Tuesday, June 22, 2010

YouCut, WeCut, call the whole thing off

"Make a Hole Make it Wide"

Big Poppa's kinda laughing this week at a topic he'd made fun of a few weeks back, that being Minority Leader Eric Cantor's "YouCut" idea.

The idea is simple and good by using American Idol/Dancing with the Stars style of text/Internet voting to get rid of certain legislation that costs taxpayers "X" amount of money by telling the voter how much can be saved(over a gross amount of years) in a NCAA March Madness style bracket system. Five pieces of legislation go up every week and the winner moves on till there's one winner that will be presented by Mr. Cantor to the House to be voted upon.

So far, it's another shell game that's losing it's luster. The "YouCut" program is not producing the results as expected and even the CATO Institute is even panning it as a dud. I was shocked to hear the CATO Institute give negative reviews of a Republican idea, as they have usually backed a large majority of their ideals.

CATO's Tad DeHaven points out how those proposed "YouCut" propositions lead to nothing but minuscule cuts or "chump change" of only 0.017% of an already $10 trillion debt.

But Big Poppa also noticed that the majority of the legislation bracketed on "YouCut" are either Democratic or Bipartisan pieces of legislation. And those proposed of Republican nature are minuscule in monetary value.

For instance, June 22's "YouCut" installment, the National Drug Intelligence Center was listed, a program of duplicity to 1974's El Paso Intelligence Center. NDIC's birth was brought forth by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, was highly regarded by many but no one wanted it. Pennsylvania's John Murtha simply added it to the Department of Defense Appropriation Act of 1993, yet the Defense Department had no control over it.

Neither EPIC or NDIC have truly lived up to their potential, but no one truly wants to kill the programs either. Proof, in 2005 President George W. Bush listed NDIC to be disbanded, yet no one touched it, even though Republicans had total control of government. Instead, Congress voted to slash it's yearly funding from $40 million to $17 million

Now Mr. Cantor's "YouCut" states by killing the program $440 million will be saved over a 10 year period.

Rep. Thadues McCotter (R-MI) is coming out against Mr. Cantor and the so called status quo of "United Republicans in Congress." Rep. McCotter was on FOX News this past week, explaining his disbelief in "YouCut."

Rep. McCotter, who heads the Republican Policy Committee, said his committee should be disbanded, for it costs the taxpayers over $350,000 yearly. As well as slash other Republican backed funding by saying "....We spend over a million on the whip’s office; we spend millions on the leader’s office. We can make a small, significant step to return it."

So in the words of legendary wrestler Ric Flair "if you talk the talk, you better walk the walk bucko.. Woooo!"

Over the past year, Republicans have given into gimmicks (Mount Vernon Statement) to draw interest from the public that they are the party of "Savings" and true Conservatives. Yet there are only 10 Republicans that are complete Conservatives.

The Contract with America was successful in 1994 even though it never lived up to it's full potential, but it had a (full) Conservative youth movement in Congress that pushed it. The freshmen Republican class of 1994 were the ones that pushed the Contract, they were the true full Conservatives in Congress.

By 1996, either Social Conservatives like Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum or Fiscal Conservatives like E. Clay Shaw, Jr. were splitting ideals of Conservatism.

Simply kill the side show gimmicks and game show theatrics. If you want to get the people involved in the process, do your job right and stop the shell games.

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