Archive for the ‘Rick Perry’ Category

STEVE FORBES ON RICK PERRY’S FLAT TAX PLAN

Friday, October 21st, 2011

DAILYCALLER.COM

Steve Forbes on Rick Perry’s flat tax plan:

‘I’m elated!’

4:31 PM 10/19/2011

As you might have heard, Texas Governor Rick Perry is planning to come out with a flat tax proposal next week. The plan hasn’t even been finalized, but it already has at least one big backer.

“I’m elated by it,” Steve Forbes told me. “And I think Governor Perry will surge ahead of Herman Cain,” he said.

“Herman Cain gets credit of realizing the [current tax] code has to go [but] the virtue of what Governor Perry is doing is that he does not bring in a sales tax,” he said.

In 1996, Forbes popularized the issue in the United States, running for president with a flat income tax as his signature issue.

Forbes stressed that Perry’s plan isn’t complete — that he’s still “tweaking” it. But Forbes indicated Perry’s plan would be similar to the one Forbes proposed in 1996  — which called for no income taxes on families until they hit $36,000 of yearly income. (After earning that amount, they would then pay a flat 17 percent tax on additional income.)

“I think the same principle will be at work with Governor Perry. The rate they are still tweaking, but the concept will be the same,” he said.

Forbes says the exemptions for people making below $36,000 (or whatever the new number is) are important, “so you don’t hit people with low incomes.”

Regarding the flat tax concept, Forbes said it’s an idea whose time has come. “The idea — even though it has been a while coming in the U.S. — has been gaining traction around the world, ranging in size from Albania to Russia,” Forbes said. “So we’re catching up with the rest of the world.”

Forbes also mocked Mitt Romney’s 59-point plan, saying: “I heard one person say, hey, Moses had only 10.”

Article printed from The Daily Caller: dailycaller.com


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A STARK DISTINCTION ON ENERGY POLICY: PERRY VS OBAMA

Monday, October 17th, 2011
The Enterprise Blog

A stark distinction on energy policy: Perry vs. Obama

By Kenneth P. Green

October 14, 2011,

The Perry campaign released its plan for “Energizing American Jobs and Security” today, and it’s hard to imagine a sharper contrast between the Perry and Obama vision for America’s energy policy:

Where the Obama administration has labored to shift America’s historically free-enterprise energy economy over to a federally planned economy, the Perry plan explicitly repudiates a federal role in energy planning;

Where the Obama administration has stated that higher energy costs were acceptable (even desirable) as a means of reducing America’s energy use, Perry’s plan make ensuring energy affordability and reliability a top priority;

Where the Obama administration has set greenhouse gas control as the highest priority for energy policy, the Perry plan specifically repudiates greenhouse gas controls as a useful pursuit;

Where the Obama administration has tried to pick which energy technologies will win in the market, Perry’s plan calls for the elimination of subsidies to specific types of energy; and

Finally, where the Obama administration has tried to use the EPA to implement an agenda rejected by Congress, Perry’s plan calls for a massive restructuring of the EPA: (more…)

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PERRY LOOKS TO ENERGY TO RECHARGE ECONOMY

Saturday, October 15th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • OCTOBER 15, 2011

    By PATRICK O’CONNOR

    Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry announced his energy and jobs plan at a U.S. steel plant in Pittsburgh. He pledged to create more than 1 million jobs by expanding energy production and lifting federal regulations on the energy sector.

    Texas Gov. Rick Perry sought to reinvigorate his presidential bid Friday by outlining a plan to boost domestic energy production, a proposal he predicts would create more than a million jobs.

    In his first major policy address since joining the race in August, Mr. Perry called for circumventing Congress to roll back environmental regulations, expand domestic oil and gas production and end a broad swath of incentive programs for energy production.

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    Associated PressTexas Gov. Rick Perry, right, tours the U.S. Steel Irvin Works in West Mifflin, Pa., before his speech Friday.

    (more…)

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    THE GOP’S SOLYNDRA PROBLEM

    Saturday, October 15th, 2011
    The Wall Street Journal

    • OCTOBER 14, 2011, 9:17 A.M. ET

    Republicans have their own green baggage.

    • By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

    • On Friday Rick Perry delivers his first major policy address, unveiling an aggressive energy and jobs plan. It will no doubt be good. It will no doubt address serious problems. It will no doubt be ignored.

