A buddy of mine showed me this earlier today.  It details quite nicely where our tax dollars are being spent.  You’ll be impressed and infuriated at the same time.

Federal Budget Poster

The former senator from Tennessee, who is expected to enter the race next month, wants to be the conservative alternative to Rudy Giuliani but refused repeated requests yesterday to rule out raising taxes.

“We are in the process of gradually bankrupting future generations in this country,” Thompson said of Social Security and other entitlement programs that will plunge the federal government deeply into debt over the next decade.

New York Post

I am somewhat concerned by his behavior over this issue in Iowa yesterday.  One of the few things that Bush has done right was lower the income tax rates.  The revenue to the Federal Government has increased due to the lower tax rates on personal income and capital gains.  Furthermore, we have the second highest Corporate Income Tax in the world and that has started hurting us in the global market.  Even the European Socialists are figuring this one out.  Raising taxes is the last thing the next President needs to be doing.

Thompson’s response here should have been a no brainer.  Taxes don’t need to be raised.  Spending needs to be cut and that should have been an easy one.  Yet, at the same time he acknowledges the fact that this country is going to bankrupt itself not far down the road as the national debt nears $10 trillion.  It’s like he was on all sides of the issue yesterday.

There seems to be a wide range of conservative thought about Karl Rove’s legacy.  One camp sees Rove as a genius who has won a string of impressive victories and been overall an asset to conservatism.  The other side believe that Rove has done significant damage to the party and the movement  by destroying the reputation of the Republican party and conservatives in general.  Most people are probably in the middle.  We do need to figure out what we take from the Rove era, and what we need to scrap going forward.

Personally, I fall into the camp that thinks that overall Rove gave us some short term gains, but has caused a long term loss that is going to be difficult to reverse. I think that, by defining the base too narrowly and by focusing so much on slicing up narrow parts of the electorate, then pumping them on a few issues, Rove has pushed too many people out of the party.  We’re holding onto our base in the deep south fine, but we are getting hurt everywhere else.  The GOP was virtually wiped out in the Northeast in 06, and it looks like 08 will be another bad year for us in that region.  The Democrats are making inroads in the mountain states, in the upper Midwest, and even in the upper south.  Virginia has a Democratic Governor, a Democratic Senator, and could possible swap a Warner-R for a Warner-D.  Within states, we are losing suburban counties.  Using Pennsylvania as an example, the Philadelphia suburbs had long been Republican territory, but they are turning against us, and our more recent success in the Pittsburgh suburbs are also being reversed. 

 What does everybody else think?