MARK POPE: Indisputable Truths and Creative Writing [OPINION]

Indisputable truths and creative writing

Some things in life just don’t seem to go together.  You are reading an opinion column on a conservative talk radio website. You expect to see the conservative point of view expressed, usually accompanied by an analysis about why the opposing liberal view is less than logical.  Guess what?  The Christmas holiday is underway, and it is the most wonderful time of the year.  It’s time to leave our troubles, our worries, and our political differences aside, and just enjoy life to the fullest. That’s coming soon.

You will still see political analysis over the next several weeks when you read this regular opinion piece here on the NewsTalk 96.5 KPEL website.  You will also read some more light-hearted, creative prose, written to make you think, and enjoy this great time of year here in Cajun Country.

The D.C. crowd – read politicians – will surely continue to spew their talking points as we forge toward the end of the year.  We may see snow in D.C. in December, but we will also hear some red-hot rhetoric.  For example, Congress must soon agree on the federal government’s debt ceiling.  Raise it, lower it, or keep it status quo?  Those of us who follow politics know the answers before they are spoken.  Liberals will insist that our nation’s debt ceiling must be raised, lest we starve old people and children, and throw the needy out on the street with nowhere to turn.  That political class in D.C. which is going the way of the dinosaur – true conservatives – will say that we must be fiscally responsible and cut federal spending, thereby lowering the debt ceiling.  Good luck.  And then there are the “political moderates” who will say ‘well I don’t want to do it, but we have no choice but to raise the debt ceiling.’  As the cliché goes, ‘if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.’

Tax cuts or tax reformation – whatever you deem it to be – is also a hot topic in D.C. that we will continue to hear about.  What will Congress decide?  Will we have a tax plan approved before 2018?  What will it look like?  Can President Trump win over a majority and get tax reform passed?  Only time will tell.

One thing is certain:  political parties/philosophies are currently more divided and vitriolic in our nation’s capital than they ever have been over the last couple of generations.  Now flash back 55 years to Dec. 14, 1962.  President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, said the following in a speech:  “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues, in the long run, is to cut the tax rates.” 

 I’m not sure that even the words of the beloved democrat, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, would make any difference here in 2017 and beyond.  I speculate that “establishment politicians” in D.C. would respond to Kennedy’s words something like this:  ‘yeah, but times are different now.’  Sure enough, we’ve become softer as a nation; too many people want something for nothing, and our politicians give it to them. Seems like Santa Claus has taken up permanent residency in Washington, D.C.  Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.   Some things in life just don’t seem to go together anymore, such as common sense and politics.

Oh well, there I go with my cynical conservative viewpoint, and before I even attempted any creative writing.  To be continued . . .

-Mark Pope