Like an old joke turned ironically true, it seems that the government is now preparing to actually tax us for breathing. This comes in the form of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 sponsored by Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) which is likely to come to the floor of the Congress as early as this Friday. It is the legislative culmination of the ongoing eco-madness based on the idea that the carbon dioxide is a form of toxic pollution, despite the fact that it is produced in nature, is part of the atmospheric cycle on which all life is based, and is shown to stimulate plant growth and the replenishment of the atmosphere.

Of course, the truth is that carbon dioxide is not an environmental threat, but is merely being raised as a bogeyman to allow for the passage of laws like this new energy bill whose real purpose is social engineering and anti-capitalism. It’s the perfect bogeyman because it’s everywhere and can never actually be eliminated plus it’s produced by almost every human activity — we even breathe it out with every breath. This means that a “carbon tax” can be applied to almost anything and becomes an excuse for raising taxes on everyone through indirect methods where the taxes end up being passed on to consumers in the form of energy price increases. John Dingell (D-MI) who is the senior Democrat in the House admitted recently that “nobody in the country realizes cap and trade is a tax, and it’s a great big one.”

The heart of this energy bill is the idea of a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide and other more serious pollutants, specifically targeting fossil fuels and making it costlier to use them, thereby pushing energy businesses to move into more earth-friendly sources of power. This is combined with the idea of “cap and trade” which allows companies which produce high emissions to buy offsets from companies which produce low emissions, thereby subsidizing the low polluters at the cost of the high polluters.

This all sounds great in abstract, but the problem is that 85% of America’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels of one sort or another, so the initial aggregate cost of the program will be huge. The other problem is that cap and trade just doesn’t work. As has been demonstrated in those nations where it has been used, energy companies find it more practical to just pass on the additional cost to consumers so the net result of all of this is not a reduction in pollution, just a massive increase in prices for energy consumers — effectively a big additional personal tax on every man woman and child in the nation, something they can ill afford in hard economic times.

Analysis of the consumer cost which this program would create suggests that by 2035 the price of gasoline would increase 58 percent, natural gas would go up 55 percent, home heating oil would increase 56 percent, and the typical electric bill would go up a whopping 90 percent. These would be increases to the baseline price and in addition to added cost from inflation and any natural fluctuation in the price of oil. In addition there would be secondary costs as the higher prices impact transportation and manufacturing and create sudden artificial inflation in almost every area of the economy. The finall cost for consumers would be almost $3000 per year starting as soon as the bill is implemented, and within 25 years the cost per family will have increased to almost $5000.

There are also other secondary costs to the economy in taking such a huge amount of money (almost $400 to $600 billion per year) out of the economy. Companies will look to cut costs and that means cutting jobs and wages. Families will not be able to pay the added energy costs and that means an increase in household debt.

The impact on jobs is particularly troubling and has been explored in depth in a stufy (PDF) done in Spain when they implemented a similar program. The administration is promoting this bill as one which creates more “green” jobs. What they don’t mention is that every one of those green jobs created comes at a cost of the loss of 2.2 existing jobs and most of the new jobs are temporary jobs in construction and installation or jobs which cease to exist when the new technology proves to be inefficient and is abandoned. It is estimated that 90% of the jobs created are temporary, so the long-term ratio is more like 20 jobs lost for every job created. Added to the massive job loss already caused by the administration’s failing economic policies this might be a cost too great for the nation to bear.

Massive job loss and energy cost increases for consumers were the result when Spain implemented a carbon tax with cap and trade, and it is that system which President Obama is using as a model for his program. President Obama regularly cites Spain as an example to look to for energy policy, despite the fact that the economic and human impact there has been devastating, prolonging recession, increasing unemployment and taking money out of the pockets of every consumer. The upside is that it is one of the factors contributing to the crushing defeat of Spain’s socialist government in the latest election which brought in more pragmatic reformers.

