Romney’s New Plan – Same As The Old Plan

Well then. Now we know. Last night Mitt Romney gave us an unequivocal plan that will, he assures us, generate about 12 million new jobs during his first term. Here it is:

And unlike the president, I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has 5 steps.

[1] First, by 2020, North America will be energy independent by taking full advantage of our oil and coal and gas and nuclear and renewables.

[2] Second, we will give our fellow citizens the skills they need for the jobs of today and the careers of tomorrow. When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance.

[3] Third, we will make trade work for America by forging new trade agreements. And when nations cheat in trade, there will be unmistakable consequences.

[4] Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.

[5] And fifth, we will champion SMALL businesses, America‰Ûªs engine of job growth. That means reducing taxes on business, not raising them. It means simplifying and modernizing the regulations that hurt small business the most. And it means that we must rein in the skyrocketing cost of healthcare by repealing and replacing Obamacare.

There we are then.

We are going to cut taxes, repeal health care reform, get to be energy independent, have privatized schooling, get all bullish on trade, and we are going to fawn all over business people, especially owners of small businesses and our heroic job creating class.

Yawn.

If this look vaguely familiar to you, don’t pinch yourself. It is precisely the same plan as that put forward by John McCain and George Bush, not to mention Republicans before them going back for decades. The only innovative thought in the Romney plan – as far as I can tell – is the order in which he presented the ideas. The devil. What an innovative job creator he must be! Fancy that: changing the order. Whatever next? New ideas?

Nah. that would be un-Republican of him.

Here’s the serious point: there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in that plan that has not been tried or advocated before. Most of it is the reason we are where we are. The bit about lower taxes is getting ridiculous. It seems that every economic problem the world over can be solved, according to the Republicans, by lowering taxes on the wealthy. You know. Those job creators.

Let me keep this simple.

We are all job creators. Yes everyone single one of us. Every time you go out and spend, you are creating a job, because your spending is someone else’s income. And that income provides the basis for employment. We all create jobs. Not just capitalists. Indeed, given that capitalists are prone to substitute capital for labor, I think it fair to say that capitalists are weaker job creators than the rest of us. And don’t get all productivity-oriented on me: the addition of capital is supposed to make labor more productive and, in theory, support a rising standard of living. Maybe. That has to work its way through wage increases facilitated by that additional productivity. But what if capitalists hog all the gain for themselves, as they have for the past three or four decades? Then there is no job creation and incomes get all skewed. Which is what we have experienced.

We don’t need to fawn over business, we need to make sure it isn’t anti-social. Business is doing just fine thank you. Else it wouldn’t be making record profits – like it has been – would it?

And the canard that health care reform is the reason why health care costs are rising is an old and wrong one. It isn’t. Small businesses are saddled with rising and unbearable health care costs by our current dilapidated and highly inefficient private system. That’s why I advocate reform. ‘Obamcare’ is a halfway house along the road to sorting out our health care mess. It isn’t the right answer, but it’s sure as heck better than the private system Romney wants to resuscitate and inflict on us all. He, like all Republicans, think we all enjoy the pain the big insurance companies inflict on us. All those denied services. All those increasing premium payments. Happy times. Let’s take a quick poll: hands up all those who love their health care insurer? No. I didn’t think so.

The big disappointment, although not a surprise, is that the Republicans have absolutely no plan to deal with our ongoing crisis. Instead they want to stick with the same set of ideas that got us here with the dangerous addition of a severe dose of austerity. This latter would be laughable were it not so sick. This is the self-same party that plunged us into debt for no apparent reason. Only two presidents in US history have significantly increased the US debt without cause. By cause I mean a threat such as war or recession. They were Reagan and the younger Bush. Remember Dick Cheney and his attack on critics of Reagan’s budget busting debt? He told us that “deficits don’t matter”. Now, all of a sudden, the Republicans want us to believe they hate government debt. No they don’t. They hate government spending on social programs. They love government spending on guns. A debt created by buying guns is just dandy for them – ask Reagan. It’s just their fellow Americans they hate. Poor people, the sick, the elderly, and the unemployed. They are the enemies the Republicans like to go after by starving them into submission. Foreign enemies? Well, they can just bomb them.

So we learned nothing, other than that the Republicans haven’t moved forward. And don’t want to either.

Oh. We did learn they lie with impunity.

Ryan keeps on attacking Obama for the closure of a factory that was closed during the Bush regime. Everyone keeps on noting his lie. He keeps on repeating it.

Then there’s Medicare. Both Romney and Ryan attacked Obama for cutting about $700 billion from Medicare. It’s true. He intends to cut the cost of Medicare by that much. Not by cutting services – which is what Romney and Ryan accused him of doing – but by cutting the cost of providing the same services. He wants to make the program more efficient. To present Obama’s goal as an attack on services is simply to lie. Worse: those exact same cost cuts were previously supported and endorsed by Ryan. He flip-flopped in order to fall into line and create an error-based line of attack on Obama. Worse again: the Ryan plan for Medicare – the one that is now official Republican policy – actually does reduce services. It does so through the backdoor of rationing. By foisting the responsibility of health care back onto the shoulders of the elderly, and by limiting the amount they can spend, via fixing the value of the vouchers they will receive, the Ryan plan actively seeks to reduce the services a person can afford. So the Republicans are setting out to do, in fact, what they wrongly vilify Obama for trying to do

The stench of hypocrisy has never been more thick.

Nor has the fog of obfuscation.

Neither Romney nor Ryan offered any specifics about their economic plans. We are supposed to fall into line behind their warm personalities and tough guy experience. And then simply trust them. Their numbers don’t add up, so we are assured they will – eventually. The only thing that is not vague is the unrelenting attack on the very vulnerable whom we are also assured the Republicans will protect. Quite how that protection will work while services and budgets are slashed, and taxes on the wealthy are reduced, we are never told.

The entire Republican platform is a mean spirited, vicious, and class based attack on the weak and the less well off. It is profoundly anti-social, and condemns millions of Americans to a lifetime of poverty and ill-health. But it is wrapped in warm fuzzy all-American mythology and endless references to happy times. That too is not new. That too is a lie.

I am sorry. Electing a president based upon the warmth of personality got us Bush. It brought us Reagan. It brought us both Clinton and Obama. It also brought us a depression.

It’s time to elect someone with a program to fix things. Romney’s plan is no such program. It’s tired. It’s old. It’s been done over and over. And it’s failed.

We need to move on. I don’t know whether Obama can lead us forward. We now know Romney has no plan and no intention of doing so.

No wonder people are confused and apprehensive. We are leaderless.