Rick Perry Is a Menace

Yesterday, April 15th, was tax day and right wing groups are organizing “tea parties” across Texas and the nation Organizers say these events are meant to protest the stimulus plan, and Gov. Rick Perry will speak at three of the tea parties – in Austin, Arlington and Fort Worth (go here for more details: http://www.rickperry.org/tea-party). When you hear your Republican coworkers, friends, neighbors and others talking about the "tea party", I encourage you to draw from the points below and share them, and specifically with respect to the hypocrisy of Gov. Perry’s grandstanding at these events.

TAX DAY TEA PARTIES and RICK PERRY
· BUDGET and SPENDING HYPOCRISY: If Perry wants to talk about reining in spending, he’s in the wrong party - eight years of Republican rule gave us the largest budget deficit in history. And Gov. Perry’s partisan posturing with the stimulus funds is the height of hypocrisy – because the state budget plan supported by his fellow Republicans depends on billions of stimulus fund dollars. It’s clear Perry is using this event as a campaign prop – at the same time he’s counting on stimulus dollars to bail out his failures to provide adequate state funding for the most important state priorities.

· RAISING TAXES: Perry has admitted that his rejection of stimulus unemployment insurance funds would force a tax increase on small businesses to make up for the projected unemployment fund deficit. And that tax increase would come just three years after Perry signed a 2006 tax plan that raised taxes on small businesses. If Tea Party attendees want to talk about “tax and spenders”, they ought to be protesting Rick Perry.

· WASTEFUL SPENDING: By Election Day 2010, Gov. Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund will have handed out nearly one billion taxpayer dollars to corporations like subprime mortgage lender Countrywide and other corporations who have laid off workers after getting tax dollars from Perry's political goodie bag. It’s outrageous for Perry to criticize our President’s efforts to invest in hard working Americans as wasteful while Perry himself wastes tax dollars on a corporate welfare slush fund.

· The organizers of these events are a small but vocal minority – the same people who get their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove. They’re way out of step with most Americans and the direction our country is taking.

· While the right wing is drinking tea and pining for the failed economic policies of the past, the majority of Americans support the President’s efforts to get our country back on track.

Let me hear your thoughts and impressions.

Your County Chair,
Deb Cascino
parker_dems_chair@att.net