This page was last updated on July 24, 2011.
Put up or shut up; Editorial; Beaver County Times; July 24, 2011.
The editorial concludes with “‘I [U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)] have no doubt that both parties will criticize portions of this plan, and I welcome that debate. [sic]’ Coburn told reporters. ‘But it’s not a legitimate criticism until you have a plan of your own.’ Basically, Coburn was telling his colleagues to put up or shut up. The same might very well be said of the American people.” If you are familiar with the BCT editorial body of work, pieces like this would make your head explode if they didn’t appear so frequently.
Go back a few months to “Totally unreal” and you find the BCT doing exactly what this editorial accuses others of doing. Further, the BCT behaved the same way regarding the Pennsylvania budget. In the case of the Pennsylvania 2011-2012 budget proposed by Gov. Tom Corbett, every BCT editorial on the topic bashed every proposed spending cut. Other than symbolic cuts by the General Assembly on itself and the executive branch on itself, the BCT “solution” to our debt/deficit problems was to increase taxation, primarily via a tax on natural gas extraction. To the best of my knowledge, only once has the BCT conceded “Raising taxes could slow the economy.” In any case, these “suggestions” were borderline meaningless, totaling only about 1.5% of the General Fund budget and 9.8% of the deficit. If BCT history serves as a guide, we can expect an editorial in the near future that does nothing more than claim this or that proposal stinks with no serious proposal of its own.
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