Fear-mongering about “catastrophic global warming” is being used by powerful lobbying groups like the Natural Resource Defense Council to drive support for this bill with no consideration of the damage which will be done to the economy and to consumers. And when you look at the bottom line, the projected outcome of all of this cost and suffering is estimated to be less than two-tenths of one degree in worldwide temperature change by the end of the century. Meanwhile the nation is enjoying what is reported to be one of the the coolest summers on record and a growing group of scientists led by Edward Teller are speaking out against climate change hysteria.

With a floor vote possible Friday, now is the time to contact your representative in congress and urge them to vote against HR2454. Remind them that you can’t afford to pay thousands in additional taxes to underwrite speculative technology and gratuitous expansion of the power of government. Tell them that carbon taxes and cap and trade have been a failure in Europe and that we can’t afford them here.

Voters are increasingly turning away from the Republican Party, as voter registration and voter identity polls increasingly illustrate. And there seems to be few voices of reason on where the Republican Party should go from this point forward.

Voters under 30 voted 66% to 32% for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 – part of the biggest age disparity the exit polls have ever measured in a race for president. Young voters were the GOP’s worst age group in 2006 and 2004 as well.

According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “History suggests that an entire generation’s partisan profile can be shaped in the first decade of voting. Imagine a Democratic-leaning millennial generation (those born between the late 1970s and the year 2000) adding 4 million potential voters a year to the U.S. electorate over the next decade.”

Young voters are less socially conservative than the electorate as a whole on issues ranging from homosexuality to immigration. They are also more secular and participate less in organized religion. In a recent Pew poll, 25% of Americans born since 1976 were atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – compared with 13% of baby boomers.

“Young voters need to see a GOP that is more socially libertarian, particularly toward gay rights. With changing demographics come changing attitudes,” Republican consultant Mike Murphy wrote in Time magazine this month, lamenting in the same column that “A GOP ice age is on the way.”

The GOP also has to find a way to appeal to non-white voters.  In 2008, voters under 30 were 62% white while voters over 30 were 77% white .

So how can the GOP simultaneously attract black, Hispanic and Asian voters, continue its appeal to white voters, and also capture young voters?

Voters are looking for consistency — a cohesive vision for peace and prosperity — and solutions to our problems.

The Republican Liberty Caucus offers the solution: less government, more liberty.

Government at every level in this country continues to be too big, too intrusive, and too expensive.

Solutions we seek — from our nation’s dwindling health care system and dilapidated schools to our meddlesome foreign policy and increasing civil liberties violations — can be found when government is reduced or eliminated from the issue.

As a RLC Adviser Ron Paul has repeated time and again, liberty is the great unifier.  A vision of limited government unites all Americans in the great purpose of our nation’s government: to protect the rights of all American citizens and to be limited in scope and size.

Is there any vision more empowering than that?

Recently, Newsweek featured a headline claiming that “We Are All Socialists Now.” Perhaps it should have featured a picture of Demetrius Poliorcetes on the cover instead. The history of the ancient Hellenistic cities in what is now Arabia and Turkey might provide more useful knowledge about what is happening in the United States than one can find in newspapers, magazines or on television.

Michael Rostovtzeff was a Ukrainian-born archaeologist and professor of ancient history at Yale beginning in 1925. He died in 1952. He was among the first historians to study the ancient world’s economies and to emphasize the role of capitalism in the rise and decline of ancient societies.

I have just started reading Rostovtzeff’s monumental Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire*, one of a number of massive books that he authored. The text runs to 488 pages but there are in addition more than 200 pages of footnotes. Friends of liberty will do well to consider Rostovtzeff’s work.

He starts the book by discussing the history of Greece and the Hellenistic city states that Greeks founded in what is now Arabia and Turkey. He notes that “class warfare” was common in classical Greece proper. “This class-war made the growth and development of a sound capitalistic system very difficult.” In classical Greece there were widespread movements for redistribution of land and abolition of debts. The problem was so widespread that Athens and Itana in Crete required citizens to swear that they would not put redistribution of land and abolition of debts to the vote. It seems that ACORN has precedents.

Rostovtzeff writes:

“Revolution and reaction followed each other with brief delays, and were marked by wholesale slaughter or expulsion of the best citizens…What was lost by the Greek cities of the European mainland and most of the islands was gained by the Hellenistic monarchies and more especially by the Greek cities of the East.”

