Today Mitt Romney, trying to divert attention from the revelation that he strongly believes half the people in this country are both gullible and free-loafers, said that he can actually help more than Obama can.
He said: “The question of this campaign is not who cares about the poor and the middle class. I do. He does. The question is: Who can help the poor and the middle class? I can! He can’t!”
I am going to perform a (slightly sardonic) experiment here: Let's take him at his word!
Let's assume for a minute that Mitt really believes what comes of his mouth, or that at least some republicans out there do. Let us also believe that he will DO what the republicans say they'll do, what Mitt Romney said he would do and actually did in the past, what Bush did in the past, or what Romney's VP candidate said he'll do in the past. Let us even assume the most rosy scenarios for each choice. Let's see, then, how they compare in lowering the number of poor Americans and increasing the number of entrepreneurial Americans. Let's start with the last...
...This should be fun...
John Galt, Howard Roark, Dagany Taggart, and Francisco d'Anconia may be the most successful here. Ayn Rand heroes from the novels `Atlas Shrugged' and `Fountainhead' were also my heroes at age 12 (a strong third place, right after `Dirty Harry', and `Starsky and Hatch'). They would just cut all government assistance to everyone, get rid of all unions in government agencies and arbitrate against unions in all industries, and eliminate all regulations.
The most rosy scenario is that within two years or less the bottom 10%, made of mostly elderly social security recipients that rely on medicare and people relying on medicaid, would die without raising a fuss. Mission on route! Now only 37% of people would not be paying taxes!
Since industries will have no unions and would be allowed to pollute, many employees would lose promised retirements, health care coverage, and would start dying of airborne, waterborne, exhaustion, and stress related illnesses. Unfortunately, that is a slower process, but within a decade, at most, 10% more would be dead. Mission progressing! We are now down to 27% of the people that are not paying taxes!
Out of those that remain, relatives of the dead would be laden with payments for hospitalizations, burials, and nursing support for the dying. According to the Ryan-Romney dream scenario they will be making more money, which is great. But since, according to Romney, success is no guarantee, let's say that 25% of them fail with their new business ventures. As a result, and since they are good Americans that don't abandon their dying relatives, they too will have a much higher risk of dying. Now this one is really frustrating. Since these are able bodied Americans, only a fraction of them will die in the process. Let's say, 1% in the first 10 years. We are down to 26%, but unfortunately that's wiped out by the fact that a stubborn contingency of minorities have babies born out of wedlock that swell the ranks of the gullible free-loafers.
So some good foreign policy would have to be employed. The Ryan-Romney ticket (as it will be fondly called) would sever relationships with Western powers that support those damn unions and have costly social programs, and sever relationships with Muslim countries that support their population with social programs (currently that is true for a large part of those countries). As a result the economies of Southern Europe will collapse, the Eurozone Northern countries will stagnate because they will have fewer customers, and our most useless industries will collapse.
The Muslim countries that got cut off will probably have uprisings, and may, if we are lucky ..., invade a neighboring country - in which case our military industrial complex will be able to increase dramatically with support for the war machine. Within a few years wars with Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Algeria will kill tens of millions of Muslims in those countries (but whose counting?), and a few hundreds of thousands in this country. Now, the fact that this number is relatively small is regrettable, but just wait for part II and III...
As one can clearly see even the modest part I plan is way more effective at lowering the number of poor Americans than Obama's plan. In Obama's plan of using government incentives for 2-3 years, then starting to cut budgets while slightly raising taxes on a growing upper middle class, the number of people paying taxes would actually remain pretty steady for at least 4 years!
4:21 PM PT: `Starsky and Hutch' not `Starsky and Hatch'... Oops.