Sen. Hatch?s Solution For The Economy: Put The Country ?Back Into Conservative Republican Hands?
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 8th, 2009 5:36 am by HL
Sen. Hatch?s Solution For The Economy: Put The Country ?Back Into Conservative Republican Hands?
Today, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) appeared on Fox Business and unleashed an angry tirade against the Democratic majority in Congress. As Fox host Alexis Glick fawned over the senior Republican senator — praising his characterization of Democrats’ policy ideas as “doggone stupid” — Hatch agreed that Democrats are trying to “socialize the country.” Towards the […]
Today, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) appeared on Fox Business and unleashed an angry tirade against the Democratic majority in Congress. As Fox host Alexis Glick fawned over the senior Republican senator — praising his characterization of Democrats’ policy ideas as “doggone stupid” — Hatch agreed that Democrats are trying to “socialize the country.”
Towards the end of the interview, Glick asked him what his “solutions” are to the problems the country faces, prompting Hatch to respond that he’d start by putting the country “back into conservative Republican hands” and keeping the Bush tax cuts:
FOXBIZ: What are your solutions to jobs, the unemployment situation, rising health care costs, energy costs that are rising, inflation that is still a concern, how do we solve these issues right now? Are we trying to do too much too quickly?
HATCH: Number one you get the arrogance of power by throwing the Democrats and get the control back into conservative Republican hands. Number two we should not do away with the Bush tax cuts, those marginal tax cuts are a major help to try and keep the economy going. Number three we should use fifty state labratories to do health care.
Watch it:
While the country continues to face enormous economic problems — like a double-digit unemployment rate and the number of Americans on food stamps hitting an all-time high — there is little evidence that a return to the policies pursued by conservatives that Hatch favors would do anything to improve the situation.
During the last year of President Bush’s term, the median household income in the United States dropped 3.6 percent to $50,303, the sharpest drop since the government began keeping records in 1947. During Bush’s tenure, the number of Americans in poverty increased 26.1 percent, while child poverty jumped 21.4 percent. In total, the Bush years saw 8.3 million people fall into poverty.
There was one group, however, that did well under the Bush years Hatch seems to yearn for. The Congressional Budget Office found in 2007 that families “earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts,” prompting the New York Times to conclude that “rich families were the undisputed winners from President Bush’s tax cuts.”
