It seems as if most people today are supporting their political party or candidate based on visceral reactions more than on intellectual assessment or logic. People are angry about what other folks have that they don't, like better pensions or more subsidized health care. Some people also seem very upset about what they believe they may lose in the future, but many of those particular fears center around the perceived potential loss of rights rather than actual concrete threats to those rights. For example, many conservatives are afraid that President Obama is threatening their Second Amendment rights to bear arms, when in fact the reality is that he has done nothing since taking office that indicates that he is trying to do so. Although he promised while campaigning in 2008 to reinstitute an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004, he has not done so, and in fact now avoids talking about reinstating the ban. Whatever his views and positions were prior to his election as President, he has done and said nothing since then in support of gun control. In fact, in 2009 Obama signed into law a bill that allows firearms to be carried in national parks, eliminating Reagan's ban on weapons in parks that Bush had overturned in 2008.
So to all these people who support Republicans, including Tea Party members, I feel compelled to ask "What have the Republicans done for you, personally, that makes you continue to support them?" I am not asking what you heard on the internet that they did for someone else. I am also not asking what you know the Democrats did to you, or what you heard they were going to do to you. I do not care about what Republicans have done for this country, unless you personally were affected in a tangible way. I am not concerned with what they have done that does not affect you specifically, even if you support those measures on principal. I am asking what the Republicans have done that has benefitted you, personally and directly, in the past decade.
Unless you are one of the wealthiest people in this country, earning over $150,000 a year, you haven't seen your taxes go down much. You may remember the "Bush Tax Cuts" and assume that you yourself benefitted from those cuts, but you probably did not. Even though the conservative blogs and news sources tell you that you are better off because of those tax cuts, you are not. In 2004, in fact, President Bush's own chief economistfound that if you are one of Americans who earned less than $75,600 a year, your tax burden increased on average because of those tax cuts. Those tax cuts were for the wealthiest Americans. It wasn't supposed to work out that way on paper, at least according to the actual tax cut bill passed in 2001, but it did. If you do not believe this, and you still have your old income tax forms, look at what happened to your taxes between 2000 and 2002 (the cuts went into effect in 2002). Do not simply believe the news reports and bloggers who say that you benefitted. Look for yourself, at your own returns, and see if your taxes went down. If you have children, you are more likely to have seen a decrease than if you do not. If you were a single parent, however, you were out of luck. And even if your taxes went down then, those tax cuts are a large part of the reason that we spiraled into a recession in the past few years. If you have seen your pay go down in the past few years, or you lost a job, then your tax cuts probably were not worth the price.
You may have received a tax rebate check ranging anywhere from $300 to $1200 sometime between May and July of 2008. That would have been thanks to President Bush, who sent those out to stimulate the economy. That is the kind of concrete benefit that affected you directly that I am talking about. But then see if that amount offsets how much more you paid in taxes starting in 2002. (Incidentally, while you are looking at your old tax returns, see if you paid less for 2008. If you did, that's because of tax cuts that Obama enacted immediately after entering office, which applied to 2008).
You might have benefitted from the repeal of the Estate Tax enacted by President Bush in 2001, but you probably did not. You see, before the appeal, only 2% of Americans who died left enough of an estate to actually be subject to an estate tax. The other 98% of us never earned enough or saved enough to pass anything significant on to our children. You might have heard that people who inherited small farms or businesses lost everything because of the estate tax before it was appealed, but that's actually not true. Most small businesses and farms that were passed down to heirs - 98% of them - were not affected by the estate tax. The important thing in this exercise, however, is what happened to you. Did you inherit more than $675,000 from a parent or relative in the past decade? If not, then the federal Estate Tax never applied to you anyway. It only began to kick in when you inherited an estate valued at more than $675,000. And as I noted above, that only happens to a lucky 2% of Americans.
Since the Patient Affordable Care Act passed, also known as "Obamacare" to people who don't like it and fear that it takes away their freedom to choose their own destinies, there has been a tremendous amount of attention paid to what this bill will do to our citizens. But instead of addressing those fears or issues, I want to ask you what happened to your health insurance since 2000. I am asking whether you, personally, saw any changes in your health insurance policy over the past decade. Did you lose health care coverage or gain it? Did you see your premiums rise or fall? Did your insurance company increase the co-pays for prescriptions or office visits, or did they decrease?
