Raoul Lowery Contreras
"Stabbed in the Back by Friends"
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The very same people that Hispanics voted for in 2002 are sticking a budget dagger into the Hispanic community from which they might never recover. Conversely, President Bush is proposing a huge tax cut that will directly put money into the pockets of up to 70% of Hispanics. In fact, many Hispanics will drop off the income tax rolls and others will have their tax bite drop from 15% to 10%.
Tens of thousands of California Hispanics will be driven from community college classrooms when the legislature and Governor Davis emasculate the one college system that educates the bulk of Hispanic collegians.
The drastic and record cuts anticipated in the community college system will set back the Hispanic community like no other budget action in history and the culprits will be Democrats.
Along with a more-than-doubling of community college tuition and a slashing of operating budgets, the Democrats are slashing funds sent to the local communities and as a result, health care, local K-12 schools and public safety will be so negatively affected that the one third of California that is Hispanic will be set-back a generation.
Surveys show, for example, that Los Angeles County leads in school dropouts, poverty, bad health care and a rising crime rate. Los Angeles County has the largest Hispanic community of any large urban county in America. Rather than assigning more resources to build that community up, the Democrats are plunging it into a budget black hole that will not help the county, or the state, at all.
In contrast, the direct result of the President's proposed tax reform will be to put cash into Hispanic pockets. It will also help those who are presently unemployed with an employment account that can turn into cash when they return to work.
While Democratic leaders like Senator Tom Daschle call the President's plan "obscene," where were they when President Clinton couldn't drop the percentage of Black unemployed to less than double that of whites? Hispanic unemployment never dropped below 50% higher than whites under Clinton. Wasn't that fact obscene, Senator Daschle?
Democrats brag that they created 20-million jobs during the eight-year reign of President Clinton, they forget that 18-million jobs were created by the Reagan-Bush economic years after devastating job losses in the wake of Democrat Jimmy Carter's disastrous four years.
Here we are with a Presidential proposal to kick-start a slowly recovering economy that is growing at three percent for the past year and the leader of Senate Democrats calls the program "obscene." That, while his Democratic colleagues in California are slashing services and resources by billions of dollars and plunging the country's largest Hispanic community into an abyss of less health care, higher taxes and less education at the very time they are in great peril.
Hispanics need to defend themselves from their "friends," the Democrats. They must stand solidly behind the President's plan that will lower their taxes, provide unemployment help and tax benefits for small business.
They must attack Democratic proposals to raise sales taxes and to raise income taxes on anyone. They must fight for slashing the bloated state employee rolls that have grown like Topsy under Governor Davis. They must make sure that the state employee unions don't get up to 25% raises that are not earned, but bought and paid for.
Hispanics have to stand up for themselves, for they don't have the help of their so-called friends. For example, Hispanic business formations continue faster than the rest of the country, thus any tax breaks for small business help Hispanic entrepreneurs at a most critical time, in the first few years of their existence.
Small business owners, especially Hispanic ones, must get behind the President and fight the Democrats in Sacramento and Washington.
Hispanics have watched all the goodies go to others in the country for years as votes were being bought. Despite that effort in the Clinton years, Hispanics were paying more in taxes and receiving less back than, say, blacks and poor white southerners, and continued to experience higher unemployment than whites.
If the Bush plan makes it into law, Hispanics will pay less in taxes, receive help on the small business front and have more jobs available among the predicted two million jobs projected to be created by the Bush plan.
Such benefits will help the community suffer through the drastic cuts in services and benefits that state legislators will strip them out of so they can pay their state union employees more money. The unions pumped millions into the campaigns of Democrats and they want their reward. Hispanics gave little money, only their votes. They now see that loyalty and being stabbed in the back is measured by campaign bribe dollars, not votes.
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JWR contributor Raoul Lowery Contreras is a columnist, radio talk-show host, and author of "The New American Majority, Hispanics, Republicans & George W. Bush" and "A Hispanic view: American politics and the politics of immigration."
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