The GOP’s Dead-End Path to Prosperity

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13186/the_gops_dead_end_path_to_prosperity


Mitt Romney may rue the day he called Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal “marvelous,” as if he were describing a splendid buffet at the mansion of a friend. The plan from the influential, youthful Republican chair of the House budget committee does offer people like Mitt and his rich buddies tasty goodies – $10 trillion in preserved and fresh millionaire-friendly tax cuts (over a decade), to be followed later with rollbacks in financial, environmental and every other regulation.

But if President Obama is politically vulnerable on the weak recovery of the economy, Romney will be increasingly vulnerable in the presidential race for embracing Ryan’s plan – if the Democrats make clear the dangers it poses for the vast majority of Americans, the servants at Romney’s “marvelous” policy buffet. Declaring the presidential race starkly as a “make-or-break moment for the middle class,” Obama told Associated Press editors in April that in the much-different budgets he and Ryan have proposed, voters face a “choice between competing visions of our future [that] has [not in recent memory] been so unambiguously clear.”

The Ryan-Romney plan is further to the Right – and more hurtful to average Americans – than anything from Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, Obama said. Calling it “thinly veiled social Darwinism,” he argued that his “centrist” approach has historically drawn support even from Republicans, from Lincoln to Eisenhower, who saw government as a way to “do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”

Few Americans may know what social Darwinism means, though many – especially the rich – do believe superior people naturally dominate society through harsh competition. (On the other hand, we can hope the anti-evolution religious Right will stay home in November rather than vote for Romney, a disciple of Darwin – even if 19th-century English philosopher Herbert Spencer was the real social Darwinist.)