Kevin McCarthy: sucking the marrow from the bones of Iowa’s flood victims.

In an exchange of public statements about both the need and form of flood relief for Iowans Kevin McCarthy gave Iowan an opportunity to see measure the true length, depth and width of the shaft he wants to give Iowans.

Christopher Rants, Iowa House leader, presented the modest proposal that the Iowa adopt the federal extended depreciation for businesses, large and small, for 2008. The Rants proposal would allow businesses, again, regardless of size to faster and larger depreciation of equipment purchases made in 2008 and 2009. One must recall that the federal version of this depreciation plan passed the Democrat Congress with wide margins.

As most people know, faster depreciation makes it far cheaper to buy new equipment. For example, the mom and pop convenience store in Cedar Rapids that just had all of its very expensive refrigeration equipment and inventory and purchasing hardware destroyed needs to buy all of those refrigerators and cash registers before they can get back in business. Rants’ proposal makes it just that much easier for mom and pop to buy those refrigerators and cash registers.

The benefits don’t end there. The increased purchases would overwhelmingly be made at other Iowa businesses thereby radiating the economic stimulus to a new level of beneficiaries. Remember, every one of these businesses employ at least one person so getting those people whose jobs were displaced by the flood back to work is the end result.

Everyone who has ever worked in a non union shop private enterprise understands these simple principles. The manifestly obvious benefits of depreciation as a powerful and universal stimulus probably explain its overwhelming passage by the genuinely anti-business Democrat Congress.

Finally, one must remember that extension of accelerated depreciation into 2009 for Iowa businesses was just one facet of flood relief Christopher proposed-it was not even suggested as the totality of the Republican plan for State flood relief.
This is how Kevin “Bully” McCarthy described such a beneficial proposal:

“The House Republican Leader's plan for flood relief is an utter embarrassment and flood affected Iowans should be outraged.” “Their proposal is another major warning sign that the Republican party has veered terribly to the political right and is completely out of touch with mainstream Iowa. We have thousands of individual Iowans hurting right now...many of them with their homes and property devastated. We have levees that need repaired or entirely rebuilt. We have hundreds of miles of roads and rail that need repaired. We have insurance obligations that need to be monitored and federal assistance that needs to be obtained - and the list goes on and on. And what is the House Republican proposal to deal with flood relief? Tax cuts for big corporations!”

McCarthy’s rage and hatred displays a religious commitment to an economically destructive leftist ideology. Every Iowan knows that our businesses urgently need help to recover from the floods. It is also evident that the floods have rapidly accelerated Iowa’s existing ten year slow motion economic decline that has dropped us below Mississippi and West Virginia for business climate.

Can we survive even two more years of the Gronstal/Murphy/McCarthy triumvirate of socialism?