It’s election day folks and the Facebooks are filled with insipid personal thoughts (including this blog), the Twitters are rife with racism towards #election2012 and everyone seems sharply divided on who to vote for, which leaves this intrepid word smith to believe we won’t know who the President is until at least one recount.
But amidst all of this cave-man (and woman) chest pounding, no one can clearly articulate from an issues standpoint why they are selecting either candidate beyond the sound bites of Romney is for the rich and Obama is for the poor.
Seriously, look at these fucking platforms and will become eminently clear that both Obama and Romney could (will) keep borrowing from China and still couldn’t afford to buy a clue.
Here’s just a snapshot of their brilliant ideas.
Mitt’s Monstrosities
Eliminate Title X Family Planning Funding — Savings: $300 Million. Title X subsidizes family planning programs that benefit abortion groups like Planned Parenthood.
Read Malcom Gladwell’s Freakonomics Mr. Romney, especially the part about crime decrease in NY in the 1990s. Please, let’s have a bunch of unwanted children so they can rob me of my car keys and wallet when I’m 55. Unless you have a plan to stop people from fucking, this is a really bad idea.
- Reduce Waste And Fraud — Savings: $60 Billion. The federal government made $125 billion in improper payments last year. Cutting that amount in half through stricter enforcement and harsher penalties yields returns many times over on the investment.
- Align Federal Employee Compensation With The Private Sector — Savings: $47 Billion. Federal compensation exceeds private sector levels by as much as 30 to 40 percent when benefits are taken into account. This must be corrected.
- Repeal The Davis-Bacon Act — Savings: $11 Billion. Davis-Bacon forces the government to pay above-market wages, insulating labor unions from competition and driving up project costs by approximately 10 percent.
- Reduce The Federal Workforce By 10 Percent Via Attrition — Savings: $4 Billion. Despite widespread layoffs in the private sector, President Obama has continued to grow the federal payrolls. The federal workforce can be reduced by 10 percent through a “1-for-2” system of attrition, thereby reducing the number of federal employees while allowing the introduction of new talent into the federal service.
- Consolidate agencies and streamline processes to cut costs and improve results in everything from energy permitting to worker retraining to trade negotiation.
This isn’t bad shit, but I ask what agencies will you get rid of? Oh, and on what day after taking office do you plan on killing Congress or can we just expect you to sidestep them like the last GOP President? Pretty words, but HOW????
Here are some words from Mitt on corporate taxes…
- Cut the corporate rate to 25 percent
- Strengthen and make permanent the R&D tax credit
- Switch to a territorial tax system
- Repeal the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
Corporations already don’t pay taxes. Anyone who is still stateside has more than enough loopholes, just ask GE. Everyone else is already in other countries, again thanks to the last guy in the white house part of the grand ole’ GOP.
- Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates
- Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gains
- Eliminate taxes for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 on interest, dividends, and capital gains
- Eliminate the Death Tax
- Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
How are you paying for this, use your chin to cut some diamonds?
Barry’s Bastardizations
President Obama has put forward a specific, balanced plan of spending cuts and revenue increases that reduce the deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, including $1 trillion in spending cuts he signed into law last summer as part of a deal with congressional Republicans.
Why didn’t we do this 4 years ago? Right, because we can’t.
President Obama knows we can’t simply cut our way to prosperity. His budget includes investments in education, manufacturing, and infrastructure, while bringing discretionary spending to its lowest level as a share of the economy in more than 50 years .
I’m surprised the nonsensical nature of this statement didn’t rip a hole in the space/time continuum. How do you cut while spending?????? Investment requires money. We have none. This is like a homeless guy eating a cheeseburger and then convincing the cook he still has a cheeseburger and he got paid for it when neither are true. .
President Obama has a plan to bring jobs back to the U.S. by eliminating tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, and creating incentives for businesses to bring jobs back to America.
Offshoring has plagued this country for 12 years; we just recognize this is a problem now? I don’t buy it, there’s a reason this wasn’t done sooner.
President Obama cut taxes for every American worker and provided 18 tax cuts for small businesses to help them weather the recession. Now, he’s calling on millionaires and billionaires to pay a little bit more so that we can pay down our debt in a balanced way.
Nope, that was George W. Bush so we would forget about 9/11 with a big screen TV in every home.
Manufacturing is an essential building block of our economy because it sparks innovation, generates higher-wage jobs, and strengthens entire communities. After declining for over a decade, the manufacturing sector has rebounded – led by President Obama’s rescue of the auto industry– and created 479,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2010. To build on this recovery, President Obama set a goal to create 1 million new manufacturing jobs by the end of 2016 and is working to double American exports over the next five years by promoting U.S. goods and removing trade barriers, expanding access to credit, and promoting strong growth.
If it was 1824 I would agree Manufacturing is the future.
Some wonderful wish lists not based in a lick of pragmatism or ideas on how we will accomplish these lofty goals especially with those two other persnickety branches of government.
I’m voting Libertarian this year because we need to break the system before it will reset properly. Gary Johnson has some real revenue builders on the horizon and I know he isn’t backed by the 54 (yes that’s literal) special interest groups that called me to support Romney.
