Spring, and all her traditions, is upon us
You can tell spring is really here because the love bugs are back.
Though the bugs’ ubiquity and their tendency to splatter onto windshields is less than ideal, there is something to be said for the Gulf Coast’s annual bug infestation. I like to think of it sort of as a low-rent monarch migration.
Bugs aside, at least it’s stopped raining. After our soggy winter, the sunny days and dry evenings are perfect for sitting outside, firing up the grill and enjoying the sunset. Spring, at last, is here.
But of course the season does bring more than love bugs and evenings by the grill.
As I type this there’s a potential federal government shutdown looming in Washington and there is a mad scramble to ram more than a few bad bills through both houses of government in Austin.
While springtime discord in our nation’s capitol is perhaps nothing new, it is remarkable that, even with a single party in control, the confusion and discord continue anyway, not unlike the love bugs’ annual ritual.
There is no joy in mocking the legislative process, but when one sees such monumental issues such as international diplomacy, health care and tax reform brushed aside as though millions of lives do not hang in the balance, it is stupefying. For instance, the federal government’s data shows that national health expenditures account for nearly 20 percent of our GDP and Medicare, the socialized program for senior citizens, accounts for about 20 percent of that. Medicare, of course, is funded through payroll taxes and so talks of big health care overhauls and tax overhauls without any details should be alarming.
I don’t know where our local representatives stand on these issues. During the two-week Easter holiday, if Rep. Randy Weber stopped by Port Arthur to have a town hall, he didn’t tell me about it.
Any fair-minded person would like accountability and would like to know our tax money is being well spent and would favor fair social policies but, again, it’s hard to support a reform if you don’t know what reform looks like.
Of course, if you don’t know what the reform looks like, you’ll never know if it happens and so much better for the person who promised you reform in the first place.
To be fair, the president at least said he would unveil details of his proposed tax cut today, so maybe there will be detail there. Maybe.
But so far, there seems to be a troubling habit of our leadership promising big things, using bold words and then … nothing. So, at a time when, according to Tuesday’s New York Times, the middle class has been shrinking for the last 20 years, big promises and bold words don’t meant much.
Sure, we need a simpler tax code. There are good arguments, too, for cutting the corporate tax rate. However, at the end of the day, there are governmental goods and services we, as a country, need even if we, as individuals, don’t like those goods and services and do not use them. At the end of the day, somebody has to pay for this stuff and it’s not fair to simply shift the burden to the states.
Huey Long once said, “I would describe a demagogue as a politician who don’t keep his promises.”
So, we wait and we will see what the details look like and we will see whether promises will be kept.
Jesse Wright is editor of The Port Arthur News.