The first Presidential campaign debate of the 2012 campaign was generally seen by the political punditry as a victory for the contender.
Not only did he show style and seem to show substance, but he had an aggressive posture that allowed him to call the President a liar. Well, he didn’t say that exactly but he did say that the President was not entitled to his own facts. Same thing.
Candidate Romney said some pretty popular things. The problem with what he said is that he lied or misstated facts on 27 of the 38 points that he tried to make. It is important to know what he said and to know what is true and factual.
So here is what happened, what Romney said, and the truth, from that first Presidential debate, without the sound and action. Just the facts. Just the truth. Just the essential points.
The opening question was on jobs. Here is what Governor Romney said.
1. On jobs. “My plan has five basic parts. One, get us energy independent, North American energy independent. That creates about four million jobs. Number two, open up more trade, particularly in Latin America; crack down on China if and when they cheat. Number three, make sure our people have the skills they need to succeed and the best schools in the world. We’re far away from that now. Number four, get us to a balanced budget. Number five, champion small business.”
The problem is as follows. He can’t get us energy independent. He works for oil companies and we can’t drill our way out of this. Oil companies have over 98 million acres on which they have rights to drill (government land…yours and mine theoretically) and they don’t do it. They want gas prices at $3.99 a gallon or higher. They’re making a fortune beyond avarice.
So, forget those jobs. Romney will NOT initiate green energy or alternative energy. He has already criticized the President for his efforts to develop wind and solar. Even the American Petroleum Institute says that, even if we max’d our potential in oil and gas there are at most 1 million jobs, not 5 million.
One of Romney’s early lies was that the President had spent $90 billion dollars on programs that Romney implied have been for alternative energy but failed. That is not true and has been debunked by both FactCheck.org and Politifact.
Romney was talking about the $90 billion in the stimulus program of 2009 for a variety of energy saving programs. So let’s examine that. Sixty percent went to job-creating programs such as increasing energy efficiency in homes and small businesses. If you bought an energy efficient furnace and had it installed…those were jobs created…and that $1,500 was a tax deduction…so it was an expenditure. There were millions of those kinds of items and it made the country more energy efficient…which every economist says is the most profitable way to get started on energy self-sufficiency.
Of the remaining 40% of the money spent on alternative energy, And where did that money go? It went to state and local governments to improve energy efficiency in schools and public buildings. And a large percentage of that remaining money went to states who agreed to begin construction on high speed raid between certain cities where air travel will, before too many years, be impractical because of the differing demands on what is left of diminishing supplies of oil.
So how much went to the 26 companies who were start ups who are trying to develop wind and solar and battery power? Well…none at all went to Fisker and Tesla. So that was an out-and-out lie. But of those that did get a sliver of a sliver of the remaining few billions of the stimulus money…fewer than 12% of those 26 companies failed, a much better ratio than business start ups in general.
Next, he says he will crack down on China. Number one, that is meaningless because we owe China trillions of dollars and guys like Mitt have fixed our economy so that we are dependent on the Chinese. If you owe the Mafia a lot of money, you don’t go to them and suddenly tell them to drop their activities and go work in a pizza joint for minimum wage. It is not only a misstatement, but a foolish comment to anyone who studies the Chinese problem.
Finally, we are working on education, already have done something that will reduce the budget (although Romney would vote against it) and have over a hundred new programs for small business, including the ACA bill which subsidizes health care for small business…of which something like a hundred thousand small businesses have taken advantage.
The truth about job creation
The fact is that corporations…and you can make excuses for them if you like….but corporations are the ones not hiring. You can say it is because of regulations…but we had more regulations before Obama took over. You can say it is about uncertainty but huge corporations were started and grew in the Great Depression because costs were so low that they could run for years at a minimal revenue level.