Unlike the democracies in Greece proper, the eastern Hellenistic kings of the fourth and third centuries BC were anti-libertarian capitalists, much like more recent rulers of Chile and post-Mao China. “The result was that every attempt at a social revolution within their gates was stopped by the strong hand of the Hellenistic monarchs, and that the cities were very rarely involved in external warfare.”

The kings’ anti-libertarian suppression of revolution had a libertarian effect, at least temporarily. “The accumulation of capital and the introduction of improved methods in trade and industry proceeded more freely and successfully in the East than in the cities of Greece proper. Hence the commercial capitalism of the Greek cities of the fourth century attained an ever higher development, which brought the Hellenistic states very near to the stage of industrial capitalism that characterizes the economic history of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

That is mind blowing. In the fourth and third centuries BC Greeks in Asia Minor were attaining 19th century levels of industrialization? In other words, from the year 300 BC until 1900 virtually no consistent economic progress was made? And how easy might it be to revert to the decline that followed the fall of the Roman Empire roughly 1500 years ago? True, these societies depended on slave labour. But recall that the American economy also so depended until 1862.

Rostovtzeff notes that the Greek cities not only had a large internal market and a large, competitive trade, but also:

“They gradually improved the technique of agricultural and of industrial production with the aid of pure and applied science…and they employed both in agriculture (including cattle-breeding) and in industry the methods of pure capitalistic economy based on slave-labour. They introduced for the first time a mass production of goods for an indefinite market. They developed banking and credit and succeeded in creating not only general rules for maritime commerce…but also a kind of common civil law, which was valid all over the Hellenistic world. The same tendency towards unification may be noticed in attempts to stabilize the currency, or at least to establish stable relations between the coins of the various independent trading states.”

These impressive advances, a globalization that occurred nearly 2,500 years ago, very quickly “stunted” and then was “atrophied” by “constant warfare which raged almost without interruption all over the Hellenistic world.” It didn’t take long for the military-industrial complex to assert itself.  ”The wars forced the Hellenistic states, both great and small, to concentrate their efforts on military preparations, on building up the largest possible armies and navies, on inventing new devices in military engineering, and thus wasting enormous sums of money as, for instance, in the case of the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius Poliorcetes.”

Rostovtzeff notes that this led to:

“Nationalization of both production and exchange, which was carried out in some, at least, of the Hellenistic monarchies, especially Egypt. By nationalization I mean the concentration of the management of the most essential branches of economic activity in the hands of the state, that is to say, of the king and his officials. Profitable at first for the state, this system gradually led to dishonesty and lawlessness on the part of the officials and to the almost complete elimination of competition and of the free play of the individual energy on the part of the population.

“Hand in hand with this tendency towards state control went the minute elaboration of a highly refined system of taxation, which affected every side of economic life. It was based on the experience of the Oriental monarchies, but it went much farther both in inventing new taxable objects and in improving the mode of collecting the taxes. The burden of taxation lay heavily on the population of the Hellenistic world…

“This disastrous economic system of the Hellenistic monarchies produced ever-growing discontent among the masses of the natives. From the end of the third century onwards the native population of Egypt, for example, rose repeatedly against its foreign oppressors…”

Naturally, the warfare and economic dislocations due to taxes and socialism in the Greek world opened the city gates to a rising new republic: Rome. Might the United States’ ever-expanding government spending; subsidization of corrupt and inefficient financial institutions and corporations; and its military-industrial complex open the door to the ascendancy of a new power, this time from the east?

*All quotes in this blog are taken from chapter 1, “Italy and the Civil War”.

Mitchell Langbert can be visited at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.

The Republican Liberty Caucus of California’s Executive Board approved a resolution calling on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state legislature to fix the state’s budget problems by rolling back excessive spending, not by seeking a federal bailout.

