To the editor:
I want to laugh when I hear Romney or Ryan blame President Obama for the deficits. Do they think we can't remember how we got here? These are a result of the unpaid Bush-era tax cuts, the credit-card wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the horrendous downturn in 2009. Only a very small slice of the deficit is the result of Obama's spending and that was to recover from the former Republican administration's mistakes. Have we forgotten the bank failures, seizing up of credit, plunging stock market, housing bubble burst and the universal fear that we would end up in another Great Depression? I haven't.
What's Romney's solution? Less regulation of Wall Street, more tax cuts for the wealthy, and increase defense spending by $2 trillion. He says he can pay for tax cuts and defense spending but doesn't show us how the math would work or what non-defense spending he'd cut except public television. The only plan that he supports for reducing the deficit is to turn Medicare into a voucher plan which is estimated to cost future seniors an additional $6,400. I can picture Granny now at 80 and in failing health trying to buy health insurance.
If Romney's solution for deficit reduction and job creation sounds familiar, it should. It was tried before under Reagan and Bush. Reagan lowered taxes on the wealthy, increased defense spending and exploded the debt which led to a recession in 1990. Bush lowered the taxes on the wealthy, increased defense spending, failed to regulate Wall Street and handed over the reins of government to Obama with the Great Recession's 750,000 monthly job losses. Bush even tried to privatize Social Security which would have turned trillions of tax dollars over to Wall Street.
These economic Republican aristocrats have opposed every effort over the last century to provide economic and political security and equality for the middle class. They opposed Republican Teddy Roosevelt when he fought against the corrupting power of large corporations; they opposed Democrat Franklin Roosevelt when he created Social Security; and they opposed Democrat Lyndon Johnson when he signed Medicare into law.
By opposing any tax increases on the wealthy and by insisting on huge increases in defense spending, this extreme right wing faction (which is all that is left in the Republican Party) is guaranteeing even more deficits until we are bankrupt and the only alternative is to eliminate programs like Social Security and Medicare or to minimize them to make them ineffective.
President Bill Clinton left office with a balanced budget, with projected surpluses in the trillions and with 23 million jobs created, and - imagine this - did this without lowering taxes on the wealthy. So we have a choice. Which model for bringing down the deficit and creating jobs works and which one does not? I think we know the answer. Choose Obama's plan for continued economic recovery and deficit reduction.
Gary Gill
Lewistown
