urban guerilla warfare that is easily translatable to doing horrific things in the cities of Europe and the United States. Not only will they follow us home, they will know what to do when they get here.
If Iraq devolves into anarchy and a power vacuum is created, Iraq’s neighbors will rush in to fill that vacuum, so the entire region will become more unstable, which helps Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda thrives wherever there are weak or failed governments.
If we finish the job in Iraq, we can have a stable government, secure in its borders, allied with us to fight terror in the region and serve as a regional model for a government that is neither repressive nor fundamentalist. | | Posted by postaldog at 4:20 AM - | |
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Here's the Gov. disecting Hillary Clinton's heath care proposal:
What is your opinion of Mrs. Clinton's health care plan and what are some specifics of your plan?
This question comes from Tom Herzog. Tom, let me begin by saying right now, we have a system of employer-based health care that is dying and will ultimately be replaced with something else. That something else will either be a government-run system – socialized medicine – which I oppose, or a private, consumer-based system, where the free market will provide competition and control costs, and each of us will own our health care, which I support.
Senator Clinton’s plan will require a huge tax increase to support its estimated cost of $110 billion a year. She is proposing a transition to socialized medicine from employer-based care. It’s a slower boat than her plan from the 1990’s, but that’s where it eventually leads.
Under her plan, everyone must buy health insurance. I do not support such mandates. Her plan creates a new government-run system as one of the options. She says that people who are happy with their private insurance can keep it, but I ask, for how long? As more and more businesses stop providing insurance, which is the direction we’re clearly moving, more and more people will be forced into the government-run system. Senator Clinton knows this, she knows time is on her side. This is her clever strategy to get to socialized medicine incrementally rather than overnight. This will be awful for our children and grandchildren, and we must not allow it to happen.
As I said, I want to move from employer-based health care to consumer-based health care. I don’t want to raise taxes, I want to reduce health care costs. My plan makes quality health care more accessible to all by making it more affordable and portable.
We don’t have a health care crisis, we have a health crisis. About 75% of our $2 trillion spent on health annually is spent on chronic disease, most of which could be prevented by not smoking, eating healthier diets, and exercising.
These three lifestyle changes could prevent 40% of cancers, 80% of type-2 diabetes, and 80% of heart disease! So prevention obviously would contain an enormous source of our spiraling health-care costs.
People who live healthy lifestyles should be rewarded in their health insurance costs (just as safe drivers get lower rates).
Besides prevention, we can also contain costs and make health insurance more affordable by early diagnosis and better, more consistent management of chronic disease. Right now, we have an upside-down system that promotes catastrophic outcomes, a system that will happily pay $30,000 for a diabetic to have his foot amputated, but won’t pay $150 for a podiatrist who could save that foot.
We must waive deductibles and co-pays for screenings (such as mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests) that lead to early detection and save lives.
Our employer-based system doesn’t allow the free market to function because the overwhelming share of the cost is picked up by the employer, while the person actually using the system, the employee, pays only a small fraction of the bill. Whenever the person using something and the person paying for it are not the same, whenever something is essentially free, more of it is going to be consumed.
With a consumer-based system, all of us have some skin in the game, some incentives to stay healthy and not take every MRI we possibly can, so costs will come down.
Consumer-based health care is portable, because it belongs to you and can’t be lost when you change jobs, start your own business, work part-time, or take a break from working outside the home to care for children or an elderly parent.
With consumer-based health care, we can maintain the high quality our system is renowned for while bringing down costs and getting more of us insured.
Thanks again Tom for the question. | | Posted by postaldog at 4:16 AM - | |
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Monday September 24, 2007
Here's the Gov. answering an e-mail question about the effect of the FairTax on the questioner's retirement fund:
Here is my question about the Fair Tax. I am 60 years old and have a long work history. I have saved for my retirement and most of my savings has not been tax deferred. Would the Fair Tax cause me to be taxed again on this money as I deplete my savings in retirement?
First James, thanks for the question.
All Americans will benefit from the Fair Tax, whether working or retired; single, married, or widowed; rich, poor, or middle class.
Under the Fair Tax, any growth of stocks and bonds in your retirement accounts or interest accumulation in your savings accounts will no longer be subject to federal taxes.You will collect all of your pension because the Fair Tax eliminates current federal taxes that are withheld when a pension is drawn.
Under our current tax system, you will be taxed again on your money as you deplete your savings because the truth is that up to 25% of retail prices are corporate and payroll taxes, plus compliance costs. Businesses pass on their taxes to consumers. The Fair Tax eliminates all these taxes and lets competition drive retail prices down.
Also, the Fair Tax gives everyone a prebate up to the poverty level, so that you can buy necessities untaxed. Most retirees don't spend more than this amount every month. The combination of lower prices and the prebate means most retirees will pay less in federal taxes when they spend retirement savings than they do under our current system.
The Fair Tax will secure Medicare and Social Security funding and protect your benefits.
By switching from a narrow, regressive, and inconsistent tax to a broad, progressive, and dependable tax on consumption, the Fair Tax will ensure that we have the funding for the benefits current and future retirees have earned. Finally, the Fair Tax eliminates capital gains, dividends, and death taxes, so that you won’t pay taxes on interest from your savings and investments, or when you sell your home, stocks or other assets. Without the death tax, your heirs will receive every penny you leave them. | | Posted by postaldog at 9:58 PM - | |
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