In the State of the Union speech President Obama pointed to the signs of the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession of 2008; the rise in the stock market and the increase of corporate profits. National progress has never been measured by these yardsticks alone. Progress must be measured by the success of all our people, not only the filthy rich. To make this assessment, there were a number of things that were not mentioned in the address. For example, unemployment, poverty, trade deficit and outsourcing did not receive any mention. Senator Bernie Sanders noted that to come to an appropriate public policy the President should pay attention to the facts that the middle class is collapsing, poverty is increasing, and the gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider.
American workers are worse off than they were a decade ago. Foreclosures and health-insurance premiums are going through the roof. The jobless rate is still above 9 percent and there are at least 1.5 million people who have been out of work for at least 99 weeks, and therefore are ineligible to receive unemployment benefits. According to Republican Congressman Paul Ryan who gave the Republican response to Obama’s speech, this is a time in which our social safety net is transformed into a hammock in which able-bodied people are lulled into lives of complacency and dependency. He further noted “We need to reclaim our American system of limiting government, low taxes (except for the rich, my comment: HWT) , reasonable regulations, and sound money, which has blessed us with unprecedented prosperity. And, it has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed. That is the real secret of job creation - not borrowing and spending more money in Washington.”
Mr. Ryan’s Republican colleagues in the House voted in January to give him (as Chairman of the House Budget Committee) unilateral, unprecedented authority to set spending limits from everything from defense to education. He laid out all his monetary plans in a document he called the Roadmap for America’s Future. In it is a plan for healthcare reform: i) destroy Medicare and replace it with fixed dollar vouchers with which the seniors have to find for themselves an insurance company willing to cover them, ii) raise the age of Medicare eligibility. In addition, he favors the idea of privatizing Social Security and raising the retirement age. He also wanted to repeal the health care bill despite the independent non-partisan Congressional Budget Office telling us that this repeal would add $230 billion more to the deficit. Another item in the plan is to reduce all non-defense discretionary spending back to 2006 levels. The winners in Ryan’s roadmap are the rich whose taxes would be cut. The losers are the bottom 95 percent of percent of American wage earners whose taxes would be increased. The top 0.1 percent would see an average tax cut of $1.7 million every year.
The Republican Roadmap abandons the commitments made to all Americans over the past century by cutting away large parts of the social safety net. Seniors would experience growing retirement insecurity, and expensive or inadequate health care coverage. The top 5 percent will be happy, but for the rest the clock will be turned back on the social progress made since the Great Depression. The Roadmap sharply cuts away from the American values of fairness, financial security and dignity for all Americans.
Democrats should never let this happen!