Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio for another edition of Crom’s Commentary.
Leahy: Crom, it’s that time of day again. We do this every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday when you come in. It’s time for today’s Crommentary. Crom, what do you have for us today?
Carmichael: Well, Michael, there was an interesting story, and I’m going to relate three things together. One is historical and two is current. A Republican defeats the Democrat mayoral candidate.
And this is in Columbia, South Carolina, even though the Democrat was endorsed by every big name Democrat, you can think of. Including James Clyburn in South Carolina. But here’s what’s interesting in this community. I’m going to read this quote. This is from The Epoch Times.
Obama had released an audio message to support Devine. That’s the Democrat. And the former president himself carried Richland County. That’s the county in question here, by 29 points in 2008 and 33 points in 2012.
Democrats own that county and the Republicans won the mayor’s race. I mean, when you come from 30 points down and win. That is newsworthy. Let’s reflect back, Michael in Tennessee to 1999 when you’d had Don Sundquist, who had won the governor’s race, the reelection in 1998, who vowed that an income tax would pass in Tennessee over his dead body.
And then he held the state of the state address in January and calls for state income tax. And at that time, the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, just like they controlled the House and the Senate here in Washington. And The Tennesseean and the TV networks all were 100 percent behind an income tax for the state of Tennessee.
The story was that Tennessee’s finances were going to collapse and that we were going to become a junk bond state if we didn’t have a state income tax. Do these things kind of ring a bell?
And then you had The Tennesseean who touted a poll that they had taken that said 70 percent of Tennesseeans were for a state income tax. Seventy percent! And this was echoed through all the TV media and all this other stuff.
I actually got a copy of the questions that were asked for the poll, and it was a two-part poll. The first question was, would you like for the children of Tennessee to get a better education? And that actually got above 95 percent.
And then the next question was if the only way children in Tennessee could get a better education, would you want an income tax? And so with that question, 70 percent said, yes. Well, the income tax didn’t pass, but many of the Democrats voted for it. And so they were now on the record.
And that was the beginning of the end of the Democrat Party in modern-day Tennessee. Since then, Tennessee is among the best-governed states in the country under strong Republican leadership, especially in the legislature, both the House and the Senate.
But look what’s happening in Washington right now. And that’s what I’m saying. And that is Democrats in Washington are attempting to do something that is every bit as unpopular as the state income tax was in Tennessee.
And if they pass this ridiculous bill, and it is by anybody’s definition. If you have to trick the bill up the way that they’re trying to trick it up, if you have to do that in order to shoehorn the amount of money in so the Democrat House looks like they’re going to vote for it. And I think they’re going to end up destroying the modern-day Democrat Party. And they deserve every bit of the destruction.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Democratic Leaders” by Senate Democrats. CC BY 2.0.
Milton Friedman, in his 1992 book, MONEY MISCHIEF: Episodes in Monetary History, at page 189, quotes John Maynard Keynes, the father of the school of economic thought which has been espoused by left-leaning politicians for almost a hundred years (Friedman, now deceased, was one of the foremost conservative economists in the Twentieth Century, but even he agreed with Keynes on the following point):
“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
Democrats in the U. S. House of Representatives, on a party-line vote (220 to 213, see U. S. House roll call vote no. 385) cheered after passing their multi-TRILLION dollar “Build Back Better” social spending bill early on Friday morning (11-19-21). This bill is their Marxist plan to ‘restructure’ America as inflation is now soaring to its highest level in our country in four decades. Or, to put this legislative action in the language of Keynes and Friedman themselves—economic theory gurus of both the political left and the political right—this bill, if it becomes law, will debauch the currency.
I close with the following quote from Friedman’s aforesaid book, at page 262:
“Perhaps the single most important and most thoroughly documented yet obstinately rejected proposition is that ‘inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.’ That proposition has been known by some scholars and men of affairs for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Yet it has not prevented governmental authorities from yielding to the temptation to mulct their subjects by debasing their money—taxation without representation—while vigorously denying that they are doing anything of the kind and attributing the resulting inflation to all sorts of other devils incarnate.”