Peter Goldmark vs. “The Tax Lady

Without any evidence, my opponent, Cathy McMorris, has tried to put a fake label on me by claiming I’m the Tax Man. So let’s look at who’s really taxing America.

Fact One: A debt is a tax. A debt is a tax wearing a Halloween mask. The only difference is that when you take the Halloween mask off a debt, it looks a lot worse instead of better. The fact is that the Republicans, with Cathy McMorris’s help, have raised your National Debt $3 Trillion Dollars in the past five years. That’s $10,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States. And it’s a tax, because you and your children and your grandchildren are going to have to pay it. So, when Cathy McMorris says she doesn’t raise taxes, ask her when she’s going to take off her Halloween mask. When she does, you’ll see the face of a spend and bankrupt Republican.

Fact Two: Trickle Down Economics is just piling the table higher for the rich and hoping a few scraps will fall off. It’s like having a hungry dog and putting more food on the table for its owner: It’s like McMorris’s strategy of cutting taxes even more for the multinational corporations and the billionaire Republican contributors and having the rest of us hope that some scraps fall off to keep us from going broke. Washington’s farmers and workers are hungry and are working like dogs, but how many of the Republican policies actually help us directly? Mostly, they help rich Republicans who keep telling you that one of these days you’re going to get some real good scraps.

Fact Three: It’s not the death tax that’s the problem. It’s all the life taxes. When Republicans help big pharmaceutical companies by making Americans pay more for their medications than any other consumers in the world, it’s a life tax that you and I are paying so Republicans can keep getting their big political donations. When the Republican Congress offers corporate welfare to Exxon/Mobil after it made $35 billion in profits for fiscal year 2005, that increases your life tax because we have to pay that corporate welfare at the gas pump. When Republicans permits insurance companies to throw sick people off their insurance plans, or Walmart uses government health plans to pay its employees’ health care costs, then your life tax goes up because your government has to pay for all those additional medical expenses. The point is that tax policy can either be used by Democrats to help Washington’s working families and farmers or it will be used by Cathy McMorris and the Republicans to help their donors, and make your life even tougher than it already is. Bottom line. The real, inflation adjusted income for households has fallen five years in a row. That’s the Republican Revolution and it’s coming out of your hide.

Fact Four. Debits for Americans to Pay, while the Republicans takes Credit. Republicans build up debits—or debts as most of us call them. Republicans build up debts and then they take credit for not raising taxes. It’s the Democrats that balance the budget and pay off the debt. Remember the late 90s when we paid down the debt three years in a row? That’s a good thing. That’s when a farmer knows that he’s on the right track and he’ll probably be able to stay in business. Any farmer knows you can’t operate on credit for very long. You have to balance your budget, decide where to make the best expenditures for your economic future and, after all that, hope you have enough to pay yourself. Republicans make the bank richer. Democrats help us make a fair wage so we can pay off our debts.

Fact Five. Free Trade isn’t Free. When Free Trade just sends your job overseas, it costs you the life you want for your family and your kids’ future. When Free Trade drives down real wages in the US and keeps you afraid to negotiate a fair wage, then there is a terrible cost to it that you are paying with your sweat and blood in 8-, 10-, or 12-hour days. When Washington’s farmers can’t make a living selling their amber waves of grain, because Cathy McMorris’s pet CAFTA lets other countries pay slave labor wages on their farms, then America isn’t so beautiful anymore. What we need is Fair Trade, not Free Trade, The Republicans keep saying that Free Trade is good for all of us because a rising tide floats all boats, but So-called Free Trade just puts more yachts on the lake for those who are already rich, it doesn’t raise the water level for the rest of us. We need to float more boats for Average Americans, not just buy more yachts for multinational corporations.

I’m Peter Goldmark. I’ve been an Eastern Washington farmer for 33 years, so I know how to balance a budget and I know how hard you work to make your money, and I’m going to protect your right to a living wage. I’m going to make sure that Washington’s farmers can make a decent living and keep their family farms. I’m going to Washington, DC, to protect your Social Security and your right to a decent retirement. And, I’m going there to make sure that Republicans stop robbing the Social Security Trust Fund to overpay Halliburton contractors.

I’m Peter Goldmark, and I’m going to Washington to fight for the needs of Washington’s working families and Washington’s family farms, because it’s your country and it’s your government. And, I’m going to Washington because it’s your tax money, and it should be spent to make your life better, not, as Cathy McMorris believes, to help someone make you work longer hours for less money—and then, as Bush’s National Labor Relations Board just decided, to tell 8 million US workers and 60,000 Washingtonians that they’re suddenly supervisors and that they have to work overtime with no extra pay, and that they have no right to negotiate, because they have to talk to another worker 10 per cent of the time.

When you take off your Halloween mask, the picture becomes frighteningly clear. Just because it’s the soaring National Deficit, doesn’t make it less of a tax. Cathy McMorris is the real Tax Lady. It’s just that she and the other Republicans are trying to bamboozle her fellow Americans about her real agenda, which is to overspend, and hide the taxes, and then to leave average Americans starving at the table with the check. But the fact is that it’s our table. Remember We the People? It’s not we the multinational corporations. It’s not we the fat-cat Republican donors. It’s We the People, by and for. And, that’s who I’m fighting for, because our current representative is not.

Who Am I?

I am a 33-year Washington wheat farmer. I’ve served as Washington State Director of Agriculture in 1993 and served on the Washington State University Board of Regents from 1996 to 2005. I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology, and I’ve developed three strains of wheat, now growing in Eastern Washington, that are made especially for Eastern Washington’s long winters and dry summers. My opponent, Cathy McMorris, is a one-term incumbent Republican who has voted with George Bush 89 percent of the time, and with disgraced former Speaker of the House Tom Delay 96 per cent of the time. She recently has been forced to donate to charity the campaign funds she received from Republican political felons Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham, and is still holding contributions from the multiply indicted Tom Delay and from House Leaders Dennis Hastert and Tom Reynolds, who have recently come under FBI scrutiny in the Mark Foley scandal. My campaign has just been designated as a “Red to Blue” race by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee indicating that, in a district that voted 60/40 Republican in the last congressional election, this race is extremely competitive.