Governor Mike Huckabee wrote an op/ed for Fox News. What he says about legislation being hurried through is so true, and I like the “Huckabee Plan” for Congress. Too bad it’ll never be enacted.
I learned a few tricks and tactics while I was a lieutenant governor and governor for over 13 1/2 years. And one thing is that when someone is in a hurry to pass legislation, you’d better slow it down because the reason to hurry a law is rarely urgency to help the citizens, but urgency to get it passed before people find out what the heck it really is.
A lot of legislation is like garbage and it’s garbage the first day in the can, but if it sits there long enough, it really starts smelling.
Congress knows that the so-called stimulus bill is garbage, but hope it gets voted on before it sits there long enough to start smelling.
If you sent your kid to college and in less than a month he spent all the money you sent with him for the semester and then, on top of that, maxed out the credit card you loaned him for extreme emergencies, what would you do?
Would you say, hey, let me give you even more money than before and another credit card, but don’t tell me how you spent that first bunch of money and it’s not even necessary to tell me how you’ll spend the new money I’m sending?
Not hardly. You’d want a full accounting of what he did with all your money since you now have to work even harder to replace it.
And, before you gave him any more, you’d put very strict controls on how he spends it.Congress must think we’re stupid. And maybe we are: We did send these guys back.
But they’ve spent all the money we sent them in taxes. They’ve run up a debt that our children and even grandchildren will have to pay and they don’t really even know what they’ve done with the money.
Somehow, they think that if we’re in this horrible mess because they spent, borrowed and squandered billions, they can fix it if we just let them spend, borrow and squander trillions.
And we even have a new treasury secretary to oversee it all — who didn’t know how to use TurboTax and didn’t pay his own taxes for four years and had an illegal immigrant working in his house.
Here’s the Huckabee plan:
Term limits for members of Congress — 12 years and go home.
Instead of automatic pay raises, you lose 2 percent of your congressional salary every year you don’t balance the budget.
We end the congressional pension and you have to go into the same Social Security system we’re in.
You get a fixed amount for health insurance and you pay for half of yours and all your family’s and you go into the marketplace and buy it like we do.
You pass the “fair tax” and eliminate the burden on businesses and individuals trying to create jobs and you close the IRS — especially since the guy you just confirmed to run it doesn’t even know he’s supposed to pay taxes.
I especially like the term limits for Congress. I think letting these guys stay in Congress so long is the root cause of our government often times not working for the people.