As millions of Americans hoped to maximize their holiday shopping budgets by taking advantage of Black Friday bargains, our U.S. Congressman from Tyler was fighting to prevent more outrageous spending sprees by Washington with taxpayer dollars going to executive cronies.

With $350 billion of the $700 billion bailout still available to Paulson pending Congressional approval, a conservative Texas lawmaker is proposing to put that money towards a tax holiday from both personal income tax and FICA tax for Americans during January and February of 2009.

He stated, “By instating a temporary tax holiday, we could electrify the American economy and provide overwhelming relief to taxpayers, all for less than the cost of the current failed Paulson bailout system.”

“We need to give this money to the people who earned it. I am sick of Washington millionaires trying to decide which of their cronies should get the next wad of taxpayer money,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) continued. “Think about how much you would have if you didn’t have any Social Security or income tax withheld from your pay check, or if you didn’t have to pay those taxes for January and February! Americans could take and invest their own money where they believe it should go — to paying down mortgages, buying a new car, making credit card payments. The economy would get relief where it is needed the most. Why try to decide how to prevent foreclosures? Just give taxpayers their own money to catch up on their payments. Those in lower income brackets who are hit the hardest by the FICA tax would see huge money back, and then THEY could choose who should benefit from their hard earned money. Even the self-employed and small business owners would receive a fantastic amount of their own much-needed money, and they will be able to invest that back into their businesses and even create the ability to hire more people.”

Gohmert is currently preparing a bill to declare the tax holiday for January and February of 2009 and is also gathering support at the same time. He said, “We can save more home mortgages, increase employment, and boost economic growth for a lower price tag with this plan than with any centralized bureaucratic program, all by giving the power back to the taxpayers. I am demanding that not another penny goes to executive bailouts, but these billions of taxpayer dollars should go to the taxpayers who earned them.”

According to American Solutions, a conservative think tank founded by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Americans pay $101.6 billion per month in personal income tax and $65.6 billion per month in FICA tax. Under Gohmert’s proposed plan, all of these taxes would not be paid during January and February of 2009, and the money would stay in the hands of American taxpayers — the ones who best know where economic stimulus should be targeted. Gohmert’s 2-month tax holiday would stimulate the economy while costing less than the remainder of the Bush-Paulson bailout plan.

Rep. Gohmert has also recently proposed returning all 2008 income taxes to American taxpayers as a solution to boost the ailing economy, as he believes taxpayers, rather than the government, should be using their hard-earned money to choose the economy’s winners and losers.

This deprivation of taxpayer money should also apply to the Pentagon and its related spending—on- and off-budget—which now totals around $1 trillion per year and is in no way related to “defense” at this point. It is outright theft. Starve that beast and stop the futile, pointless, endless, bankrupting overseas wars which have been bleeding taxpayers dry for more than seven years.

Of course, Gohmert’s proposals have ZERO chance of passage as his party suffered even more losses at the polls last month and is now even a smaller minority in the two houses of Congress. Also, thanks to his party’s actions after 9/11 when it did still have control, the executive branch now has near-dictatorial power over the federal government, as it proved when it threatened martial law if the House continued to refuse to go along with the Bush-Paulson bailout a few months ago.

Rep. Gohmert, being dependent upon taxpayer money himself, should also have no problem in agreeing to work for free from now on while the U.S. tries to reverse its slide into Third World economic oblivion. If this downturn, which is happening on his watch, ever ends, then there will presumably once again be sufficient revenues coming in to pay him and his colleagues.

Seriously, though, with the “sacred cows” of the Pentagon (a huge King Ranch-sized herd of them, in fact) remaining as a drain on the federal government’s relatively meager and declining revenue sources along with all the salaries, pensions and other perks that Rep. Gohmert and his colleagues are NOT going to give up voluntarily, that probably leaves the elderly on fixed incomes as the group which will eventually be “asked” to bite the bullet.

They probably should have thought about it more carefully as they were enthusiastically supporting the endless wars over the last seven years. There went their Social Security, Medicare, etc. There is no “trust fund” or “lock box.” If the FICA tax is no longer collected and the Pentagon hogs the rest of the tax revenue, the senior citizens dependent upon the programs funded by FICA are history.

This would help our “service economy,” though. There would be an immediate increase in “funeral services,” but only for those who could afford them, a number which is also declining.