    That’s because, unfortunately for Mr. Perry, drilling isn’t the energy topic du jour. The buzz is the bankrupt Solyndra, which is why the only energy question that came to Mr. Perry at Tuesday’s New Hampshire debate was this: How, exactly, is his state’s vaunted “Emerging Technology Fund”—which has dumped some 200 million taxpayer dollars into private companies—any different from Obama programs that subsidized the likes of Solyndra?

    It isn’t, of course, and that’s a problem for Mr. Perry. The political merit of Solyndra is that it perfectly illustrates the failed Obama economic mentality—that politicians should allocate capital, that government creates industries. Nothing should be further from a free-market mentality, and Solyndra ought to be providing Republicans a potent contrast with the president. Instead, candidates like Mr. Perry and Mitt Romney are dragging green baggage.

    Congressional Republicans are now investigating the solar panels out of Solyndra, and rightly so. But no one should forget it was Republicans who in 2005 created the loan program that Mr. Obama would later expropriate to funnel stimulus dollars to his green boondoggles. This was the height of the Bush-era spending craze, when the GOP had come to see green energy as a slick way to funnel yet more pork (ethanol, nuclear, wood chips) to their states. As a side benefit, it offered cover against charges that Republicans were stooges of Big Oil.

    Where the handouts really got rolling was at the state level. It used to be that Republican governors competed for business by lowering taxes and regulations. Then some genius worked out that it was easier to flat-out bribe companies to relocate by offering cold, hard taxpayer cash. And with green energy all the rage, a lot of state tax dollars Enlarge Image

    PW1014

    Associated PressTexas Gov. Rick Perry

    (more…)

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    THE UNSINKABLE MITT ROMNEY

    Saturday, October 15th, 2011
    The Wall Street Journal

    • OCTOBER 13, 2011

    This candidate will have to be pushed a lot harder to make him a good president.

    • By DANIEL HENNINGER

    • Watching Rick Perry in the Republican debate at Dartmouth say that the answer to every aspect of economic revival is to “get our energy industry back to work,” and watching Herman Cain say that the answer to virtually anything is “my 9-9-9 plan,” one’s thoughts of course turned to John Belushi’s immortal Greek diner owner, Pete Dionasopolis, who defined his world in three words: “Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger!”

    Perhaps destiny brought these GOP candidates to Dartmouth. After the debate, Gov. Perry attended a Dartmouth frat party. A Dartmouth fraternity was of course the inspiration for “Animal House,” an apt metaphor for the GOP nomination process.

    Newt Gingrich’s variation on cheeseburger is to repeatedly attack Ben Bernanke. This is slightly weird, but the former House Speaker apparently has decided that if he talks too much about Washington, he’ll be fingered as one of them. So his strategy is attacking the Fed.

    WL1013

    Associated PressPolling in the low 20s, Mr. Romney gives new meaning to front-runner.

    (more…)

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    HOW TV DEBATES HAVE CHANGED THE RACE

    Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
    The Wall Street Journal

    • OCTOBER 9, 2011, 8:27 P.M. ET

    The also-rans get free publicity and have no incentive to drop out. Meanwhile the media pits all candidates against each other, giving Obama a pass.

    Neither fund raising nor the building of grass-roots organizations in key primary states is driving the Republican presidential race. Endorsements haven’t mattered much either. Stump speeches have been of minimal importance. And policy papers—such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 59-point economic plan or ex-Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s proposal for tax rate cuts—have been largely overlooked.

    By far the biggest influence on the Republican contest has been the series of nationally televised debates. There have been more debates than ever—six so far—and they have attracted record audiences. The most recent debate on Sept. 22 on Fox News drew more than six million TV viewers, plus another six million watching on streaming video.

    The debates have overwhelmed the Republican race. “They are about all there’s been to the campaign,” says Fox political commentator Brit Hume. After each debate the campaign has been frozen until the next one, except for arguments over issues spawned by the debates themselves.

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    Associated PressFrom the left, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman before the debate at the Reagan Library, Sept. 7

    (more…)

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    TEXAS UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR FUNDING

    Monday, October 10th, 2011
    Published on The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com)

    Defending the Defensible

    Texas’s college tuition policy is not the abomination Mitt Romney claims.

    Jonathan V. Last

    October 10, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 04

    EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:   For starters, Texas Republicans understood that tuition isn’t all that important to the state university system. Texas schools are funded largely by the state sales tax, which everyone​—​both legal and illegal residents​—​pays. (Texas has no state income tax; most revenues come from consumption taxes.) Republicans argued that, as a matter of fairness, illegal immigrants had been funding the colleges just like everybody else. (This relative unimportance of tuition as a funding source is why both in-state and out-of-state tuition rates at Texas schools are far below the national average.)

