Our Democratic friends don’t have a corner on making outlandish campaign promises, but they certainly have more practice at it and go to more extremes.
We offer, in example, a recent Jerri Green fundraising email. Green is a Memphis councilwoman who is probably the leading — we’ve seen little polling because of the predicted fall results — Democratic candidate for governor.
In an email where she touts one day of early voting in South Carolina as to how it might change the trajectory here, she offers her “plan for Tennessee.”
› She would “Lower the Cost of Living” (capitalization hers): After the highest inflation in 40 years under the most recent Democratic president and prices that have decreased little since, this prediction is pretty rich. She would do it by eliminating the state grocery tax.
Green doesn’t say what revenue would replace the state grocery tax, just that it would “give working families immediate breathing room at the checkout counter.” Well, sure, who wouldn’t want to see the tax on groceries eliminated? But a serious candidate wouldn’t make such a promise without saying how the money in the state coffers would be replaced. Some other tax? Cuts in service areas? Rob the “rainy-day fund”?