Well…as I was thinking about the manufactured welfare flap that the repubs are using to falsely attack Obama…I had an epiphany on ole Mitt…It came to me that Mitt doesn’t stand for anything…just winning the election. This whole thing is just a fake argument that Obama wants to end welfare to work system that was implemented under Clinton…he wants nothing of the sort…what has been requested of the feds is that waivers be issued exempting them from federal law on the matter so the governors can more tailor the programs to the facts on the ground in the various states…and this includes two repub governors…I guess these governors have gone from great supporters of states rights to socialists overnight…but you’ll never hear that from the Romney camp…it would interfere with the meme that Obama is a socialist and just wants to hand out checks to people who don’t want to work. The funniest thing in this whole idiotic attack by the repubs is that, while ole Mitt was governor, he asked for the same waiver that he now thinks is the last straw to the damning road of socialism….this man has no beliefs or core….and would have been laughed out of politics when I was younger…just shows you how far the repubs have fallen…geez…
Category Archives: Politics
Welfare for the rich, courtesy of the republicans…
Well…wanted to touch on a couple of things today starting with the rush to privatization of schools across the country, especially in higher education where this privatization leads to the presidents and people running the universities making millions while everyone else takes a pay cut and loses their benefits. In a recent study, it was found that the average pay of the ceos of these private schools is an average of 7 million dollars a year…yep, that is 7 million that is paid for by you and me since the majority of their funding comes from grants and subsidized student loans paid for by the federal government. This is one of the problems that I have with the repubs, as long as the well off can suck off the government and take advantage of loopholes in the laws they are all for it, but when anyone in the middle class gets any benefit from the government, they howl about “welfare” and these people are no better than bloodsuckers that are stealing money from the rich. But, the worst part of this whole story is the fact that private universities have the worst graduation rate of any class of universities and don’t really care if their students are successful, after all, the university has already gotten it’s money and if the student leaves, it’s all profit for them. Just another case of welfare for the rich where they have rigged the system to steal from the rest of America…aren’t you getting tired of that yet? Geez…
There are parallels…
Well…was sitting here watching the olympics and a thought just came to me regarding the relationship that ole Mitt’s tenure at Bain has to do with how he would govern as president….while at Bain, ole Mitt gutted companies and fired people with little regard for the human toll that it took, all the while enriching himself and his rich buddies. When you look at what little detail he has presented in his economic plan (and his fealty to the Ryan plan), it appears that the same kind of thing would happen with ole Mitt as president…huge tax cuts for the rich, huge cuts to Medicare and Social Security for everyone else with little regard for the human toll of the plans…in fact I think he gleefully likes that effects….since he has no empathy for anyone other than those that were born rich like him and has shown this lack of empathy throughout his life and career. It heartens me that Obama has finally started to frame the argument in these terms, to highlight that what Romney wants to do is exactly what was tried by the Bushies…didn’t work then, won’t work now….and that the polls have started to turn against ole Mitt since he so inept at everything….what a joke…geez…
A couple more things…
Well…have been reading quite a bit today….okay, I do that everyday so I guess it’s not unusual…in that reading, I did find a couple of tidbits that shed some light on the effects that ole Mitt’s economic proposals would have if he were elected…first…the WAPO has a new series going on where they ask noted economists whose plans will have the best effect for the economy if implemented…so far, they have all come down on Obama’s side saying that Mitt’s plans to cut spending and lower taxes for the rich will make the economy worse….since those spending cuts will result in real job losses across the economy and tax cuts for the rich will explode the deficit. One of the other planks of ole Mitt’s plans is to continue to deregulate everything in business, but an interesting story in the Trib today shows how drug companies, in the part of the industry that is not regulated, have been stealing billions from you and me by paying generic drug manufacturers to not introduce generic versions of their cash cows…in essence colluding to fix prices…and ole Mitt wants more of this? Oh, yeah…that’s right, he has gotten the bulk of the campaign funding from this industry…I guess they are trying to ensure there is no competition in the presidential race, too. No wonder ole Mitt doesn’t want to reveal any details of his plans, stupid as they are….geez…
Mitt is just an idiot…
Well…I laughed my butt off today when I saw the latest pivot from ole Mitt…since his meme that his business experience makes him qualified to be president has been widely discredited by the Obama campaign’s attacks on his years at Bain, we now have ole Mitt changing his focus to his time as governor and the supposed great things he did then. One of the lines that he used in a recent speech is that “he created more jobs than Obama has”…I guess no one in the repub party reminded him of their talking point that government can’t create jobs…what is it, Mitt? Does government help create jobs or not? This just exposes the lie that ole Mitt bought into and shows that he has flip-flopped again. One other point that he made in the same speech was that while he was governor, housing prices went up…of course they did, moron, they went up everywhere until the crash of 2008…now he’s taking credit for it? I am just exasperated that this guy is still in the race…the only way he was ever successful was when he started ahead of everyone else…in money, name recognition, and connections…we all should be so lucky…geez…