    Another reason was Texas’s Permanent University Fund, which National Review’s Kevin Williamson charmingly explains: “Early in the 20th century, the state of Texas gave the universities a whole bunch of land, which turned out to have a whole bunch of oil on it, and West Texas is full of wells bobbing up and down and pumping grade-A education out of the ground.” In other words, tuition at most Texas schools is used more to control enrollment than to raise funds

    Rick Perry is not always his best defender. For the last two weeks, Mitt Romney has hammered Perry over a Texas law the governor signed which allows children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state college tuition. At the Orlando debate, for instance, Romney said sardonically, “To go to the University of Texas, if you’re an illegal alien, you get an in-state tuition discount. You know how much that is? That’s $22,000 a year. Four years of college, almost $100,000 discount if you are an illegal alien, go to the University of Texas. If you are a United States citizen from any one of the other 49 states, you have to pay $100,000 more. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

    In his defense Perry dolefully concluded, “if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.”

    Well then. Perry would have done better to describe the program, explain its legislative history, how it works, and its effects. Because the Texas law is more complicated than Romney suggests and more interesting than you might think. (more…)

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    REALITY VS. IDEALOGY: IS RICK PERRY CONFUSED ON IMMIGRATION OR ARE WE?

    Saturday, October 8th, 2011

    oregonlive.com

    Published: Thursday, October 06, 2011, 4:15 AM
    Guest Columnist By Guest Columnist The Oregonian
    roberts.jpg

    By Jack Roberts

    Rick Perry has revealed some rough edges since joining the race for president, but the issue that has hurt him most is the one for which I like him best; namely, his defense of the law allowing Texas high school graduates to qualify for in-state tuition at Texas colleges and universities even if they are illegal immigrants.

    The outcry against this law — passed 10 years ago with just four dissenting votes in the Texas Legislature — reflects how far ideology has become removed from reality. After a decade under this law, a whopping 1 percent of Texas college students in public institutions are illegal immigrants paying in-state tuition. And that’s in a state that not only shares the longest border with Mexico, but where border patrols are less attentive and aggressive than the greeters at Walmart.

    The outrage against this law might be more understandable if illegal immigrants didn’t pay state taxes, but, of course, they do. That’s true everywhere (the myth that most illegal immigrants are paid in cash under the table is just that, a myth), but it is particularly true in Texas, which has no state income tax and raises 80 percent of its revenue from a general sales tax and other excise taxes (particularly on gas, tobacco and alcohol). Clearly, this isn’t about the money. (more…)

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    BRENT BOZELL – PERRY’S “RACISM” VS. REVEREND WRIGHT

    Friday, October 7th, 2011

    October 5, 2011

    By Brent Bozell

    Is there a clumsier group of newspaper character assassins than the hit squads at The Washington Post? On Oct. 1, the Post was back on the racist-Republican attack with a 3,000 word, investigative treatise over a rock. Specifically, Gov. Rick Perry had leased a property where the N-word was painted on a rock, and then he had it painted over with white paint. But investigative genius Stephanie McCrummen could see a virtual Klan hood on Perry’s head. “As recently as this summer, the slab-like rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp.”

    Near the end, she underlined it again: “In the photos, it was to the left of the gate. It was laid down flat. The exposed face was brushed clean of dirt. White paint, dried drippings visible, covered a word across the surface. An N and two G’s were faintly visible.”

    Three thousand words on this. (more…)

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    ROMNEY ENVIRONMENT PUSH IS FRESH TARGET FOR HIS RIVALS

    Friday, October 7th, 2011
    The Wall Street Journal

    • OCTOBER 6, 2011

    Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, whose health-care record as governor of Massachusetts has left him struggling to win the support of conservative voters, now faces another point of vulnerability: his environmental record.

    Just days after his 2002 election, Mr. Romney hired Douglas Foy, one of the state’s most prominent environmental activists, and put him in charge of supervising four state agencies.

    Romney

    Associated PressGov. Mitt Romney and Douglas Foy at a March 2006 event.

    Mr. Foy had initiated a lawsuit that led to the cleanup of Boston Harbor and had worked to protect fishing grounds and seashores. Once in the Romney administration, he served as the governor’s negotiator on a regional climate-change initiative and helped draft regulations to put emissions caps in place for coal-fired power plants.

    With Mr. Foy by his side, Mr. Romney joined activists outside an aging, coal-fired plant in 2003 to show his commitment to the emissions caps. “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant, that plant kills people,” he said.

    (more…)

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