Saturday, February 19, 2011

Gov. Perdue Knows When to Hold 'em?

Rob Christensen has a very interesting analysis of Gov. Perdue's budget proposal, which was released on Thursday. We can hope that he's right, that the Guv is indeed playing poker with the Republican General Assembly, and not Go Fish:
...In proposing to extend most of the 1-cent temporary sales tax that is due to expire in June, Perdue is taking political heat for having broken her word...

By proposing to extend the temporary tax hike, she was able to limit the loss of state positions to 10,000, but only 3,000 new layoffs. But she said without the temporary tax hike, another 13,499 people would lose their jobs.

The Republican legislative leadership has made it clear that they will not support a tax increase. So Perdue appears to be setting up the GOP legislators as the political heavies who will have to do the layoffs.

As we've already seen with the national Congressional Republicans and the Republicans in states like Wisconsin, when they said they were going to concentrate on jobs, they meant eliminating jobs.

It does not seem to occur to Republicans and their Teahadist political brains that government workers are workers too, contributing to the tax base and the general economy.

2 comments:

brotherdoc said...

Private enterprise jobs = good, government jobs = bad. It's that simple for the Teahadists. Only when the last government regulator is strangled with the guts of the last IRS agent, will they be happy.

Liberal POV said...

What most of the Teahadists ( I like that term ) don't realize is they to will be on the receiving end of the pain and their funders will be on the receiving end of rewards of additional wealth and political power.