The fact is that jobs at the local level are not available because of two things. One we sent so many jobs overseas that there are millions on millions of people who no longer have a viable job and no disposable income. Statistically, about a third of our current unemployment is equivalent to the number of jobs that used to be here but are now in China. About a third of the jobs that should be available right now (but are not) are the result of the Bush Crash and Recession and the Republican-Wall Street obstruction of job development and a third would be the normal unemployment rate.
Even the jobs that were here were lower-level, lower-paid jobs that many who had lost their jobs to China and India were taking. Romney says that he will create small business jobs but small businesses cannot start because banks no longer loan to companies who need money but to companies that already have money…to a much greater degree than was the case in previous decades.
There are two basic ways to create jobs. One, banks could do it, but the six big banks control all the money and they are still using our money to speculate. (Why doesn’t the President do something? He signed Dodd-Frank, a still weak reform bill, but Congress and the banks have worked hard to damage and stall its implementation. So no new corporations and therefore no new jobs from the private sector.
We could easily create 5 million jobs using about $300 billion in investment money to take care of our infrastructure. That would create another 5 million more service jobs to serve the newly employed and would begin to stimulate investment in private businesses. The economy is dynamic. In other words when economic opportunities come, you often need to hire people so that you can take advantage of those opportunities. Those small businesses who don’t get left behind.
Public investment on infrastructure and education and energy can be easily recovered. First of all, we would realize about $100 billion in new tax revenues from those employed in the public sector. (We did experience some of that in the first stimulus but it is simply, again, arithmetic…not economics.
Second, we would shed about $300 billion in unemployment and welfare costs. Actually, with low interest rates and so many people already drawing some kind of check from the government, there could not be a more propitious situation. Finally, the growth in the economy would start the economic “virtuous circle” and business and personal taxes would increase.
So, with the cuts that will be made…some will be made for sure in the Spring of 2013…that is already agreed between the two political parties…we could be at very close to a balanced budget. We have a $1.3 trillion deficit. We could add 5% to GDP, lose the welfare on 5 million people, create at least $100 billion in revenues and have some big cuts. Result: a 2014 deficit of only $200 billion. That is what full employment (in this case just 5% unemployment) can do for an economy.
As U.S. industrial prospects begin to show a hint of recovery…foreign investors, who are now poised financially and geo-politically disposed to invest here will start to invest more heavily, forcing U.S. investors to act or lose the best opportunities. So public investment attracts all kinds of private investment because new roads, bridges, buildings, dams, and other public works all have some kind of value to private industry like trucking and agriculture and energy. Those kinds of investments are all secure and virtually guaranteed.
2. On taxes. Governor Romney has said in the past that he wants to cut taxes on top individuals. That described tax cut has always been calculated at $5 trillion to individuals but also $5 trillion cost to government. The Governor has said that he could pay for it through eliminating deductions such as those that the Bowles-Simpson commission identified.
The problem is that the Bowles-Simpson commission did not come up with anything remotely close to saving $5 trillion. In addition, Governor Romney wants to allow the Bush-Cheney tax cuts to continue. That’s another $2 trillion. And finally, he wants to add $2 trillion to military spending, already greater than the sum total of all the countries in the world combined. (The only reason must be that he anticipates some kind of war with the 80 million people of Iran.
Even if he could find $5 trillion in savings somewhere, he still has about $4 trillion in tax cuts for the rich that he does not pay for. But he says, don’t worry…this is revenue neutral…will add nothing, cost nothing. The problem is that it simply does not make any sense at all.
It is in fact…dissembling, misstating…in effect, lying. We need tax increases, especially at the top level—we need to pay down debt…that is a serious problem…and we need to create jobs and a whole new industrial structure in this country.
In his comments on taxes and the economy, Romney says that health care costs have gone up. And it is true that they have, but they always do, and in the last two years, in addition to rebates to many families, actual checks from insurance companies, rates have gone down as a percentage of the increase. The rate of increase is lower than at any time in the last ten years.
