A Mitt Romney Victory Would End America's Recovery

   "If you’re looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple : Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive".

   Vice president Joe Biden said these words last April at New York University Law School during a policy speech, and it’d be hard to find one sentence that illustrates the hypocrisy that pervades GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s lying campaign ads attacking Barack Obama’s foreign and domestic achievements over the span of his administration. Just examining the above two issues would be enough to draw the simple distinction between America’s all-time greatest political flip-flopper and a man who took the reins 3 1/2 years ago from the worst presidency of our history and has done yeoman work against unceasing Republican obstruction to rectify nearly every mess he and his team inherited.

   It should be easy for all aware voters to remember Romney’s ludicrous downplaying during his 2008 presidential run of the absolute importance most Americans attached to capturing bin Laden ("It’s not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person"). And it’s even easier to recollect his disgraceful 2008 op-ed column calling for the federal government to let General Motors and Chrysler go bankrupt, right after Obama’s election victory ("If General Motors and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye"). 

   As we all know now, the president made the correct decisions on both issues, leaving the greatest single threat to the security of every American citizen dead, while concurrently resurrecting the United States’ automobile industry to its current heights.

   These are just two reasons why the smiling, "presidential-appearing" Romney would be a disastrous choice to replace Barack Obama next year. But there’s so much more, an absolute litany of recent stated opinions and policy beliefs that would be total anathema to our nation’s ongoing recovery from the nightmarish George W. Bush era, a recovery that in almost every issue save for the current 8.3% unemployment numbers is obvious to any impartial observer.

   1. Romney’s carping about Obama’s supposed failure re: job creation is disingenuous on every imaginable level. America lost 779,000 jobs in January 2009 ALONE, an ugly parting shot from the real economy-destroyer, the Bush/Cheney administration. Obama has presided over a 29-month stretch of continuous job growth nationally, a fact that the GOP would like us all to forget.

   Our unemployment figures have little or nothing to do with any current presidential policies, actually being caused by the uneasy European financial situation that has scuttled much of our overseas trade with the affected nations, as well as by many American businesses correctly making sure that our economic indicators continue to rise before resuming abundant hiring. But more importantly the Republican party in Washington has deliberately held national hiring growth hostage, as planned, for the past 3 years by refusing to pass Obama’s Jobs Act, an initiative that would’ve created over 2 million public-sector jobs this year alone.

   2. Unless you’re earning millions of dollars annually in salary, vote for Mitt Romney at your peril. A Romney administration will definitely be a huge tax boon for the wealthy, as he will extend the Bush tax cuts that immediately threw the United States from surplus to deficit spending back in 2001, while simultaneously slashing a plethora of social programs and raising taxes on America’s middle class. In short, if you earn $1 million per year, your tax cut will be around $87,000 under the Romney plan. And if you earn $200,000 or less your taxes go up, in some cases dramatically. Check out data from the non-partisan Brookings Institution for the sobering specifics.   

   3. Romney is also amazingly claiming (with absolutely no specifics, naturally) that his administration will be able to balance our budget and lower the national debt, while at the same time adding $2.1 trillion to defense programs (!), along with gifting an average 20% tax cut for all Americans by slashing federal tax rates by 1/5. Keep in mind that we already spend more on our military than the world’s next ten nations combined. And don’t forget that the above proposed cuts add up to $500 billion of lost federal revenue for 2013. How does that bring down our current deficit?  

      This is the type of pie-in-the-sky arithmetic-challenged foolishness that plays well to Romney’s target audience until the ones who care actually DO the arithmetic, while leaving the rest of us shaking our heads in disbelief. But at least it gives intelligent voters just another in a long line of GOP-caused examples to point to as to why "TRICKLE-DOWN" DOESN’T WORK.