If you are like many other Americans, you may have lost your health insurance coverage between 2000 and 2006, because8.6 million of us lost our coverage between those years, while Republicans were in control of the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. For those of us who still had health insurance, we all started having to pay a lot more for it. For a baseline, in 1996 those of us lucky enough to have health insurance plans through our employers saw those premiums rise by only 0.8% that year. But in 1999, our premiums rose by 5.3%. In 2000, premiums went up another 8.2%, in 2001 they went up by 10.9%, in 2002 by 12.9%, andin 2003 we Americans on average saw a whopping 13.9% increase in our health care premiums. So that this is clear, that is the amount by which insurance companies increased their premium charges for employer-sponsored plans. That's not how much more your boss made you pay, even though he or she did not have to pay more for your plan. That's how much insurance companies in this country increased their premiums each year for the health care plan your employer offers to you as part of your benefits package, if you are lucky enough to get one.
If your health insurance premiums went up between 1998, when the significant rate increases began, and 2003, when they skyrocketed out of control, that is something that your Republican Party did for you. Between 1995 and 2007, Republicans controlled the Senate and the House of Representatives. Without getting into a complicated discussion of deregulation, health care costs, inflation, and so forth, I think it suffices to say that things that happened starting a few years after 1995, when the Republicans took control of Congress, and 2006, when they lost control of it, are the result of Republican rule. So if you were paying a lot more for your health insurance in 2006 than you were in 2000, thank your Republican Party.
I am fairly confident that Republicans have not benefitted you personally with regards to abortion. If you are like most Republicans, you are anti-abortion. You believe abortion is wrong, for any number of reasons. You, therefore, will not have an abortion under any circumstance, or perhaps only in the case of rape or incest or if your life is in danger. It therefore does not matter to you, personally, whether abortion is legal or illegal. You will not have an abortion regardless of its legality. If Republicans acted to make abortion legal forever, that would not affect you personally because you would not choose to have one. Likewise, if Republicans made abortion illegal, that would also not affect you, since you would not be having one anyway. So whatever restrictions Republican legislatures around the country have enacted that restrict access to abortion, you personally are not affected. Therefore, they have not done anything to benefit you personally with regards to abortion.
If, however, you are one of the minority of Republicans who believes that abortion should be legal, then the Republican party's efforts to progressively restrict access to abortion might impact you personally and directly if you find yourself with an unwanted or medically dangerous pregnancy. You might not be able to afford to take two or more days off of work in order to fulfill the "waiting periods" that half of all states have enacted under Republican legislatures. You also might live in a state where abortion providers have been murdered specifically because of the service they provide. This is a case in which your party's policies and laws might have had a direct impact on you, albeit a negative one.
I also suspect that you personally have not benefitted from the Republican support of traditional marriage. Why not? Because if you are like the majority of Republicans, you are heterosexual, and every institution in this country, religious or secular, public or private, already fully supports and endorses heterosexual marriages. The Republicans have not won you, personally, the right to marry your opposite sex partner. You already had that right, and the approval of the entire country to do so. In fact, you have had that privilege for centuries. You also did not ever face any discrimination against you because of your heterosexuality. You have always been able to serve as an open heterosexual in the armed forces. You have been able to add your opposite sex spouse to your health insurance plan if you wanted to do so. You have always been able to marry your opposite sex spouse in any state in this union, and have it legally recognized. Therefore, the Republican "Defense of Marriage Act" did not affect you personally. You already had the right to marry your opposite sex partner, and remember, in this exercise I am asking what the Republican Party had done that has directly affected you, not what it has done to other people. The "Defense of Marriage Act" did not protect your personal right to marry someone of the opposite sex. You already had that right. It only affects someone who is not heterosexual, so for the majority of Republicans, it does not impact you.
As for the minority of Republicans who are LGBT, I admit that your party probably has had a direct effect on you. Your Republican Party has tried to keep you from serving in the armed forces as an open gay for years. When the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" repeal of 2010 was brought to a vote, all but 8 Republican Senators voted to keep that policy intact. When the federal "Defense of Marriage Act", which defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman,passed in 1996 not a single Republican senator voted against it. Your party also does not want to protect you from hate crimes that might be perpetrated against you simply because you are gay. When the "Matthew Shepherd Act" was passed in 2009, expanding hate crime laws to include those based on sexual orientation bias, only four Republican senators voted yes. Twenty-eight Republican senators voted no, in order to prevent crimes that are a result of sexual orientation bias from being considered hate crimes. Seven Republican senators didn't even bother to vote. I think that it is safe to say that as a gay Republican, your party has clearly done some things that may have affected you personally. However, I would not say that those things have benefitted you.
