Why I Could Never Be A Republican
Voting Issues: The Republican Party (aka the GOP) is not your friend. The GOP and the people who run it and the elected officials who claim loyalty to it care not a whit for or about you, your family, your health, the environment you live in or your ability to survive. The GOP has given us voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering. Less than 40% of the voting age population has put control of both houses of Congress, as well as states where they should have no hope in the hands of the GOP.
Jobs and Wages: Republicans support the idea of corporations taking from you the wages and salaries you need to pay for your mortgage, food, clothing, healthcare and transportation. They encourage companies to do this by shipping your job to Borneo or Sri Lanka (or any of a hundred places) and pocketing the difference. By the way, we pay for it with our taxes, because they get tax subsidies to cover the "cost" of putting us and ours on the street. What? You thought all the alleged savings would be used by the “job creators” to create more jobs? Don’t be daft. There are no “job creators” in that scenario.
Wealth, Income and Tax Inequality: Republicans also think it's a fine idea that CEOs of publicly held companies, who made about thirty-five times the annual wage of their lowest paid employees in the seventies, now make ten times that much, while employees' wages have not even matched inflation. Republicans also tell us they believe that letting the rich keep more of their income and having you and me pay their share of the cost of government will result in more investment in jobs creation. It never has and there is no indication it ever will. Ronald Reagan nearly drove the country broke trying to prove it would, failed miserably and insisted his efforts had been a success. I do not think that one Republican elected or appointed official in ten believes that any longer, and not one in a hundred at the national level. Now they just lie about it.
Military Spending: Republicans constantly squawk that we need to "rebuild" a military that already spends as much per year as, and with the exception of Saudi Arabia, more per capita than the next dozen countries combined! Don’t believe it? Take a look:
NOTE: These numbers are all in equivalent US Dollars - Annual budgets are in billions.
Relative Military Expenses 2016
Average
Rank Country Annual Per Capita
1 USA $598 $1,853
2-13 $597 $ 663
2-13 w/o Saudi $515 $ 453
Source: en.wikipedia.org/...
Cost of Government: Republicans promise limited government, but they bloat it and outspend Democrats when they get control of one. Did you know that G. W. Bush fought two wars at an annual deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars, which did not show in the annual deficit or growing federal debt, and that when the Obama added it all up it came to more than $3.5 trillion? Did you know that when the Obama Administration added G.W. Bush’s war debt to the federal debt, Obama was blamed for increasing the debt and deficit?
Peace through strength: It is to laugh. All that money spent, and we don't get peace out of it. This is excess spending through hubris and stupidity. If strength bought peace, how much more "strength" d'you reckon we need than a third of the world’s entire military budget? But that’s for war and making money off our blood.
Veterans Affairs: The GOP has been yammering since the day he took office that President Obama has been short-changing our veterans (of which I am one). But when it comes to caring for veterans when they come home wounded or damaged by PTSD, or making sure they have jobs to come home to, Republicans think that they’re a "fiscal drain," and get way too much of the budget. It’s not Obama who has been denying the Veterans’ Administration adequate funding. The self-righteous minions of the GOP have denied or drastically reduced the last five Veterans’ Administration funding requests, and they’ve just done it again. It has been ever thus for Republicans. Approve less than adequate funding, and then blame the Administration when things go south, like the treatment scandal of last year. I will die believing that my brother died because he never could get a consistent care approach from the VA, and he could not afford what he really needed from the private sector.
Healthcare: Republicans also believe it is better that tens of millions of Americans and their children go without healthcare and die ten years earlier on average than people with healthcare, because it costs too much to help them. More importantly, it will hurt the bottom lines of too many pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and doctors. Not saying we should make them unprofitable, just less obscenely profitable off our misfortune.
Intrusive and Increased Government: The GOP’s primary purpose for decades has been to invade every American’s bedroom and religious life wherever possible, although I’ll grant you they want to get the EPA out of the Protecting the Environment part of its job (which would be it’s only job). Republicans insist America was originally a “Christian” nation (a patently nonsensical assertion), and they believe it should be “again,” including making blasphemy a punishable offense. To hear them speak, you’d think they want to introduce a Christian version of Sharia Law, much as in every Middle Eastern country... because it’s working out so well for those countries, I suppose.
On the Environment: Nixon was the only Republican President since 1970 to have had any environmental record to be proud of, if you can believe that. The Republican cry of “States’ Rights” led to the EPA being throttled by rules requiring they prove they’re not stepping on State administrations’ toes before they do anything. Can we spell “F-l-i-n-t,” as in Michigan? EPA was weeks later than they could have been had they been permitted by law to just show up in an emergency. However, when she explained that to the House Committee investigating the Flint Crisis (because, having passed that law they had somehow forgotten all about it), the EPA Director got screamed at (not hyperbole) by a Republican Representative, to wit (and I quote): “Nobody cares about the law up here.” Well that’s always been true of his party. However, if she had done as he suggested and gone in anyway, he’d have likely remembered then, and taken the lead in demanding her head. The irony? Although he was screaming at her, it has been a Republican State legislature for twelve years and a Republican governor for the past eight that has created this mess, not the EPA. Still, there is a proposal in the House, and I'm betting it will be voted up to the Senate, to eliminate the EPA and create all environmental regulations in legislation, enforceable at the State level, because . . . stupid.
A note on Republican presidents since Johnson:
- Nixon:
- a flat out criminal,
- but his environmental record wasn’t bad;
- Ford:
- a nice guy but basically out of his depth;
- Reagan:
- led us into the wilderness of no income and great expenses, thereby running up the deficit and the national debt without even a war to blame it on,
- dramatically lowered taxes, primarily on the one percent,
- raised them eight times, mostly on us (when a small group of people has a majority of the nation’s wealth, shouldn’t they pay an equivalent percentage of the cost of government?);
- Bush the Elder:
- started a war to help one Middle Eastern Robber Baron get his country back from another Robber Baron (in short, basically for no American security or other reason at all),
- Never understood why that lost him the next election.
- Bush the Younger:
- cut taxes primarily for the wealthy, instantly wiping out the annual surplus Bill Clinton had left him with,
- started two wars under false pretense,
- fought those wars off-budget, so the new (Obama) Administration got the bill.
- didn't do the one thing that would have justified the Afghan war (keep bin Laden and Mullah Omar when he had 'em),
- Bush never again went after them effectively), leaving us with only a hundred thousand bodies or more and two ruined nations to show for it.
So I ask you, Republican voters and enablers . . . howinell did you ever let them sucker you this badly?
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