Romney says that while he will bring the income tax rate of individuals at the top marginal rate down by about 30% (from 35% to 25%) but that it will not reduce the revenues they pay to the federal government. And why is this? Because, he says, they will make more and therefore pay more and because he will eliminate the loopholes (But, of course, the Republican Congress, if still in position, will not approve that.)
He will blame Congress and will get maybe at most the one million dollars in tax reform (which, by the way, must include the biggest “reform” which is the deduction for mortgage interest…and who pays that? So, Romney’s policies, no matter how hard he lies, would cost us another $4 trillion from another round of tax cuts for the rich.
So we have “Voodoo Economics, part II.” It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up. When Reagan cut taxes from 70% to 28% and when Bush II cut taxes from 39% to 35%, revenues did not increase beyond what they would have without the tax cuts. What happened was that wealthy people got a lot of money and the Treasury lost trillions. It is just as simple and no more complicated than that. Romney’s plan is a meaningless proposal for government and instead a boondoggle, a total fabrication, basically a lie he is using to try to get elected.
3. On the economy. Next, the debate was supposed to shift, but it continued on the economy. Basically, Romney said that he would cut back on government. Because he has already said that he would add money to the military budget and cut taxes on the wealthy by 30%, he claimed that he would cut government and reduce the deficits. He claimed that the President had put into place as much debt as all the other Presidents combined. Of course that isn’t true, but it is worthwhile understanding the history what has happened on the debt.
Carter actually reduced the deficits, and the losses in 1979 were something like $80 billion. The total of national debt until Reagan, including what was being paid down on the WWII and Viet Nam war debt, was less than a trillion and going down.
At the end of Reagan and Bush the First, we owed $4 trillion dollars. Reagan had tripled it and Bush raised taxes to try and slow it down, (at one point the deficit was $500 billion for one year.) but he couldn’t. Of that $4 trillion debt, Reagan and Bush I had accounted for $3.2 trillion.
When Clinton came in (he was in for 8 years), in the first four years he added about a trillion dollars. So it was a little more than $5 trillion by 2005. In his last four years, however, he actually had a surplus and in fact brought down the national debt from about 65% of GDP to about 55% of GDP. When he left office, the country took in each year about $800 billion more than it spent.
When Bush II came in he had a $5.6 trillion national debt. He also had annual surpluses…more money coming in than going out, and the national debt slowly being paid down. But he decided to cut taxes, especially on the wealthy. That alone added $1.8 trillion to the debt. Then he started two wars and another tax cut and that added another $3.9 trillion to the debt. So now, as Bush was about to leave office, he had added $5.7 to the national debt. It was now $11.3 trillion dollars.
But Bush was not through with us yet. Not only did he take our taxes and waste them foolishly, but he also set up a government whose main objective was to make money for his pals in the private sector (Cheney’s former corporation, Halliburton, had received $12 billion in war contracts) and for Wall Street.
Bush and Cheney hated regulations and their campaign contributors hate regulations. So they took the reins off Wall Street and mortgage companies and stopped enforcing laws about securities. Gamblers in Wall Street made personal fortunes and then let the markets crash, leaving 401Ks and pensions and state and municipal funds in the lurch.
The American People, as a result…401Ks, pensions, and a variety of investments….plus the huge losses in home equity….some lost all their home equity and others owed (some still owe) more than their house was worth. That was the result of Bush…$7.5 trillion. Bush and Cheney tried their best to ruin the country for the average citizen.
So, Bush’s final budget which he dropped in Obama’s lap, added $1.4 trillion to the national debt before Obama could walk through the White House door. Now we had a $12.7 trillion national debt…but more importantly about 700,000 people a month were losing their jobs. President Obama acted and somehow got the Congress to approve a $787 billion rescue fund to create jobs and stabilize the economy. So that gave us $13.5 trillion in debt.
Even though, because of Congress’s demands only about $500 billion would actually be used for job creation and about $300 billion would once again end up in the hands of the Republican’s campaign contributors, the stimulus bill would go into effect and about 3 million jobs were eventually created which put a floor under unemployment at about ten percent.