The full text of the resolution:

Whereas California’s current budget crisis is the result of more than a decade of irresponsible spending by the state legislature, and also the result of billions of dollars of bonds and other spending requirements approved directly by California voters; and whereas

California would have a multi-billion dollar budget surplus if the rule limiting the growth of spending to inflation plus population growth were still in effect; and whereas

California is already one of the most taxed states in the nation; and whereas

It would be deeply unfair to the taxpayers of other states to send their tax dollars to bail out California, or to burden those other taxpayers with additional debt to finance a Federal bailout of California; and whereas

Hand-waving and vague invocations of so-called “Keynesian economics” are no substitute for honest fiscal discipline; and whereas

It is inappropriate for the great State of California to become dependent on or addicted to injections of Federal taxpayer dollars; and whereas

Governor Schwarzenegger loudly foretold over $9 billion of “deep and painful cuts” if propositions 1A through 1E failed to pass in the May 19th special election; and whereas

The voters heard Governor Schwarzenegger loud and clear and responded by voting nearly 2 to 1 against propositions 1A through 1E; and

Governor Schwarzenegger said, “I heard the message of the people loud and clear, and I’m sure that the legislative leaders and the legislators also heard the message loud and clear”;

Therefore be it resolved the Republican Liberty Caucus of California hereby urges Governor Schwarzenegger and the state legislature to neither seek nor accept any federal bailout, but instead to address California’s budget crisis by reducing government spending to a sustainable level.

The below guest opinion was published in The Montana Standard newspaper on May 7, 2009.
______________________________________________________________________________

Why I voted ‘no’ on the stimulus

by Senator Joe Balyeat

“Big government can’t solve our problem; big government is our problem.” — Ronald Reagan The budget recently passed by Montana’s Legislature was hailed as a bipartisan feat, including total spending of almost $11 billion and so-called federal stimulus spending of $1 billion. I voted against both spending bills. Why?

One senator characterized the federal stimulus as free money “… that doesn’t cost Montana taxpayers one dime.” Commenting near April 15, the irony was self-evident; any naïve notion that Montanans don’t pay federal taxes must come from someone who’s never completed a federal Form 1040.

More importantly, the “free money” is non-existent; it’s deficit spending, which is putting an insurmountable debt load on the backs of our children’s children.

Presently, the national debt is $11,246,599,828,489 — roughly $11 and a quarter trillion dollars. According to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama’s spending spree will leave us with a $20.3 trillion debt 10 years from now. This is real debt which someday needs to be repaid by our heirs — debt owed increasingly to foreign nations, especially China.

America’s been living beyond its means on our children’s money. Now that this lavish lifestyle is coming home to roost, Obama’s answer is more of the same thing which initially created this mess — bailing us out by spending more money we don’t have. Twenty trillion dollars translates into $266,667 of debt on the backs of every family of four in the entire United States.

Even if you’re completely debt free personally, you’ll still owe over a quarter-million dollars as your family’s share of the federal debt. Our parents handed us the greatest nation on the face of the earth; we’re handing our children the greatest debt ever imaginable.

Is Montana’s state government any less irresponsible? While Montana’s governor and politicians talked of an austere budget, Montana’s total spending increases 19 percent over last session’s budget, which itself repre-sented a nearly 40 percent increase in government spending during the previous four years.

Montana’s current budget spends $10,787,000,000 — $10.8 billion for two years. This translates into $44,254 in spending for every average Montana family of four. In a state where the average wages are only $32,000 annually, how can our struggling private sector possibly support this much government?

Considering Montana’s high number of government employees per capita, the total government spending per private sector family balloons to $48,000. And much of this expanded spending is debt-financed. While Montana’s average wages languish near the bottom, Montana’s state government debt per capita ranks in the top 10 nationally. Moreover, that per-capita debt has increased almost 50 percent in just the last three years alone.

Much of this increased government is nothing but micro-meddling regulation of our lives and businesses. The Legislature needlessly “licensed” several more occupations this year, with further regulations making it that much harder for young people to better themselves by entering certain careers.

