I realize some of these have been covered but I checked, and I don't think all of these are dupes, so here goes...
AlterNet's JOSHUA HOLLAND describes how Republicans have changed their tune
Sunday, September 25, 2011
In 2001, the GOP's budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, was excited to vote for George W. Bush's "temporary" tax cuts. "I think we ought to have this income tax cut fast ... to make sure we get a good punch into the economy, juice the economy to make sure that we can avoid a hard landing," he said at a committee hearing.
Fast forward 10 years to last month as Barack Obama was poised to call for an extension of a payroll tax break -- and an additional break for businesses -- and Mr. Ryan began singing a very different tune. "Those things are all temporary," he told Fox News. "They are demand-sided. And they are proven not to work and they still facilitate uncertainty for businesses." Suddenly, tax cuts -- the GOP's answer to every economic issue of the past four decades -- were "proven not to work."
The president had made a point of the fact that the proposals contained in his jobs package had all been embraced by Republicans in the past, but that didn't prevent them from bashing it, just as they had decried many other erstwhile conservative ideas as so much misguided "socialism" when proposed by Democrats.
Before the memory-hole swallows them up, consider some other ideas that Republicans had long championed but were then picked up by Democrats and suddenly became toxic. They tell us not only how serious Republicans are about undermining the Obama administration, but also how far both parties have lurched to the right.
1. The health care mandate
Late last year, when a federal judge ruled against the mandate (two other courts disagreed), Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, rejoiced. "Today is a great day for liberty," he said. "Congress must obey the Constitution rather than make it up as we go along." It was an odd testament to freedom, given that Mr. Hatch himself co-sponsored a health care reform bill built around an individual mandate in the late 1990s.
In fact, the mandate was a Republican idea. It was championed by the Heritage Foundation, President Richard Nixon and President George H.W. Bush. For years, it also was touted by the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Scott Brown, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Judd Gregg and many other notable GOP officials.
As NPR has reported, the mandate was the right's free-market response to progressive proposals to establish a single-payer system.
2. Cap and trade
A central tenet of traditionally conservative economic thinking is that you tax activities you want to deter instead of regulating them out of existence. This was the thinking behind "cap-and-trade" policies to control pollution -- it was the "free-market" approach.
The Reagan White House developed the first cap-and-trade program. It gained momentum during the first Bush administration when, according to a history of the concept in Smithsonian magazine, George H. W. Bush decided that "cap-and-trade still beats command-and-control regulation" because it lets polluters figure out the least expensive way to reduce emissions.
Today, this signature, market-based, business-friendly alternative to "Big Government" regulations is just another "job-killing tax" according to a majority of Republicans.
Read more:
http://post-gazette.com/pg/11268/1177068-109-0.stm?cmpid=newspanel#ixzz1Z4MFrn2S
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