Can’t let this one go…
Well…I rarely repeat myself here but today I really feel the need to, I need to go back to Romney’s tax plan and the fallout of the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of it. I just love the fact that Obama has finally found out how to take some wind out of the “trust me” crap that Romney is peddling and is forcing him to respond to facts…something that the repubs really can’t do since they don’t believe in them. To recap, the TPC has stated that there are only two outcomes possible form ole Mitt’s plan, either he will raise taxes on the middle class and poor to pay for his tax cuts for the rich, or he will explode the deficit. Ole Mitt’s campaign has complained that the TPC’s analysis is flawed since it doesn’t have the details of his plan included but they have a problem since they have not released the details of the plan, instead doing what all repub candidates do; lie or stay vague so the real effects of the policies can’t be determined by the voters…just like ole Walker did in Wisconsin and like Snyder did here in Michigan. So, I have to applaud the new Obama tactic of calling him out on this vagueness since once the real effects are known, no one but his base will vote for ole Mitt…maybe there is hope after all…
Gonna pick on the Fed a little today…
Well…this one is going to be something that probably very few really care about…that is the inaction of the Fed to do anything to get the economy moving again. I wonder if they understand that one of their jobs is to try to ensure full employment? With inflation falling to almost deflationary levels, what the hell are they waiting for? Before everything in government became politicized, the Fed would have looked at the anemic job and GDP growth a few months back and done some easing to put more money into the economy, but this fed, and Bernanke seem more concerned that they look like they are favoring one party over the other which leads to inaction on their part that is unconscionable…they should have their foot on the pedal until inflation hits at least 4-5% and we have a sustainable recovery…not the fake recovery we have been in for the last two years. Can’t anyone think anymore? I knew what to do after my basic econ class in my first year of college…what’s their excuse? Geez….
The numbers don’t lie…
Well…sitting here waiting for the maint guy to come so I thought I’d comment on the tax plan being put forth by ole Mitt…in an analysis done by the non-partisan Brookings Institute and the Tax Policy Center shows that this reverse Robin Hood plan would shift even more of the tax burden from the rich to the middle class and poor…and, on top of that, would increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars a year…and it would shift the tax burden by 86 billion dollars a year from those making more than 200K a year to those that make less…essentially making the workers pay to subsidize the rich who already pay less of a percentage of their income than they’ve paid in 80 years. As you can see, ole Mitt is not serious in trying to fix the problems of the US, is not serious in trying to fix the infrastructure and schools that we need…he is only interested in stealing more for the rich…if you want your taxes increased, vote for Mitt….geez…
Last one for the month…maybe…
Well….they say that laughter can make you live years longer, if that’s true, I have to thank ole Mitt for extending my life for many, many more years with his gaffe filled overseas trip. Then, he forgot that there are other news organizations other than the fawning propaganda experts over at Fox and the fact that he is going to have to answer questions from people who want the truth…not the daily talking points. This idiot then even went on Fox to bitch about his missteps being covered instead of what he thinks they should cover….then, there was the column by Eugene Robinson that touched on the same theme I have touched on here many times…the fact that ole Mitt is so arrogant when it comes to his “accomplishments”, thinking that anyone should be able to do what he did no matter how they started out in life…no matter that he has been wealthy his whole life and used his daddy’s connections and his friends money to start Bain where he gutted companies for his own personal profit. It is like many of the rich that I have crossed paths with during my life…they just can’t understand why everyone can’t be a ceo of a family company, or can’t understand that it takes more than a year or so to go from an entry level job to vice president….it’s like these people are aliens…geez…
Surprised by the Detroit News…
Well…Imagine my shock this morning when I opened the Detroit News (a staunchly conservative repub paper) and found an article by a Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who destroyed the normal repub arguments for their economic plan of cuts and austerity by the use of facts and history…something that will fall on deaf ears on the right but was still surprising to see in their propaganda rag. He went on to stress something that I have been harping on for almost the past two years that the concentration of wealth in the top 1% distorts the economy and is the primary factor why the economy is not recovering…because the people who would spend the money no longer have it…and that lowers the aggregate demand in the economy…again, something that I have been saying for a long time…that no business is going to add jobs until demand rises and the top 1% can’t spend as much as the middle class would if they had the money that the top has stolen by rigging the system….in this era of opinion and ideology that replaces objective facts, I am starting to lose hope that things will ever change…geez…