• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Bayhfurcated optimist

How do you survive as a not-quite conservative in a conservative state? You try to have it both ways so that you get headlines written about you that say, "Bayh cautiously praises stimulus bill":

"This is not perfect," he said. "I wanted more tax cuts and less spending.

What do you know? Me, too!

. . .he is a little uneasy at the price tag funded by borrowed dollars.

"In the long run, these deficits are damaging ... and they bother me," said Bayh.

Why, they bother me, too!

Tax benefits, he said, will have a far-reaching effect for middle class families paying for college, buying a new car or a new home.

Wow. I don't need a new home, a new car or help paying for college right now, but I have been thinking that my middle-class family -- the two cats and me -- could really use some more tax benefits. How about that? It turns out that I must be "cautiously for" the stimulus package, too. Especially when I hear this, which you know I take as gospel: ""This is not perfect," he said . . . But this will provide 75,000 jobs in Indiana." That's about 1.2 percent of the population, for those who forgot.

Comments

tim zank
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 12:09pm

Well...."But this will provide 75,000 jobs in Indiana.

Bob G.
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 12:31pm

"Bayhfurcated"

Leo, that's brilliant!
(cautious optimism aside)

Bet'cha Bayh (golly wow) is STILL picking splinters from his GROIN from straddling that fence ALL these years, eh?

;)

Doug
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 6:09pm

I recall when Bush was pushing for his tax cuts on the basis that the government was taking in too much money, the surplus, and especially the future projected surplus, was too big, and paying off the national debt too fast was a real hazard.

Bayh pushed for an amendment that would have eliminated the Bush tax cuts if we returned to deficit spending. That failed. Bayh voted for them anyway, as I recall. He does seem to have his finger firmly in the wind.

gadfly
Wed, 02/18/2009 - 11:50pm

If Bayh disagreed with legislation that he did not even get to read thoroughly, he should have voted NO.

We have waited months for Porkulus and we could have waited long enough to do this thing with some research into unintended consequences.

Why Doug feels it necessary to defend bad judgment is beyond me.

Speaking of bad judgment, President Bush should not have listened to his Dem Treasury Secretary in bailing out the banks and the auto companies.

We cannot spend our way out of this economic crisis brought on by the very politicians who are now making the problems worse.

tim zank
Thu, 02/19/2009 - 9:13am

Just the very fact ANY bill contains 672 pages is proof enough our government is on "auto-pilot" with iced up wings, for lack of a better analogy.

Quantcast