Congressional candidate Salud Carbajal should explain in his own words why he supports the policies and politics of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Robert Reich. Relatedly, voters should ask Salud about his leadership role in an international organization called ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability.
ICLEI’s mission is to encourage climate change legislation throughout the world based upon the protocols of the United Nations. Accordingly, ICLEI launched the Resilient Communities Campaign aimed at getting government officials to commit to enacting policies to address the impacts of climate change. The campaign worked as intended.
President Obama, with phone and pen in hand, issued an executive order that skirts Congress and puts tremendous pressure on states and municipalities to hand over control of water, infrastructure, and even dictate land-use policies at the local level under the guise of preparing for, or responding to, climate change whether that be in the form of droughts, floods, storms, wildfires and other natural events. At the time, county Supervisor Salud Carbajal was the national vice-president of ICLEI! To that end, based upon a pledge to ICLEI, Salud helped pass a county greenhouse gas regulation that was 10 times stricter than that which has been adopted by any other jurisdiction in the state!
Herein lies Salud’s progressive dilemma. The poor in this country pay a disproportionate amount of their income on food and energy. Further, some of the best paying jobs available to immigrants, who typically lack the educational background and requisite language skills, are in the manufacturing and industrial sectors. So, when Salud panders to extremists in the environmental movement, he is hurting his impoverished constituency group in two concrete ways: by increasing the cost of living, and by shrinking the opportunity to get a good paying job with benefits.
The campaign that Salud Carbajal and Barack Obama foisted on us is a perfect example of the breakdown in our constitutional system of checks and balances. Due to devastating impacts to our economy, the Senate refused to adopt these goals, and neither the House nor the Senate have agreed to support analogous legislation aimed to cap carbon emissions. Nonetheless, these non-governmental organizations and politicians decided to take matters into their hands and bypass both Congress and our state governments.
If Salud Carbajal is elected to Congress, what more can you expect? Well, Salud recently traveled to Napa to wine and dine at the home of Nancy Pelosi, and to get schooled by economist Robert Reich who served in the Clinton administration. Reich was a keynote speaker at this Democratic confab, and it is vitally important for voters to understand just how dangerous his theories are to our economy—a lesson presumably lost on Salud Carbajal.
Case in point, Reich produced a video for moveon.org to explain the virtues of deficit spending! He maintained that deficits are meaningless except as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). He then claimed that the debt-to-GDP ratio has been declining for years! Reich also maintains that deficit spending grows the economy as it creates jobs for the unemployed and the underemployed. Finally, Reich believes that deficit spending on things like education and infrastructure isn’t really deficit spending at all. It’s in actuality investment spending because it creates a return.
Reich, of course, is wrong on all counts! You simply can’t spend your way out of debt! Moreover, private sector growth and growth in government spending are not one and the same thing! For government to grow, it has to either raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. None of these things are good for the economy, which is fueled by the private sector. Of course, Reich’s final solution is higher taxes and redistribution of wealth. However, if we were to take all the money away from the so-called 1 percent, not just a portion of their wealth by way of taxes but all of their wealth, we still wouldn’t be able to put a dent in our debt!
The debt-to-GDP ratio has been growing steadily due to the policies originally enacted by President Lyndon Johnson, but it has more than doubled under Barack Obama! The most conservative estimate has our debt-to-GDP ratio at 85 percent, whereas some government analysts believe we are at 105 percent. Either way, we have accumulated nearly $20 trillion in debt! It should be noted that no economy in the world has ever survived this level of indebtedness.
It’s no secret that Carbajal is supporting Hillary Clinton for President. What that means in practical terms is that you can expect Carbajal to support Hillary’s economic plans carte blanche. What does that mean? In short order, it means our fiscal situation is about to get a lot worse. Hillary wants to raise income taxes by $350 billion including capping itemized deductions. She plans on raising business taxes by $275 billion. She has also invented what she calls “Fairness Taxes,” which would raise $400 billion on interest and death. She also wants to raise capital gains taxes and create new taxes on buying and selling stocks, including 401Ks and IRAs. She’s also considering taxing guns, sodas, and carbon.
The original ideals of the Democratic Party still appeal to me having to do with helping the poor, addressing genuine environmental concerns, and ensuring safe working conditions, fair wages, and benefits for workers. However, I believe today’s Democratic Party is no longer sincerely concerned about any of these things. Instead, the party has been co-opted by interests who simply exploit these issues while manipulating the people in order to stay in power.
Today’s progressives, by virtue of their ill-fated political priorities, would rather offer handouts instead of a leg up. They have destroyed the very economic sectors that have traditionally and historically presented the greatest opportunity for upward mobility for the working poor. Hence, these elitists inflicted significant collateral damage to our shrinking middle class, with special vitriol reserved for blue-collar jobs. These policies relegate blue-collar towns to poverty, to wit, Salud Carbajal recently referred to Lompoc as the armpit of the county. Go figure!
Accordingly, I am voting for Justin Fareed for Congress.
Andy Caldwell is the executive director of COLAB and the host of The Andy Caldwell Radio Show. Send comments to the editor at [email protected].