So why are we still running huge deficits? Because we have so many people out of work that the government pays about $350 billion a year for welfare, unemployment, food stamps and other life-preserving activities…and…we get no tax revenues from those people…which is another $350 billion. So that makes up $700 billion of the one trillion debt each year.
And the Republican Senate has filibustered 380 times to prevent job bills from passing. They make no bones about it. The only surprising thing is that the American people are stupid enough to let them get away with it.
4. On health care/Medicare. So we are in a tremendous hole and the President has done some things to bring it under control. First of all, he did health care reform. Peter Orszag, the former head of the Budget said and it continues to be true, that the biggest threat to ongoing debt is health care costs. So how can we bring that down? The OECD countries…Europeans…have an annual average cost for health care of 6%. France and Switzerland have the best health care in the world and they spend half of what we do. They have two different systems but in both cases they are non-profit.
Here, until President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, costs went up…in a for-profit private system…well over 10% per year with no end in sight. Last year, costs went up by between five and ten percent and many individual families got rebates. Why? Because the ACA says that health insurance companies must use 85% of premiums for care and not executive bonuses. If they don’t, they must rebate the difference to their policy holders.
So millions of Americans are getting rebates this year. That is why the rate of premium increases is slowing. Next year, when Obamacare, ACA, really kicks in, prices will drop below current rates and when the regional insurance centers kick in, 2014, prices will drop even more. By 2015 we should have rates that are only…only…twice the rates of European countries and about the same rate as Canada…but we will all have access to affordable health care. And Medicare will be extended for even more years because costs will go down.
Romney wants to kill the Affordable Care Act. Remember this: Romney is a liar who has been called that repeatedly by the other candidates, Congressmen, Senators, Governors in his own Party, a political party known for liars and degenerates. Yet they have singled him out.
If Romney, as President, were going to continue to reduce health care costs…the biggest factor by far…except perhaps for the bloated, obscene military budget (which he says he would increase by 2% instead of reduce by 20%, which is what is needed)…then he would say that he would…modify…not repeal…Obamacare.
We know that hospital chains, the entire health insurance industry, medical equipment manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies—all making huge profits—do not want Obamacare. It will remove their huge profits and give those savings to the average American citizens, no matter how stupid or bigoted or religiously superstitious they may be. We know that in one year, 2009, they spent over $500 trillion to try to defeat health care reform.
Romney took credit for a health care system in Massachusetts that 98% of the people say that they love and would not change. Just as Canadians and British and the rest of Europe says about universal health care. It works for the people. Not CEOs of health care companies. Romney wants the “Republican plan.”
Does anyone remember what the Republican plan was? It was very simply stated…give Americans a few thousand dollars to buy health insurance that costs more right now than they would be given in subsidy. Basically an HAS, health savings account. Then take away all ability for citizens to sue for malpractice. So people would pay more than double what they now pay on Medicare for example…there would be no more Medicare, just this subsidy (or “voucher”)…and people who make more would pay more. Means tested.
Here’s a better way. Let us pay for Medicare in our payroll taxes and let the government run the system as it does now with Medicare. No one wants out of Medicare. The Tea Baggers often say…”keep government hands off my Medicare!” Yes, we are by and large an ignorant society.
If the Romney-Ryan budget were passed, and Obamacare, with its enormous beneficial effects on Medicare repealed, then health care for seniors will simply be a matter of negotiating for some kind of price with health insurance companies. That will be a disaster and 50 million people without health care will become 80 million without health care, half of those seniors.
So there is no reason to believe that Mitt Romney, when not faced by an overwhelming majority in both the Massachusetts House and Senate, a highly intelligent and educated society, would not run away from what he was forced to do in Massachusetts and do what he now says he would do and what the Republican Party wants him to do…repeal health care and send us back to the horrible Bush years with half of million personal bankruptcies a year from health care costs alone.
