If there are no atheists in foxholes...

Then there are no libertarians or conservative Republicans during house fires.  Imagine if you had the option to opt-out of protection from the fire department and could save roughly $75 per year in taxes.  Sounds like a pretty fair deal to me. Would you take that risk?

Well, a family in rural Tennessee found out when they repeatedly refused to pay the option for fire protection from the closest municipality in South Fulton, Tenn.



Well, guess what? That $75 of freedom per year pretty much bit them in the butt. Now I would have probably put out their fire and had them pay every fee they owed plus a massive late fee, but that's not how insurance works, does it?

I'm sure my fellow conservatives will agree, they didn't pay for the service then they shouldn't get it.  That family got to be $75 more free than any of their neighbors from South Fulton, who didn't have a choice whether or not they were going to pay for the fire department, they just had to.

Was it worth it? I don't think so...

Hat tip to Ezra Klein for his post regarding the incident and how it relates to the GOP's bluff about repealing the healthcare mandate.

Quote of the Day

I tried to not post this, but I couldn't resist.

"The Republicans don’t have any credibility whatsoever. They squandered whatever they had when they enacted a massive UNFUNDED expansion of Medicare in 2003. Yet they had the nerve to complain about Obama’s health plan, WHICH WAS FULLY PAID FOR according to the Congressional Budget Office. The word “chutzpah” is insufficient to describe how utterly indefensible the Republican position is, intellectually.

Furthermore, Republicans have a completely indefensible position on taxes. In their view, deficits cannot arise from tax cuts. No matter how much taxes are cut, no matter how low revenues go as a share of GDP, tax cuts are never a cause of deficits; they result ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY from spending—and never from spending put in place by Republicans, such as Medicare Part D, TARP, two unfunded wars, bridges to nowhere, etc—but ONLY from Democratic efforts to stimulate growth, help the unemployed, provide health insurance for those without it, etc.

The monumental hypocrisy of the Republican Party is something amazing to behold."

- Bruce Bartlett, domestic economic policy adviser for President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush in a recent interview with The Economist's blog Democracy In America.

Graph of the Obama tax proposal vs. original Bush tax cuts

So here's a handy little graph from Ezra Klein's blog to help sort out the difference between the Obama budget proposal for only letting the tax cuts for the richest 1-2% expire and the Republican proposal of extending the "Bush" tax cuts as is.  This graph lays out pretty clearly that the Bush tax cuts did largely go to the richest Americans, and not like medium rich, but like really REALLY rich.  As you'll see, between the two tax proposals most of the tax cut amounts are essentially the same for most income brackets.

Also ask yourself, if you really care about cutting the deficit (letting the tax cuts expire in full would cut the deficit by roughly 30%) would you be willing to part with the amount in either proposal?

Full disclosure, I stand to gain an increase in my tax cut of $2 to $7 from the Obama proposal.  My bias is so easily purchased!

Read the full article about the Joint Committee on Taxation's analysis of the two tax proposals here at the Washington Post.

Full of it....

The Republican Party on spending.  Just watch how congressman Pete Sessions of Texas can't identify one program that he'd cut in order to balance the budget and reduce the national debt.  I mean the answer's pretty clear right?  Just stop funding poor kids' breakfasts and foreign aid and you're half way there! Oh wait, these programs are only like 0.08% of the annual budget, not to mention an even smaller chunk of our long-term deficit.  But hey, it sounds good to "live within our means" doesn't it?

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We all know the big ticket items that need to be reformed / reduced in order to make a significant dent in our long term debt.

Social Security - slow but steady increase in the retirement age as well as getting rid of the salary cap around $125K?
Medicare - means justified benefits and a raise in salary cap
Medicaid - hospital payment reform and increased primary care access for low income communities
Department of Defense - phasing out and canceling outdated weapons systems and ending $3 Trillion wars