During one licensing debate, I announced that next session I’d sponsor a bill to license politicians, and the education requirement would be at least one course in economics. The wisdom of this ed requirement was proven during debate on the stimulus bill, when one senator (who’s lived off a government paycheck his entire adult life) made the absurdly false statement that “every economist knows that the government should spend more money during recession.” I refrained from providing names of at least a dozen economists in Bozeman alone who disagree profoundly with that notion, especially when speaking about deficit spending — squandering our grandchildren’s well-being under a mountain of inflationary government debt.

I also refrained from pointing out that expanding government’s regulatory meddling actually stymies economic growth, rather than fostering it. Will Rogers once said, “Thank God we don’t get all the government we pay for.” Update that quote n Thank God we don’t get all the government our grandchildren will be paying for.

My “no” vote was a vote against America’s self-inflicted destruction of history’s greatest economy, a vote against burdening the backs of each family with a quarter-million-dollar bad debt, a vote for my children and children’s children, a vote for giving them the same life of economic opportunity which my parents handed to me. Unfortunately, too few politicians just said “no.”

Sen. Joe Balyeat, R-Bozeman and a CPA, is chairman of the Legislative Audit Committee and Business, Labor, & Economic Affairs Committee.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com posted earlier in the week at his blog, asking “Are Republicans Going Galt?”

Pointing to the Tea Party’s origin within the libertarian movement, Silver questions whether the Republican Party is tilting in the libertarian direction in wake of their solid defeats in 2006 and 2008.

The objective evidence Mr. Silver presents includes:

• A recent Gallup survey suggests that 80 percent of Republicans believe that Big Government is a bigger threat than big business, versus just 10 percent who think the opposite. He says “it has now become almost a definitional issue for Republicans.”

• “The Republican alternative budget could be considered a somewhat radical experiment in libertarianism”; and

• Republican insiders are increasingly uncertain about whether gay marriage, which was such an important issue for the party over 2000-2004, is any longer a winning issue at all for them.

Comparing Big Government to big business doesn’t really tell us what we need to know, unfortunately. Big business may be one of the entities competing with limited government that Republicans “sell their souls to” — however, there are a plethora of other entities that Republicans have chosen before smaller government, including puppet politicians, special interest groups, neo-conservatives, pork projects, and religion, to name just a few.

The idea that the Republican alternative budget is radical in any way is foreign to me. It is a far better budget than any one that Republicans proposed under the Bush Administration (no surprise there), and this budget would ultimately reduce the size of government if adopted. However, it is not even close to “a radical experiment in libertarianism”.

Speaking to Mr. Silver’s final point: I’m no Republican insider, but I never believed gay marriage was an important issue for the GOP. Ditto on abortion.

In 2004, for example, the RLC issued a press release against the Federal Marriage Amendment.  My recent post at this blog, “Are Republicans Shifting on Gay Marriage and the War on Drugs?“, indicates that at least some Republican legislators — most of whom were already in the moderate wing of the party — have had the courage to support equal rights for gays.

To this point, I count just two libertarian-leaning legislators (both from New Hampshire) who had the courage to take a principled stance of supporting marriage equality for gays and lesbians. If Republicans are going to stand up for equal rights in the near future (and why shouldn’t we?), it will have to be libertarian-leaning Republicans who lead on the issue.

As evangelical social conservative commentator Cal Thomas wrote recently, “The battle over same-sex marriage is on the way to being lost [for social conservatives]. For conservatives who still have faith in the political system to reverse the momentum, you are — to recall Harold Hill [in The Music Man] — ‘closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge’.”

In summary, I think the Republican Party is shifting, but it is not proven with the evidence provided by Nate Silver.  Instead, I measure it by how fast the RLC is growing (at a very rapid pace — we can barely keep up!), the enthusiasm of the Ron Paul movement, and the anger in the faces of those who attended the Tea Party protests last Wednesday.

The battle for liberty has just begun. Brace yourself.

According to the latest National Taxpayer Union rankings of Congress, RLC-endorsed Representative Jeff Flake is the top friend to taxpayers in Congress. Representative Flake (R-AZ) has always been a RLC favorite.  In the photo at right, RLC interim Arizona Chair Roy Miller handed a RLC PAC check to Jeff Flake for his 2008 re-election bid.