There are, of course, some conservatives who will be able to report that the Republican Party has had a direct positive effect on them over the past decade. Those people who are in the top two percent of wage earners in this country have benefitted directly through tax cuts, as have the children of those top 2%ers if they inherited a large estate in the last decade or so. And although I will not discuss the banking system deregulations enacted by Republicans in the late 1990's, or the massive tax breaks for corporations and hedge fund managers that the Republicans have passed into law, those certainly might have had a direct positive impact on you if you happen to be the CEO of a large national bank, or the manager of a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. However, I again have to point out that the vast majority of us Americans - all but 1% of us, that is - did not directly profit from those laws and deregulations.
In doing the math, the actual numbers of people who have themselves been directly helped by the Republican Party is almost insignificant. If less than 2% of Americans have benefitted financially from the legislation and policies of the Republican Party, substantial numbers have been harmed with increasing costs of health insurance and increasing tax burden, many have lost health insurance as a direct result of their party's legislation, and few have benefitted personally from their social agenda, why do you continue to support them, elect them to office, and thereby continue to contribute to your own worsening financial status?
One of the few explanations that makes sense is that the Republican Party has waged a campaign to make ourselves the enemy, and we are buying it. The Republican Party passes laws that routinely and uniformly benefit the upper class. The Bush tax cuts, the repeal of the estate tax, the corporate tax breaks, the deregulation of the banking industry, all directly benefit those among us who comprise the top 1% of earners in this country. Similarly, the Republican acts to repeal or defund laws that increase costs of manufacturing, like the Clean Air Act that requires industries to limit their toxic air emissions, save those corporations money. They do not, however, save you, the average American, any money. In fact, polluted air makes you more likely to be ill with asthma and bronchitis, which means that you must call in sick more and therefore lose income.
As tax-paying, air-breathing Americans of the middle class, you should be asking why the wealthiest of Americans have the best tax deals, but you don't. There is a theme among conservative bloggers and pundits that liberals "envy" the wealthy. Liberals are portrayed as being motivated by jealousy, as if that is the primary reason for their arguments that the wealthiest Americans should be paying more than they are in taxes. It is much easier to dismiss an argument without debate if you can classify it as a deadly sin or a moral character flaw, rather than a legitimate concern based on tax code inequity. Asking why you pay more taxes as a proportion of your income than a multi-millionaire does is selfish and morally questionable, according to the Republican Party, not a legitimate question to propose to your legislators.
The Republican Party also divides the middle class by pointing out the "privileges" that some citizens have that others don't. Public sector workers have consistently had better benefit packages than private sector employees, with larger employer contributions to their health insurance and pensions. Private sector employees, on the other hand, have had their pensions all but disappear over the past few decades, and in the past ten years have had to make larger and larger contributions to their own health insurance. But instead of asking why and how this happened, conservatives encourage you to simply look at who got the best hand after the dust settled. Private sector Americans are angry that the public sector employees managed to hang on to better benefits when they were not able to do so. Unionized employees, private and public, have continued to bargain for the best packages for their members, while non-unionized Americans began to lose their benefits packages years ago. But rather than viewing that as a failure of the non-unionized Americans to maintain the best possible wages and benefits, it is instead portrayed by the Republican Party as an unfair, unwarranted, and unearned coup of unionized workers.
What would be in the best interest of the private sector employees would be to improve their own wages and benefit packages so that they are on a par with those of the public sector. However, that is not even considered fleetingly as an option. Instead, the Republican tactic has been to encourage the private sector employees to pull the public sector down to their ever-worsening level. That strategy has been played out recently in Wisconsin, where the Republican Governor Scott Walker has proposed a budget that, among other things, strips the rights of most public sector employees to collectively bargain. The public sector unionized employees have been portrayed as privileged and lazy by the Republican legislators and governor, and the Republican party has squarely placed the blame for the private sector citizens' financial struggles on the heads of the unionized Americans. The Republican Party insults liberals for being envious of the wealthy, but encourages envy in its own constituents when it advances the Republican agenda.
As Abraham Lincoln said in 1858, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." The Republican Party knows that a middle class, divided, cannot work for our common best interests if we are fractured by in-fighting. Since the interests of the Republican Party are not aligned with the best interests of the middle class, they have therefore encouraged divisiveness amongst us. So again I pose the question to conservatives, what has your Republican Party done that has directly benefitted you? Before you head to the voting booths next or open up your checkbook for a donation to your political party or candidate, look at the specifics of what your party has done for you over the past decade. If you are like 98% of us, they have not done anything that has benefitted you. Perhaps it is finally time to rethink your political affiliation.