Scott Brown pinky swears "No New Taxes."

Scott Brown has claimed that he has signed a No New Taxes pledge and has challenged his opponants to do the same.

Well I haven't received a signed copy of that pledge from Scott, so as far as I'm concerned, it's no better than a pinky swear.

The no new taxes pledge is really just a ploy to sway voters and is not realistic in practice. There are just situations that warrent new taxes and the signing of a pledge only means that the politician will ultimately be forced to either break the pledge, or find some other creative means of coming up with the funds to pay for whatever it was that would warrent a tax increase. So which is worse, breaking the pledge or using some sneaky roundabout way to finance the program?

One commonly employed method it to take funds away from one program to pay for another.  That means cutting back on the funding of a program that had been previously debated and approved. This is how the Iraq war supplimental funding has been paid for. We hear our Congressmen and Senators proudly declaring that they can somehow approve a 75 billion dollar expenditure, without new taxes. Really?

The money has to come from somewhere and the taxpayers are less likely to notice if they just gut already approved programs. When the cuttbacks hit the ground level, we never hear the explanation that the cuttback was made to fund the war. They separate the two and the taxpayers happily go along thinking that they are not somehow paying for it. The people who would have been the beneficiaries of the programs end up paying the price.

The no new taxes pledge is meaningless, especially if it not accompanied with a pledge to not cutback already existing programs in order to fund new ones.

That is just as unrealistic as the no new tax pledge. There will always be the need for new programs and there will always be wastefull or overly expensive programs that need to be trimmed or eliminated.

To improve governement programs and get things done , there needs to be the flexiblity to add taxes when needed and  to preserve programs that already exist.

In the past few days, the United States Governement has been ramping up a response to the devestating earthquake in Haiti. This is right in our backyard and the US is going to play the leading role in the emergency response and long term recovery of Haiti. No one with any humanity would argue against that, but it's going to cost a lot of money. How are we going to pay for it? Which programs are going to be gutted to fund humanitarian aid to Haiti?

The no new taxes pledge is an unrealistic meaningless gesture and nothing more than a campaign ploy. But it might get votes from those who really haven't thought things out.

When a candidate uses such a ploy, I see it as such and I really have to question the sincerity of a candidate who uses such ploys to get votes.