The votes in the Mid-term elections have been tallied.The message has been sent. The Republicans got it loud and clear. But do you know what it is?
You’d better find out quickly, because the new Republican government is about to implement that message. That is not good news for the average American.
First, who are the Republicans? Who are these people who just came into power in the House of Representatives and governorships around the country? Who are these people who won seats in the Senate?
They are backward-thinking, anti-government, neo-conservatives who are supported financially by Right Wing, pro-business, anti-labor, anti-middle class billionaires. They spent about $4 billion in all, after the Citizens United decision allowed them to run ads anonymously in whatever amounts they want.
They are going to try to pass tax cuts in amounts that are so large that most Americans cannot believe it is true because most Americans have no idea that there is even that much money.
The average American makes $43,000 per year, if–these days–they are even employed. The Koch brothers, hedge fund managers and many others on Wall Street make more than that every hour of every day of every year. In a time when many Americans are going to food banks rather than the grocery store, these rich Neoconservatives want tax cuts on money that they could never even spend or, in some cases, never even know they have. The House Republicans, grateful for the hundreds of millions in campaign donations want to give them those tax cuts.
But someone has to pay for government. If the Republicans cut taxes, who is going to pay for government?
In the 1950s, people in top income brackets, that portion of their incomes over, say, $1,000,000 per year were taxed at a 90% level. Many people who made a lot of money, like President John F. Kennedy’s father, didn’t like that. So President Kennedy cut it to roughly 70%. But the people who owned General Electric never liked even that much, nor did the big Texas oil barons, who were used to getting all kinds of tax breaks in return for campaign contributions. So Ronald Reagan cut that top rate down to 28%, then raised it back up to about 35%.
But he didn’t cut government spending. In fact, he quadrupled the military budget while cutting nothing in government except for the revenues it received from taxpayers.
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So, the Republicans that have recently been elected were sponsored by the people who want tax cuts. In fact, the leaders of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives have already said that they will try to renew the Bush tax cuts that gave these millionaires and billionaires a $120,000 tax cut on each and every million dollars of income that they make. Right now they pay an average of about 23% in actual out-of-pocket taxes to the government. They want to pay less.
But government is losing a trillion dollars a year and is already.$13 trillion in debt after 8 years of the Bush Adminlsitration. Now the voters have elected the same people. They intend to cut taxes again, and those tax cuts will add another $4 trillion to the national debt.
And who are the real winners in this election? The health insurance industry now has discovered that if they pay off the big, Right-Wing radio commentators in the tens of millions, if they pay off the leaders of the Republican Party in the hundreds of millions, then those people will lie about the health reform bill, demonize it, make it sound expensive, inept, and heavily regulated…none of which is true…simply lies…outright lies.
The Republicans will promise to “repeal and replace” it with a program that will actually take it back for the health insurance industry so that they can continue to destroy the health of the American people. The health insurance industry has bankrupted over half a million people a year, has raised rates by an average of 20% per year for the last ten years, and has continued to deny people coverage and continued to drop coverage at will.
What did Nancy Pelosi do? She rallied everyone in the House of Representatives whom she could persuade to help these poor people who come from all strata of society who are simply and suddenly thrown into desperate circumstances, often actual death, by these cynical, profit-motivated insurance executives. Her efforts were demonized, lied about and ridiculed by the Right Wing commentators, by the Fox Republican Channel, and Republicans who wanted to be re-elected and were eager to take the money from the health care industry.
The Republicans are all railing against the “Big Spenders” in Washington. This is of course the shallowest and most devious of lies. They…these same Republicans…are the ones who spent the additional $8 trillion over and above the $5 trillion debt that was being reduced when they took over in 2001. When the Democrats returned to the majority in the House and Senate in 2006, they restored “paygo” so that no new spending could be undertaken without cuts of the same amount in other areas of the budget.
So the Republicans, not the Democrats, are the big spenders. They are the ones who ran up the deficit and they are the ones who now want to keep the big tax cuts for the very rich. Consequently they are the ones who want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Education. But they don’t want to cut spending on a military that the Secretary of Defense has said is about 40% redundant.
So whom did we elect? Who won?
Here’s who won: the very rich who want more tax cuts, the health care industry, the international corporations, the CEOs, the billionaire oil men, the Right Wing radio commentators, the Wall Street operators, the big banks who are holding on to their money and not lending it, the people who are laying off workers and shipping their jobs to China and finally those who spend their entire lives now, such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation and all their 32,000 lobbyist friends who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year each to keep the American people from finding out what is actually going on
