[Mb-civic] What happened to real Republicans?

[Michael Butler]

For all my republican friends( or like many of us...former republican
s...)MD
 Monday, March 21, 2005

 What happened to real Republicans?

 L.A. HEBERLEIN
GUEST COLUMNIST

I was a Teenage Republican. Working my precinct for Barry Goldwater, I got a
thorough education in what real Republicans believe. And whether I still
agree with all I learned then, I will always understand and respect it. I'm
just not sure the people calling themselves Republicans today do.

 When I was a Teenage Republican, all Republicans knew the 10th Amendment by
heart and Republicans resisted the increasing power of the central
government. Now Republicans leap over one another to make the federal
government ever more powerful. It is Republicans at the federal level who
now want to tell states whether they can allow medical marijuana or assisted
suicide, or even who can have a driver's license. They want to tell the
states who can get married. Imagine a Republican of my youth thinking the
federal government should dictate policy to local school boards.

 When I was a boy, Republicans cherished personal liberty. Creating secret
no-fly lists and spy-on-your-neighbor programs, turning medical records over
to police, holding people without trial in hidden military compounds, saying
it's legal to torture them -- that's how we thought only Communists would
behave. 

Above all, the Republicans back in those days were the party of
responsibility. They understood a balance sheet. "Yes," they would say, like
a patient father with an immature child, "we'd all love that, but we can't
afford it. Look right here at the numbers." Fiscal discipline was a value
held almost as deeply as family and religion. Republicans knew that nothing
works if you can't pay for it, that only ruin and shame can come from laying
out more than you take in.

 Where have all those Republicans gone? The ones running Washington, D.C.,
today inherited a $236 billion budget surplus, and like kids on crack with a
credit card, turned it into a trillion-dollar deficit almost overnight.

If there was one thing the Republicans of my youth understood the value of,
it was the American dollar. Today's Republicans stand around and watch the
American dollar fall further every day. With our out-of-control trade
deficits and increasingly shaky credit, all it might take is for one central
banker from one small country to switch reserves to the Euro, and the dollar
could plummet like the Space Shuttle Columbia, leaving a smoking trail of
ugly wreckage.

 When the issue of long-term planning for the future of Social Security came
up, I thought maybe the Republicans I remember had resurfaced. That is
exactly the sort of issue a white-haired Republican accountant for the water
district would have raised in my youth. "Now, in 40 years," he would
patiently explain, "the way these bonds are structured, we're going to have
a shortfall, unless we adopt prudent measures right now." So the board would
adopt prudent measures. After all, they were responsible people.

 But have you followed the Social Security story? Do you know the plan?

The way Social Security works is that the people paying in support the
people taking out. The "Republicans" in Washington want to let people stop
paying in, so they can put their money in private investment accounts. But
if we let people stop paying in, where's the money for people who are
drawing out now?

 Listen, you'll never believe this. The plan is to borrow it -- to borrow a
trillion more dollars.

Oh, for a time machine. Mr. Twenty-First-Century-Call-Yourself-Republican,
can I get you to come back with me to explain to a real Republican how, with
our nation in debt as never before, your plan to fix Social Security is to
borrow a trillion more dollars?

 L.A. Heberlein lives in Seattle.