I beg to differ

I was surprised by this New York Times letter writer's lack of awareness of Republican moves to suppress voting so I sent in the following response...

Ms. Goldberg (Letters, Nov. 7) laments long lines to vote and posits that all sides will agree that it should not take hours to cast a vote.  But Republican-controlled state legislatures and Republican election officials demonstrated just the opposite.  Two of the more extreme examples were in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio. In Florida, Governor Rick Scott refused to reinstate early voting on Sunday in the face of intolerably long lines.  In Ohio, Republican secretary of state John Husted tried, unsuccessfully, to ban early voting during the final days before the election. Across the country, Republicans worked to erect barriers to voting. Ms. Goldberg’s assertion does not stand up to the facts. 

The letter I responded to:

To the Editor:

I write this letter with icy cold hands after spending more than an hour on line outside my polling place. How can our nation invest so much time and money on federal elections, only to have the voting process be managed so ineptly?

I suspect that this is one point on which all sides will agree: It should not take hours to cast a vote in a country where we have more than 200 years of experience at the polls.

SUZANNE B. GOLDBERG
New York, Nov. 6, 2012

Republican Storyline: Fact or Fiction?

I've been on the sidelines too long. We must elevate the national discourse. Here's my attempt, my latest letter to the editor.

Our country faces substantial challenges. While there will always be differences about the policies needed to surmount them, we can only achieve success through an honest debate based on accurate representation of facts. Sadly, truth is in short supply in the Republican Party.

Mitt Romney says that more jobs have been lost during President Obama’s tenure than any president since Hoover. Newt Gingrich accuses Obama of being the “food stamp president.” Both candidates ignore the fact that Obama inherited an economy in worse condition than any time since the Depression. It is dishonest to hold Obama accountable for the 3 million jobs lost during the first six months of his administration, the disastrous legacy of Bush’s fiscal mismanagement, while not recognizing the economic recovery for which his policies are responsible. Since June 2009, Obama has added 1.2 million jobs to the economy, more than half of what Bush added during his entire eight year tenure.

Romney recently claimed that “I’m not terribly worried about the very wealthiest in our society. They’re doing just fine.” So why does his proposed tax plan, as analyzed by the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, afford the wealthiest 1% tax breaks that are three times larger, in percentage terms, than the bottom 80%?

Republicans say that creating jobs is their top priority, but stood in the way of a payroll tax break for 160 million workers (that Moody’s Analytics estimated would add 750,000 jobs) because it was to be paid by a small tax increase for the wealthiest Americans. Their alternative was to lay off 10% of the federal workforce, which would only exacerbate the problem. And lest one assume that Republican administrations lead to smaller government, the facts prove otherwise. President Reagan increased nonmilitary payroll by nearly one-quarter million. George W. Bush increased it by 53,000. Under Obama, the federal workforce is smaller than it was when Reagan took office, in no small part due to the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, which lowered the federal payroll by 380,000.

We need to evaluate the Republican storyline carefully; it’s apt to be more fiction than fact.

"News Flash": Drill, baby, drill won't work

There were a lot of things that disgusted me about the Republican convention--generally centering on playing loose with facts, mean-spiritedness and hypocrisy.  This is one of them, captured in my latest "letter to the editor".  More to be covered in upcoming posts.

John McCain, in his nomination acceptance speech, decried the incompetence of his own party over the past eight years. At the same time, he smiled gleefully in response to his Republican delegates’ chants of “drill, baby, drill”. Electing John McCain President will ensure four more years of incompetence, because he so willingly ignores the facts.

The United States has 2% of the world’s proven oil reserves, but consumes one-quarter of global oil production. According to the Energy Information Administration, expanded offshore drilling would not have a “significant” impact on oil production for more than two decades. The EIA also predicts that drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Preserve would reduce dependence on foreign oil, by 2030, only “slightly”. “News flash” for John McCain and Sarah Palin: we aren’t going to drill our way to energy independence.

According to three Nobel laureates in economics, McCain’s proposed gas tax holiday would generate “major” profits for big oil while doing little to lower prices at the pump. Is that what McCain means by “fighting for you”?

We need an administration and Congress that will make policy decisions based on facts, not chants; an administration which defines “you” as average Americans, not large corporations. That’s why I’m voting for Barack Obama for President and Jim Himes for Congress. They have sensible, fact-based energy policies that will move us towards energy independence, create jobs and wean us off of environmentally harmful fossil fuels. And they will promote energy efficiency and conservation, concepts that McCain and Palin aggressively disdain.

McCain's Economic Illiteracy

By his own admission (to the Wall Street Journal in 2005 and The Boston Globe in 2007, see John McCain on Meet the Press) John McCain is not an expert on economic policy. If anybody doubts this, he proved it with his remarks about the recent employment report. In response to the loss of 80,000 jobs in March, McCain, in a  press release, called for lower taxes and less regulation as a solution to creating job growth.

Under the current administration, overall federal income tax rates are at historically low levels. Yet the overall growth rate of private sector employment during George W. Bush’s administration is the second worst performance since World War II (his dad gets honors for the worst performance). Contrast this with the Clinton record, where despite tax increases, job growth outpaced Bush’s record by a factor of four. This certainly dispels the Republican mantra that the only way to grow the economy is by cutting taxes.

As for less regulation, the cause of the current financial market distress appears to be completely lost on the Republican nominee for president. More, not less, regulatory oversight of the subprime mortgage market could have reigned in the excesses of the imprudent lending and financing practices that are the very cause of the economic downturn that McCain believes less regulation would alleviate.

Regulation serves the purpose of policing markets where the actions of individual players can harm more than just themselves. Surely the current situation, where the reckless actions of companies like Bear Stearns are driving the economy into recession and seriously threatening the stability of financial markets, is proof positive of the need for regulation.

So when John McCain says “The American people cannot afford the Democrats and their economic leadership”, you might want to think twice. It’s time to put somebody in the White House who will put aside dogma in favor of an informed economic policy. Clearly that person is not John McCain.