Jordy Blog

Party Differences in Taxation and Spending

I love this quote from Ron Paul’s most recent installment of his weekly column “Texas Straight Talk“.

While Democrats propose to tax and spend, many Republicans aim to borrow and spend, which hurts the taxpayer just as much in the long run.

Republicans who are concerned about increased taxation should be up in arms about the present value of future taxation that we make inevitable by letting the government live outside its means. You can’t lower taxes without lowering spending; you can only defer them –and deferring them to a future generation through debt is, in my opinion, even more immoral then overtaxing the current generation.

What is needed (for both parties) is to lower spending. That can be politically tricky since everything government does costs money, and no leader wants to be seen as doing nothing; but nothing is precisely what should be done at least 90% of the time. That’s one of the reasons the Founding Fathers, through a delicate system of checks and balances, made it so hard to get anything done. Yet we often, as voters, reward candidates who campaign on all kinds of ridiculous, expensive plans. (Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!)

Lowering spending, and in turn taxation, requires both that we mind our own business internationally and let people solve the own problems with their own money domestically. Right now neither major party as a whole can agree to do both, so Americans will have to pay the hefty price until we can bring about serious and meaningful change in American politics.

Voucher Supporters: Register Your Discontent

I’d like to encourage everyone who voted FOR referendum 1 to please go to the Parents For Choice in Education website and register as a supporter. If the voucher concept ever resurfaces to sees the light of day in Utah (and I think it will since we only needed to sway an additional 12% of voters), we’re going to need people on the ground to pass out fliers, place yard signs, and host neighborhood meetings in their homes.

There was just too much misinformation out there. The opposition spent millions of UEA dollars to send daily mailers and buy up something like 6x the TV spots, and those anti-voucher ads were full of lies. The only way you can combat that kind of FUD campaign is to have a groundswell of grassroot support, willing to do what it takes to make sure that every citizen has the facts.

Please sign up now so that next time we can know our supporters and better coordinate our efforts. Help us ensure that parent’s choice in education never gets railroaded by union special interests again.

This is not over.

Best Pro-Voucher Ad Ever

It’s easy for normal folks to get lost in an issue with so much rhetoric.

That’s why I was thrilled to get this ad in the mail:

This ad makes it easy for people like my mother-in-law to feel safe in a Parents’ Choice vote, despite claims from voucher opponents that

The real “bureaucrats and liberals” are the subsidy advocates and out-of-state voucher pushers looking for Utah to save their faltering national movement.

and

The issue isn’t about choice, is a liberal subsidized entitlement program that competes for scarce resources.

(Both those quotes come right out of the “against” portions of the 2007 Utah Voter Information Pamphlet, with my emphasis added.)

So, wait a minute… Sean Hannity, Mitt Romney, & Focus on the Family are liberal? What does that make Hillary, Atheists United, and the Rainbow Coalition? Can you ever be so far left that you actually wrap around? Voucher smearers, I think you may have a beam in your eye.

I only wish the pro-vouchers list had included the Utah Taxpayers Association and the late, Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman, from whose stellar essays the voucher bill is based. I think a lot of questions on the fiscal and tax impacts of Referendum 1 could have easily been answered by their inclusion.

BTW, I think that perhaps the dumbest statement I heard at Provo High School’s voucher debate was when an anti-voucher lady (whose name I don’t know) declared that she thought it was offensive that the Choice in Education side was citing some economist when these were Utah’s kids we were talking about it.

Some Economist –> Milton Friedman, arguably one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

Utah’s Kids –> Your Kids

TOMORROW: Cookies and Ice Cream FOR Utah’s Kids

For those of you who haven’t already read this on ConnectBlogs, my friend and fellow blogger Devin Thorpe is holding an event called
Cookies and Ice Cream FOR Utah’s Kids to discuss Utah’s Referendum 1. If you’re for school vouchers or are still on the fence and would like to learn more, please consider attending this event –just make sure you RSVP.

Patrick Burne (my former boss at Overstock) and Jordan Clements of Peterson Partners will be speaking.

Tech in Government

The Tuttle IT fiasco reminded of my “Intro to IT” professor who, showing the class how to check email, complained that he was getting 500+ spams per day –despite the fact that he kept clicking to “opt-out” of the mailings. I sat there in complete disbelief as he “opted-out” of several blatant spams on the wide screen projector in front of the whole class. It was funny at first, but it got old when I had to guess which answer he thought was right on the exams. Needless to say, I decided to get experiential credit for the follow-up course rather than endure the comical “learning” an additional semester.

On a serious note, how do complete technical morons (conservative and liberal alike) make it into positions of authority? And once they’re in, how do they stay? It’s frightening how tech-adverse some government officials are, but what’s more scary is that they pretend that they aren’t. Some even pretend to be experts. (I’m looking at you, Orrin). It’s amazing that they think they can get away with it!

From a technical standpoint, I really like Pete Ashdown, founder of XMission and Utah senatorial candidate. I don’t think he has much of a chance of winning against a senior incumbent Republican here in Utah.

But I digress…

IT sucks at Tuttle City Council

This email exchange between the City Manager of Tuttle and the lead developer of CentOS Linux is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.

Here’s the hard-hitting local news coverage.

Pete Ashdown on Open Source Government

Pete Ashdown (founder of Xmission and candidate for US Senate) will address UVLUG this Saturday:

Pete will present “Democracy 2.0: Open Source Government,” showing how the Federal Government can learn from the open source movement. He will talk about how the government can stop ignoring technology and use it to better the lives of all Americans. He will also take questions on any issue.

This will undoubtedly be a great discussion for people interested in technology and government in Utah.

Pete’s discussion will start at 12:30 in room CS-404 on UVSC campus. For those who’d like to stay, there’ll be a Linux installfest directly afterward.