5. More on the economy. Romney says that 3% of the small businesses are responsible for half of all jobs in the country. This simply does not pass the laugh test. How many small businesses do you think it takes to equal the revenues from Apple, GE, Exxon/Mobil and BP alone? The problem is in the tricky way Romney defines small business.
Romney says that he doesn’t want to add a 5% tax burden on these people (like Donald Trump, the real estate billionaire whom he considers one of his “small businesses.”) He says that the President would raise taxes on these corporations.
Well, of course, we should raise taxes on corporations. They amount to about 7% of all government revenues. Fifty years ago they represented about 30% of all government revenues and now they should be dialed in at about 10% minimum, guaranteed. If you can’t afford to pay one dollar out of ten to your government for doing business in the greatest country in the world, and the largest market in the world, we can find corporations in India, China, and Brazil that will come in tomorrow morning and start corporations with tens of thousands of jobs right here in the U.S.
No one pays 35% in taxes. Let’s suppose we do it Romney’s way. He says he wants to cut taxes to 25% and eliminate deductions. OK. Let’s do that for corporations. Let’s make it 25% of everything you make…with no deductions…just 25% of sales minus basic operating costs. That will last about a week.
Don’t be fooled by Romney’s style and arrogance. Anyone can take a company, sell off all the assets, fire the people, while using the assets of the company to borrow money to pay your fees. Then you take the company into bankruptcy. During the era of leveraged buyouts, every con-man on Wall Street was doing the same thing. They gutted our manufacturing infrastructure and made China and India what they are today. What Romney and his gang did then and what he is doing now, is a semi-criminal enterprise, looting made to look like sophisticated business management.
6. More on the economy. Romney blames the President, as he should…he’s trying to get the President’s job…for what he says are 23 million unemployed (not what the official government records reflect) and for the 47 million on food stamps.
Is that the President’s fault? Bush walked away leaving the President with 15 million people out of work. He has put about 4 million back to work. But 30 Republican governors elected in 2010 have laid off 600,000 state workers, some after turning down substantial amounts of money offered by the federal government.
But the Republican Senate has vetoed every jobs bill after the initial stimulus bill, which created at least half of those 4 million jobs and kept us from falling into a 1930s-like Depression, where one out of four people would have been unemployed. This is exactly what the Republicans and their big billionaire backers wanted.
The Republicans have created a campaign of lies and held down employment. They are traitors to the American middle class, dissolving equity in average home ownership, foreclosing and reducing the Middle Class to poverty, putting them, as Romney says gleefully, on food stamps.
The Republicans obstructed every single jobs bill or progressive attempt to get the economy going again. They filibustered, basically vetoed 386 times on legislation that would have gotten the economy rolling again. Romney is the perfect candidate. He’ll lie about anything…Mr. Etch-a-Sketch he’s called…and he has a heart hardened by closing one plant after another and sending jobs to the slave-labor plants of Southeast Asia.
7. On the national debt. Here is what Romney says he will do and what he will actually do. First, he says that he will get rid of all non-essential programs. He has been ridiculed because he mentioned Big Bird as an example…cuts to PBS. The larger point is not that PBS is such a tiny fragment of the budget. The point is that all non-“entitlement” programs and non-military items make up virtually nothing compared to the size of the deficit.
Second, Romney says that he would do away with Obamacare. That’s good. The problem with that is that Obamacare will cut our medical cost by two-thirds over the next ten years. Here’s why. Competition.
It’s easy to understand. Let’s suppose you have a pair of tires made by Goodyear. Great tires. You can go to a tire store and pay $300 or you can go to WalMart and pay $200. How do you think that WalMart got to be the largest retailer and the largest corporation in America? Price.
You can go to your doctor through an insurance company charging you $15,000 a year or you can go to one charging you $10,000 a year. Which one will you use? Same doctor. Same hospitals. Same care. But your insurance costs you $5,000 less. That is what will happen within the first two years, let alone the first ten years of regional auctions for health care insurance. That is in the private sector.
