By Scott Cavanagh
With the new year upon us and only two days remaining before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican presidential candidates are spending a great deal of time and money regaling interested Hawkeyes and the national media with their plans for the future. Let me save them a lot of energy and cash.
They want to cut taxes on the rich and corporations, gut regulations that protect you, me and our environment from those corporations, and pay for it by slashing programs that make life better for average Americans. Okay, they may also want to bomb some country filled with brown people after they've won the War on Christmas, but that’s it. That’s all they’ve got—and that’s all they’ve had for 20 years.
Tax cuts, fear mongering and bullshit wedge issues make up their entire plank. Fear mongering you say--whatever do you mean? Well, who don't they hate? I can tell you who they
do hate: gay people, union workers, public school teachers, black people, brown people, government workers, atheists, immigrants, east coasters, people from Hollywood, people from San Francisco, Europeans (particularly the French), Muslims, intellectuals, the media (except Fox News--because they are Fair and Balanced), scientists, environmentalists--the list goes on and on.
Obama is a scary Socialist--that's another great old standard. The Republicans have been calling every Democratic president and presidential hopeful either a Communist or a Socialist since the 1930's. Anyone that wants to do anything for anybody that doesn't reside in the highest tax bracket is a damn commie. How can anyone with a third-grade education buy this nonsense? It’s the same thing with guns--another totally bogus non-issue. Nobody has ever proposed anything that would limit hunting weapons or any legal gun ownership, yet they continue to scare people into believing that a cadre of liberals is ready to strike at any moment and rip away their right to bear arms. It’s total nonsense. What have they spent the last three years yammering away about? Death panels and the president's birth certificate. It’s almost as ridiculous as believing that a 21-year-old John Kerry somehow conned the Army into giving him three bogus Purple Hearts. How in the hell can they continue to get away with this stuff? Who in the hell is still voting for these people?
These days they spend the majority of their time hammering Obama over the economy. How convenient is that memory loss? This entire financial meltdown was engineered by Republican greed. Bill Clinton left them with a massive budget surplus which they immediately squandered on two unfunded wars, obscene tax cuts in that time of war and a huge prescription drug program that handed most of the benefits to pharmaceutical companies.
Now they want to balance the books by picking the pockets of the weakest members of our society--the elderly, the working poor, students--while at the same time pushing for even more tax breaks for those that need it the least and huge corporations that waste no time investing that money overseas, slashing jobs here and paying no taxes whatsoever.
The Republicans like to promote themselves as the party that stands up for Americans that work hard and play by the rules and as the party of good Christian values. When examining those claims, consider these facts: Over the past 30 years, 80% of all new income in this country has went to the richest 1% of our citizens, while the top 400 families now control more wealth than the bottom 50% of our entire population. The average American pays roughly 30% in taxes, while billionaire hedge fund managers—who provide nothing to society—pay 15%. Billionaire Warren Buffet pays a lower income tax rate than his secretary. Exxon-Mobil—the most profitable company in the history of mankind--paid no taxes last year. Republicans like this system. They like it so much they want to lower marginal tax rates on the rich and corporations even more. They want to pay for it by cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits for your parents and grandparents, raising taxes on the working poor and gutting protections for the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. How can anyone—particularly anyone that calls themself Christian—support such policies?
It shouldn’t be surprising though. The GOP has been against every policy or initiative to protect or lift up regular people since the 19th century. Child labor laws, The GI Bill, The Marshall Plan, student loans, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, seat belts, pollution control, civil rights, consumer protection, women’s rights, worker’s rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security—they were against all of them, and they were all going to turn us into a bunch of socialists. All the while they’ve never seen a corporate tax dodge they didn’t love.
2012 might be a new year, but in the immortal words of Steven Tyler: “It’s the same old story, same old song and dance.”
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