The first item is an attack on Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, which they illustrate via someone holding a match to the constitution. Even if the Akaka Bill is a bad idea, I fail to see (and the FRC doesn't even purport to explain) what it has to do with the FRC's broader agenda -- except insofar as that agenda is "harass liberals," which, to be fair, is the only unifying thread I've ever seen in the FRC's work.
This is aptly demonstrated in the second item, which is a rant about Charlie Rangel's tax reform bill. What is breath-taking here is the perfidy with language. Rangel's bill would "increase taxes" on many "married couples" (what a meaningless phrase -- Bill and Melinda Gates are a "married couple"), but it would "increase welfare payments through the earned income credit," something you may know as the "Earned Income Tax Credit", but while the FRC can't stand policies that actually help working families, they wouldn't be caught dead opposing a tax cut, so hence we have our little omission. Perkins concludes:
The overall proposal resembles more a Marxist proposal of redistributing income than something worthy of the leaders of the free world. I'd agree with Congressman Rangel that the tax system needs a major overhaul, but more in the direction of simplicity and equality, not of a socialistic labyrinth.
Come on, Tony. Red-baiting is so 1950s.
Finally, the last item tries to diffuse the Democratic Congress' accomplishments writ large (on the occasion of the House's 1,000th roll call vote). Here, at least, some of their problems bear a relationship to the FRC's stated policy aims, such as "presents to the abortion/pro-death community by supporting Planned Parenthood and passing a bill to increase embryonic stem cell experimentation, and gifts to the homosexual lobby by voting on so-called 'hate crimes' legislation," they open the list with neither killing babies nor killing homosexuals, but rather by opposing the minimum wage hike (and here you thought that the anti-Marxism rant was a one-shot deal!). It is, as Perkins puts it, but a "gift to the labor unions." How horrid! The working class gets all the breaks.
If there is a difference between the FRC and the propaganda arm of the RNC, I'm just not seeing it.
I've been told that many labor union contracts do use the minimum wage as a basis, so that if the minimum wage goes up, their pay automatically also has to go up. So calling a minimum wage hike a gift to labor unions isn't insane, and may even be an accurate description of how some politicians came to support the measure.
ReplyDeleteI'm always amused by Republicans' opposition to the EITC, given that it was one of Nixon's better ideas. Instead of giving people money for not working (i.e. welfare), why not give people money for working low-wage jobs that otherwise don't pay much more than welfare? It's a good idea to top up to a living wage so that working actually makes financial sense, instead of looking like a very dumb thing to do once you factor in the high cost of childcare, etc.
(Though if you start from the FRC position that the way to deal with poor children is not to help their parents but to put the kids in orphanages or eat the tastier ones, EITC admittedly doesn't make sense at all.)