But eventually the margins will be so low that there will only be one or two companies…like WalMart and Costco, or Target. So what does that mean for Medicare? It means that costs will come down. Insurance companies will put pressure on providers and providers will begin to cut costs themselves. Can we do it?
In the entire history of the medical profession in the United States we have deliberately controlled the number of doctors who are educated every year. Since 1980, (and it was worse before that) we have graduated, every year, something like 17,000 doctors from our medical schools. And we import from foreign countries about 6,000. So we import well over a third of our doctors. Why? To keep competition down, doctors scarce, and prices high.
So, while physicians make very large incomes, they also work their asses off. You can’t call one, talk to one, see one, and God forbid ever have one visit you except in a hospital, where the average daily stay now costs $3,900. By the way, the next highest cost anywhere in the world, including Europe, is Chile where the cost for a one-day hospital stay is $1,500. Some surgeons and highly trained specialists make millions but they do so from skills so rare and so important with such long hours that no one begrudges them their income, nor should they. The same is true of general practitioners.
But…we cannot go on like this forever. Doctors in the United States, like doctors elsewhere in the world…must begin to live normal lives…make the kind of income that a highly skilled professional should earn…and be accessible to the public without months waiting time and frantic, infrequent visits.
Physicians in other countries are happy and healthy and make a damned good living. We can insure that CEOs of insurance companies make less per hour and our gifted and extremely hard working best and brightest make more. That will reduce costs.
That is not what Romney-Ryan want. In fact, they want the opposite. Their idea is simply to return the health care system to the insurance companies. Despite the experience of the rest of the civilized world, this Republican Party, the Party of anti-science and of emotional, religion-based decision making wants to keep a system that is significant to only one group…very wealthy individuals.
The average CEO of a health insurance company makes $14 million a year. That is at least $13 million too much. Would you like to make a million a year? That is plenty…no matter how big your company. Obamacare says that health insurance companies must spend at least 85% of premium costs on actual health care services. In other words, if your hospital or doctor bill is $100, they cannot charge more than $115.
So, cutting the deficit requires cutting Medicare costs and repealing Obamacare will do just the opposite. So why does Romney and why does Ryan lie? Because both Romney and Ryan are sponsored by billionaires like the Koch Brothers and other billionaires and multi-millionaires, like Philip Anschutz and Donald Trump and others who belong to Karl Rove’s Crossroads Super-Pac. These people and the Neo-Fascists from the oil patch in Texas want to go on paying little or no taxes, and making more. No amount of money is enough for them.
They would let Americans die of disease, let elderly lose their homes and their healthcare, and put more people…as they have done with their Wall Street pals’ theft of the nation’s equity…on food stamps. And all simply to pay less in taxes on money that many of them will never even know they have or where to find it.
So…deficits…national debt? Romney and Ryan have not the faintest, foggiest notion of how to trim our government under their plan. Romney wants to cut taxes by $5 trillion. He lies and says he knows how to make it “revenue neutral” but he doesn’t.
Understand what he is saying. He says basically that if we reduce the top marginal rate to 25%, which will reduce other rates all the way down the line, and cut out deductions, government revenues will go up by $5 trillion at the same time we cut $5 trillion from revenues with tax cuts.
Trying to be polite, every economist, government official in the Treasury, every tax specialist with the IRS, and every Ph.d. d with the CBO find Romney’s comments to be totally inaccurate in the least and a gigantic lie at the worst. Bowles-Simpson…looking everywhere…found $1 trillion. But that includes all business expenses and home mortgage deductions plus charitable deductions.
Why do it? Romney says it would unleash more capital from the “job creators.” Of course, we already know, from the Bush years and the Reagan years, and from the CBO report of 2003, that it will not. Never has. Never will. All this kind of approach has done is increase the national debt from less than a trillion in 1980 to $16 trillion…80% of which came under Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.