Flake has earned the top spot in NTU’s ranking for six years in a row, tying Ron Paul’s six-year stint from 1979 to 1985. Drs. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Paul Broun (R-GA) followed Flake closely in the 2009 ranking.

Other RLC-endorsed incumbents also scored well: Jim Jordan (89%), Mike Pence (88%), Ed Royce (88%), Doug Lamborn (88%), Jimmy Duncan (87%), Scott Garrett (85%), John Shadegg (84%), and Dana Rohrabacher (82%).

Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Doug Lamborn (R-CO), in particular, should deserve our support, as they are fairly new members in Congress.  They have found a way to resist the temptations that come along with being a new member of Congress.

That said, Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) and John Shadegg (R-AZ), while still receiving “A” grades from NTU, have fairly low scores for Congressional veterans who are supposed to be champions of less spending.  I would urge RLC members in Arizona and California to build relationships with these members and ask them to hold the line on spending — 82% is not good enough, Mr. Rohrabacher!  And Mr. Shadegg’s bailout vote is simply unacceptable.

As I posted earlier, only 17 members of Congress did not vote for one of the bailouts. RLC-endorsed members Flake, Paul, Broun, Duncan, Royce, and Garrett can be trusted to hold the line on spending and did not support any bailouts.  They are true champions of liberty.

I have compiled a photo summary of pictures that include RLC members or that were taken by RLC members at their local Tea Party events yesterday. Enjoy!

With tea parties going on nationwide I thought I’d better get down to Austin and make sure I didn’t miss out on our local protest. I went incognito, dressed informally and hiding behind a very large camera to get a feel for the mood, mix with the crowd and see how powerful the grassroots movement really was. I’d heard all the claims from the left and the media — that it was just an attempt by Republicans to try to gain some attention and that there would be just a few kooks protesting in a handful of cities.

What I found in Austin and what I learned during the day was much more impressive than I had been lead to expect. First off, the crowd in Austin was surprisingly large. I attended the first (and likely smaller) of two tax-day events, and it had 1500 people jammed onto the very small area of the steps and plaza infront of the Austin City Hall. Subsequently I learned that rather than a handful of other protests nationwide, the Austin protest was just one of close to 2000, and despite how impressed I was with our local turnout, it was small by national standards, with some other cities turning people out in the tens of thousands and a total estimated nationwide attendance likely to be in the millions by the end of the day.

It was also quite apparent that despite substantial Republican involvement, this was conceived as a non-partisan event. The idea originated with Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC and was picked up by all sorts of groups, and they were prominent at the Austin Tea Party.

Ron Paul’s non-partisan Campaign for Liberty was there, along with the Libertarian Party, the Constitution Party and local issue groups whose interests cross party lines. Plus Americans for Prosperity was a major presence, and they’re a strictly non-partisan group with funding from the Koch family who are known for libertarian but strictly non-Republican political activism. The speakers included a lot of Republicans, lead by Governor Rick Perry and Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams, but also including representatives of various activist groups including several speakers from the Libertarian Party and Mike Voorhees from the Travis County chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus. So while the local Republicans had joined in and assumed a large role, the overall character was not partisan.

Obviously there were common interests being expressed, most obviously a strong objection to tax increases, erosion of constitutional rights and out of control government spending. Unfortunately, what seemed to be happening both in the speeches and in the media coverage was the dumbing down of the message to a single element.

While the focus of the grassroots anger really seems to be on excessive government spending and the growth of government intrusion in the lives of citizens, too many of those speaking and too much of the coverage boiled it down to an anti-tax message. That’s largely the result of holding these events on April 15th, but it gave President Obama the opportunity to address the protests dismissively by dragging out his dubious promises about a tax cut for the middle class and no new taxes for 95% of the population. It’s an unfortunate outcome of taking a movement like this to a broad audience that the message gets diluted and misdirected, in this case with the result that most observers and many of those involved will only get the superficial anti-tax message and miss the stronger and much more fundamental message that out of control spending and fiscal mismanagement area much bigger threat than mere tax increases.

