8/5/2009 6:00:00 PM Barbour warns of
healthcare disaster
By T.J. JERNIGAN Staff Reporter
Gov. Haley Barbour focused on federal issues Thursday at the Neshoba County Fair, denouncing Democratic President Barack Obama's proposals on health care and the environment.
"Obamacare is a government-run health care system that would result in a federal government takeover of 18 percent of our economy,' Barbour told several hundred people under the tin-roofed pavilion on the Fairgrounds outside Philadelphia.
Later he told journalists some of the health care reform proposals pending in Congress would add a new 8 percent payroll tax for many small businesses or force some small businesses to pay penalties of $750 per employee and levy a major income tax surcharge in our most successful small businesses.
The Neshoba County Fair attracts thousands of people every summer to the red clay hills of east Mississippi, with two days of political speeches during the eight-day gathering.
Because there are no statewide or congressional races in Mississippi this year, fewer politicians spoke in the Pavilion. Spectators sat in rows of wooden pews and waved cardboard fans to stir up a tiny breeze in the muggy heat.
As Gov. Barbour addressed Fairgoers, he recalled the first time he spoke from the Pavilion in 1982 as a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
"Our country was in a recession then, too," he said. "Ronald Reagan led us out of that deep recession and for the next quarter century the number of Americans working skyrocketed as we added 49 million net new jobs....and more than a billion people around the world were lifted out of poverty."
Barbour said while facing another deep recession, the Obama administration has gone in just the opposite direction and that "the liberal Democrat Congress has gone on a spending spree that would give drunken sailors a bad name!"
Barbour criticized the federal budget, saying it guarantees huge tax increases, federal debt that "our grandchildren will be dealing with," and a weaker dollar with accompanying increases in gas prices and higher interest rates.
Barbour, the new head of the Republican Governors Association, said the Obama administration's climate-change legislation would increase energy costs for consumers and businesses.
He said "the left and their allies in the liberal media elite' claim the environment bill would help the economy, but he said the bill would destroy jobs.
State Treasurer Tate Reeves, a Republican, also appealed to the politically conservative crowd Thursday by saying Obama and congressional Democrats are running up the federal deficit and trying to "nationalize' health care.
"That's not hope. That's not change. That's not America,' Reeves said.
Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann focused on his job as overseer of state elections and public lands. Hosemann, a Republican who took office in January 2008, said public school districts are now receiving $22 million more for land leases that have been renegotiated. He said the leases are now generating $77 million a year.
After the political speeches, Barbour told reporters that as head of the Republican Governors Association, he's concentrating on getting his GOP allies elected to governorships in several states during the next two years.
"My day job is state government,' Barbour said. "My hobby is national Republican politics.'
