R i g h t a r d i a: The Party of No

Saturday, July 13, 2013

The Party of No

If you have been watching the Republicans at the state and national level, certain trends are obvious.

Any GOP economic legislation is designed to favor the affluent and corporations, not citizens. In the case of the affluent, the GOP has blocked attempts of the Obama administration to make the tax system in the US more progressive and to reform the Bush tax cuts that favored the rich.

An example of GOP favored legislation that affect corporations is the Keystone XL Pipeline. First, the GOP claimed that the pipeline would create 40,000 short term jobs. The real number is actually closer to 4,000, I More importantly, this pipeline doesn't not benefit domestic oil production because the oil that flows through the pipeline is for export.

The Keystone XL pipeline is about energy industry profits and there is a significant environmental risk associated with the pipeline which is pressured and heated.

A great deal of GOP legislation is also focused on peripheral social issues of a prescriptive nature.
This is why the GOP is refereed to as the Party of No. Now welfare such as food stamps, no birth control for women, no abortion, no employment benefits, no unions and no sick leave.

The GOP id desperately trying to overturn a conservative reform to US medical care. Us medical care costs twice as much as the other industrial counties of the world and worse, only 75 per cent of the population had medical insurance. The Affordable Care Act got rid of lifetime medical insurance caps and pre-existing conditions. Parents can bring their children under their medical insurance umbrella until age 26.

Insurance companies must refund premium money to policy holders if the company doesn't spend 80 percent of more of its revenues on the policy holders medical expenses. That alone is enough to make a greedy corporatist cry.

The GOP rarely creates any programs that benefit people unless the program is privatized. Medicare advantage is good example. This privatized version of Medicare is subsidized by traditional medicare to the tune of $900 per medicare participant.

As of 2008, the federal government spent 12 percent more on Medicare Advantage than it did for comparable care under traditional Medicare. These subsidies (which added an additional $14 billion to the Medicare program last year alone) will gradually be reduced until payments to Medicare Advantage are in line with the cost of traditional Medicare.

The prescription drug program, Medicare part D, was an unfunded GW Bush initiative. About one-third of the people who use Medicare Advantage are enrolled in the prescription drug program.

There you have it. A political party is not people oriented, a a party that likes to proscribe what people can do, and party that doesn't do much for Americans unless it involves privatization.

Subscribe to the Rightardia feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/UFPYA