Unless you think that a President who walks into a $1.4 trillion budget deficit every year, plus 15 million people unemployed and a Senate that blocks all job creation…had anything at all to do with it. That he did is of course a lie and complete political propaganda. Obama has done his best to rid us of these problems. The Republicans have not only done their best to obstruct job creation, which is the only thing that will balance the budget…but they admit that this is their policy. And yet some ignoramuses still vote for Republicans.
7. Finally, jobs, taxes and economic growth. Romney challenged the President to show why the President’s $4 trillion in cuts to government…which the President laid out…various really good efficiencies and combinations of departments and elimination of duplications…would make any difference since we are spending $1 trillion more than we take in. And here is what Romney knows but what Romney will not say.
There is no plan…increasing taxes or decreasing taxes or leaving them the same…that will eliminate the deficit. Here’s why. $350 billion of the debt is lost revenue from 15 million people out of work and from people who are working again, but making so little that they fall into the poverty category and another $350 billion is what we pay out in welfare, unemployment and food stamps to keep those unemployed people alive.
The Republicans and Romney want to keep them barely living, ready to accept lower wages, fewer benefits. Here’s the problem. Let’s say that you are an average senior executive in a major corporation. You have a family and you finally have a lot of the superficial things…houses, cars, toys…that you unfortunately have been made to feel are important.
Now you go to China or India and you see where your products are made. If you are at the top level, you do. People there are wage slaves, live in dorms, work for 12 hours straight without a break for fifty cents an hour.
Then you come home and you see people with an old car, a house falling down, no health care, no dental care, kids going to broken down schools and they can’t even speak good English. Someone says…let’s bring jobs home because our people need jobs. And you think of the workers in China and India with no homes and slave-worker conditions. And you are asked to give up some of your toys to do it. And you say no. You eventually become CEO. And that is where we are now.
Romney is the Republican candidate, the candidate of Grover Norquist and the Koch Brothers. He will not create jobs in the U.S. It is the Republicans’ goal NOT to defeat the President but to defeat the AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.
Look at ALEC, a secret organization, funded by and controlled by major industries…pharmaceuticals, oil companies, communications companies, food and beverage companies. Their job is to replace your vote with theirs. They have agents in all 50 state legislatures whose job is simply to create legislation for corporations against your best interest, because that is why they are there. Pollution costs corporations money. But it also costs you when your child becomes ill or when you get cancer.
So Obama is not the target. You are the target. And Romney will never balance the budget. Only a President who will do what Obama did, try to create more jobs, will balance the budget. This is what Clinton did. He worked with Republican majorities, using them to cut government, and then making deals to raise more revenues.
The combination…lower government costs (Obama has offered $4 trillion in cuts), higher revenues (Obama want to increase taxes slightly at the top end…incomes over $250,000) and full unemployment (Obama has offered several jobs bills that would increase employment by 2 million jobs…a multiplier would create at least another 2 million)…will bring the deficits to a minimal level, and with $4 trillion already cut, long term, we will be on our way to balanced budgets. Romney’s plan will do just the opposite.
So there you have it. Romney will offer you what Bush offered you and give you the same result. More military spending for the largest armed force in the world, larger than all others combined. More tax cuts for billionaires and multi-millionaires. More jobs sent to China. Setbacks and your health in the hands of sadistic health insurance companies. Less employment. Less security. Less value in your home, your one piece of formerly rock-solid security.
Republicans don’t want to merely beat Obama and Biden. They want to grind you into the dust. If you don’t vote and bring along at least five other voters they will do just that. Not just for Democratic voters but for another 80 or 90 million Republican voters, your neighbors of modest or average income who have been brainwashed to vote against their own best interests.
Romney and Ryan are merely the latest in a series of sinister hucksters paid to lie for the Right Wing Republicans and their Neo-Fascist billionaire masters.
