The Radical Republican Future of America Part 2

Do you remember the old man begging on the streets of El Salvador? Under the Romney-Ryan plan, that's you, if you are a man, in the United States. Ryan's budget calls for replacing Medicare (as we have it today) with "Medicare," which gives you a stipend—completely at the whim of the political party in power— and not a guaranteed benefit that will care for you in your old age.

After all, insurance companies are really hustling to get older, more infirm people, better health care, aren't they? Answer "yes" to this, and I'd like to move to the planet you're on. Ah, but now the Republicans are calling the Democrats out for having radically cut Medicare—over 700 Billion dollars!

I'm shocked! Democrats, cutting Medicare? How is this possible? This is one of their pet projects—to provide access to medical care for everyone. So what's really being done here? Firstly, Paul Ryan (who proposed a bill in the House of Representatives to end Medicare and change it into a stipend—see below) knows that he cannot get the votes of seniors based on ending Medicare. So, they're very interested in confusing the issue and "re-defining" the Democrats as Big Medicare Cutters. This is despite the CBO's assertions that the $716 billion "cut" to Medicare is actually a savings. Additionally, CNN and the AARP did their own studies and they found the savings over 10 years is based on reducing "gifts" to insurance companies that the Bush Administration built into Medicare Part D (something insurance companies are not happy about) and savings due to decreased waste and fraud. CNN did a fact check on this and I think it will result in Governor Sununu refusing to accept invitations to talk to CNN reporters. He doesn't like being called out on the air. I worked with Soledad O'Brien when she was at NBC and she's a smart cookie.

But we have to cut, right? Frankly, that's false. Republicans want to spread Amnesia Dust all over all Americans who lived through the 1990s, when everyone's taxes increased by a little bit under Clinton and the annual budget showed a surplus in his last year in office. And in the 1990s, we had very low unemployment!

Women in El Salvador have frighteningly low status.
VP candidate Paul Ryan wants American women
to suffer the same.

Here is what Romney's running mate wants: He wants those darned "uppity women" to stop thinking that they can have any of their freedoms. He wants to limit a woman's ability to use contraception. He wants women to go to jail if they have an abortion, just like El Salvador. He voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Act that gives women equal pay for equal work so, if you are a man married to a woman, the money she brings in will be the same money any man will make for the same work and, if you are a woman, you cannot be forced (either by companies ordering people to not tell anyone else what they earn or by companies that discriminate openly against women) to accept 77¢ for every $1.00 a man makes. He also wants to pass a "Personhood" amendment to the United States Constitution—something that very conservative Mississippi refused to pass.

In essence, he wants to reduce the status of American women to that of women in El Salvador. In the last ten years, the murder of women in El Salvador has increased five-fold. And the level of violence used against the women is higher in those murders than in men. In fact, Paul Ryan voted to redefine rape for American women as only provable if deadly force was used against the woman. If you are a woman, if you are married to a woman, if you know women and have friends who are women, you don't want this person in any position of power. Ever.

Source Data: CBO Historical Tables

Republicans want to cut, cut, cut. They talk about "discretionary spending" as if it were bad. They talk about "entitlements" as if they were not earned and are—thus—a "handout" to lazy people. Here's where "discretionary spending" isn't so "discretionary." The military. The 2009 U.S. military budget accounted for approximately 40% of global arms spending. The 2012 budget is 6-7 times larger than the $106 billions of the military budget of China, and is more than the next twenty largest military spenders combined. And, according to the GAO, the US Department of Defense has made its financial statements unauditable. When that report came out, Congress "let them slide," ordering the Department of Defense to achieve audit-readiness by 2017.

If the SEC or the IRS ordered a business audit only to be told that the business would be audit-ready "in five years," if they had a question about filings or taxes, the business would be shut down. Look at the table above. It shows Medicare and Medicaid (red) as well as Social Security (green) are taking up 43% of federal spending. But both of those outlays have actual income that is not the general fund. In other words, there is actual income directed at those two programs. And that 43% of our federal budget keeps old men, like the one above in El Salvador, off American streets with a beggar's bowl in front of him. But look at defense spending in blue. it's 20% of our total spending and that doesn't count stuff like nuclear arms research, and other stuff that is hidden from up in the orange "Discretionary" category.

Back in 1990 we were supposed to get a savings from the end of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. We were supposed to end the Cold War. Recently, Governor Romney announced that the Russians is America’s top geopolitical adversary. This actually made Republicans wince. Do we really need this large military?!

The only area where the military is cut these days is on base housing, which is abysmal. I have a friend who has had to submit to a ceiling collapse (she moved out with her infant son) and, most recently, with an improper plumbing installation that may result in another ceiling collapse, an apartment infested with mold or worse (she's hoping that's repaired by the time she gets back from a trip).

So what are we left with? Well, Republicans told us after Katrina that we "couldn't afford to rebuild New Orleans." Of course, the results now are obvious—they don't have that pesky Democratic enclave with all of those voters in New Orleans any more. They've been dispersed throughout the South, where they can't gather together in a nice, big Democratic voting bloc.

While Republicans were doing this, they wrote laws for Iraq that gave every Iraqi a right to healthcare. Essentially, those Republicans who think Americans ought not have a right to see a doctor think Iraqis ought to.

We're left with an infrastructure that there is no interest in repairing or even maintaining. Gee, this takes us right back to El Salvador again. For the most part, roads in Central America are horrible. The Pan-American Highway, which stretches from Canada all the way south to Tierra del Fuego is a "highway" in name only. It's a mud track in parts of Costa Rica and disappears entirely in the Darien region of Panama.

Look carefully at the Central-American road to the left. This is what our streets will look like in just a few years under Republican "leadership." They have consistently voted down all infrastructure bills in the House of Representatives since they took the majority—and remember: They ran on jobs, jobs, jobs in 2010. I still don't see those jobs.

So, America under Republicans looks a whole lot like El Salvador. Beggars on every street corner. Bad roads. A complete inability to rebuild after a natural disaster. Oh, but we'd be different: We would have the most well-funded military of anyone in the world!

When Developing Nations have big militaries, we consider them a threat. Since Republicans want to take America back to Developing Nation status, would we be the threat?