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EternalHoH -> What is the Republican plan? (10/24/2010 10:45:34 PM)
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Okay, so in 2008, a nation angry at bubbles popping and upside down mortgages and big corporate paydays fell in love with Hope and Change. In just 2 years, not much has been done to fix any of that restlessness. The health care bill amounted to nibbling around the edges. The public is now angry with Hope and Change.
Should the republicans re-take control, what exactly is their plan to fix all the ills from 2000 to now? Unemployment is 9.5%, but really close to 18% if you count the uncounted and all those people underemployed and not earning adequate returns on their education costs (which are steep and real, btw).
Public debt is sky high, so how will any tax cuts be paid for? Tax cuts? You know they don't pay for themselves, right? Like Stimulus, tax cut proceeds really don't create jobs, those funds only migrate to the Wall St casino. Shut down the casino and banish the shortcuts to wealth? Hell, you created them.
Consumers? They are as scared as business owners sweating Obama's restoration of taxes to Clinton levels. Consumers are banking and not spending just as most business owners are banking and not spending. Not much to be gained here.
If government spending is the problem, how do you cut that spending to "take back the country from the socialists blah blah blah" without throwing more people out of work, those who are presently counted as employed, but really are employed largely because of government spending. The biggest growing job sector, the only goose still laying a golden job report egg, is healthcare, and that's because so much of healthcare is funded by the government (those dollars are spent largely on the elderly whose generation caused this mess and siphoned 28 years of false prosperity from future generations since Reagan). Killing that off is going to go over as well as a fart in church.
Unregulated capitalism has gambled to the tune of $700 trillion in derivatives debt, which is 46 times what the shopaholic government had racked up in spending debt. What is the Republican plan to keep those financial WMD's from going off? The fuse to that bomb was already lit once, and the Democrats stopped it by throwing money from the nation's credit card at it, but so what? What will be the Republican's play for when that fuse is re-lit? (and it will be). More deregulation? As of right now, deregulation is the cause of the greatest financial threat ever known to the world. This is serious stuff that is way beyond the comprehension of the average teabagger. The average teabagger cannot even define what a derivative is, let alone tackle in a comprehensive way its threat to the economy.
What is the plan to stop foreclosures or ensure that state governments don't go insolvent? The gambling on foreclosures by the financial elites is how that fuse to the bomb was lit before. That reality doesnt change simply by electing Republicans, you know? How much gambling over the solvency of companies and state governments has been racked up the financial elites? How many more private firms will have to be taken over by the government to once again keep that bomb from going off under the Republican watch?
The agenda is pretty tall, the natives are still as restless and unemployed, the credit card is still maxed out, and the financial bomb landscape is just as delicate as when the donkey ran things.
Watching the Sunday morning political talk shows, I was struck by all the republican guests complaining about the debt one week, and then demanding budget-busting tax cut extensions the next. Cognitive Dissonance already? They aren't even elected yet.
Let me say right now, killing off liberal bastions by defunding things like NPR or any other taxpayer funded group that disagrees with the Almighty is not a solution. Its not enough, and besides, we need real solutions, not fantasy solutions. Getting down on our knees just doesn't cut it. We need solutions for the here and now, not solutions based on any sage advice from the spook daddy in the sky.
So what's the plan?
If you were looking at this as an outsider from a distance, you wouldn't want to touch it. And yet, two political parties are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fuck each other over for control of a country strapped to a bomb. What is more scary, the biggest political activists and loudmouths on both sides don't know the bomb is there. Ignorance in action. And the ones who do acknowledge it, think that their freshly scrubbed Constitution or their gun collection or their welfare government is going to be an adequate defense against a bomb that size. Silly stupid shit.
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