You can get some idea of the character of the protest from my photos of the posters and the crowd. The signs were mostly hand-made and some of the messages were surprisingly sophisticated. I was pleased to see one which read “inflation is hidden taxation,” demonstrating an understanding of the economy which seems to be lost on or ignored by our political leaders. Although I hear there were problems in other parts of the country, the Austin Tea Party was unmarred by MoveOn agitators, “citizen journalists” from HuffPo and Union stooges, though they may just have been keeping a low profile in a relatively inhospitable environment.

One of the things which surprised me was the relative youth of the protesters. Several college Republicans spoke, and the activists from groups like the Campaign for Liberty and the Republican Liberty Caucus also seemed to be mostly in their 20s. The crowd also seemed surprisingly normal. Sure, there was one FLDS family dressed in creepy from head to toe, and a guy dressed as Uncle Sam and another dressed as Jesus, but most of the people there looked like tech workers on their lunch break or college students or other typical Austinites.

I fit right in with my t-shirt and shorts and excess of digital hardware. One interesting thing I noticed was that despite our proximity to Lake Lady Bird, there seemed not to be an actual or even symbolic tea bag in sight. They may have been saving them for the evening rally, or perhaps the scoffing about “teabagging” from Rachel Maddow and the Huffington Post had prompted people to tone down those references.

As I hammer out this story on the trusty old Powerbook, the Tea Parties are still going on around the nation, and the news media is finding themselves forced to report on them with little else to cover on a slow news day. They’re trying to squeeze in as much as they can about Obama’s hollow promises of tax simplification and tax cuts for the middle class he has already destroyed, but footage of an empty shirt at a lonely podium really doesn’t play well against crowds of angry Americans who are demanding real change and responsibility from their government.

The Republican Liberty Caucus of California Recommends a NO Vote On Propositions 1A-1F in the May 19 Special Election:

NO on Proposition 1-A: THE RAINY DAY BUDGET STABILIZATION FUND
This budget deal is a bailout for big spenders who will extract another $16 billion dollars in taxes and continue to increase state spending. It is not a rainy day fund at all. The California legislature that has overtaxed and spend our hard-earned money will just have another slush fund to use at their will. It does nothing to restrain bloated deficits nor restrain tax-and-spend legislators.

NO on Proposition 1-B: EDUCATION FUNDING. PAYMENT PLAN
This proposal mandates more deficit spending for an education system that needs massive reform, not another $9.3 billion dollars in spending. Every increase in education spending, over many decades, has resulted in decreased student achievement. The legislature should be expanding charter schools, cutting bureaucracy, and allowing parents to choose among competitive public and private schools.

NO on Proposition 1-C: LOTTERY MODERNIZATION ACT
Lenders no longer trust the state of California to pay off its debts with reduced spending, so the legislature wants to promise its future income from gambling to bet that voters are suckers. The state legislators want to gamble in order to pay lenders so they can borrow and spend more.

NO on Proposition 1-D: CHILDREN’S SERVICES FUNDING
This shell game takes tobacco tax revenue, that had been promised for early childhood development programs, to pay off its other general fund obligations. Not only does this allow the state legislator to hinder the voter initiative, but it will fund more bloated state bureaucracy.

NO on Proposition 1-E: MENTAL HEALTH FUNDING. TEMPORARY REALLOCATION
This proposal is another shell game that voids voter initiative preferences to pay for mandates that were imposed by the federal government. The state should be saying NO to federal mandates and handouts, of our tax dollars, by reforming its own MediCal program with tax-free medical savings plans.

NO on Proposition 1-F: ELECTED OFFICIALS’ SALARIES. PREVENTS PAY INCREASES DURING BUDGET DEFICIT YEARS
This feel-good proposition pretends to freeze legislator’s salaries, but it does nothing of the sort. It pretends to be an incentive for responsible budget reductions, but it only guarantees more tax increases when legislators insist that they have to spend more. It does nothing to cut legislator salaries, nor those of the exploding state bureaucracy. This is a con game, to top off the shell games and slush funds of the other propositions.

Vote NO on all of these statist, bureaucratic games. NO on more borrowing and spending.