Some on the far right have also contributed to our current state of affairs but liberalism by far is destroying us from within. We are surrounded by nothing but divisive rhetoric that is ment to serve 2 purposes at the expense of our nation. 1: divide the electorate. 2: re-elect Obama.
I have always been a republican and I have never strived to have dirty water, poor neighbors, uninsured neighbors, dead elderly, dirty air or any other such nonsense. But that is exactly what is said about those of my ilk.
My Sig has never been more appropriate.
I found that the Republican party in my lifetime has changed to the degree that it excludes someone like me.
I have never strived for dirty water or air either, but the policies this once great party now has is to let big polluters do what they want and regulate themselves.
If I'm not striving for dirty water or air, how can I support a party that is by their actions or inaction?
The Republican party's platform was cap-and-trade until the last 2 years, when that became the devil's work because a Democratic President supports the idea of big polluters taking responsibility for themselves.
Republicans put it forward first. I support it, but now they don't anymore.
Conservatives put forward the individual mandate. Conservatives enacted it. Conservative courts upheld it, including the SCOTUS. But now that a Democratic President supported it and then passed it, it became the devil's work.
I still support it because I support no free riders and I support people who share that view as well and I don't care if it's Obama or Romney or Ron Paul or whoever.
The tax policy in this country is still firmly gripped in a conservative headlock. Tax revenue represents about 14% of our GDP. That figure should be closer to 18%. That's where it was in the boom periods under Reagan and Clinton.
So letting some tax cuts expire on people who don't need them and saving $70 billion or so a year by letting them expire on folks like Obama and Romney seems fair to me. Seems conservative. If you can't afford something, you have to correct the mistake, and I like the idea of saving nearly a trillion over a decade.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes after he realized that he cut them too deeply in his first year in office. A boom period followed.
A liberal President wishes to cut the amount of corporate welfare that our tax dollars go to support. We could save another half trillion or more over a decade by scaling back what we dole out to multi-nationals that are doing just fine on their own. Seems a rather conservative thing to do.
So, we'll just have to agree to disagree, but the way I see it, America is locked in a right-wing headlock that says we can't pass anything that might help us out.
The only liberal policy I have seen enacted over the last 4 years is the repeal of DADT, and that's surely not the reason why our economy is still only sputtering along.
40% of the stimulus was middle class tax cuts. Hardly liberalism at work there.
The real problem in America is a total lack of common sense within a party that isn't even Republican anymore because that would mean you put the republic before your own petty interests, like screwing around with women's health care and trying to control their every decision.
A Republican should work with a Democratic President who is supportive of conservative ideas like the mandate, like cap-and-trade and like the Dream Act, which was a conservative idea first.
