A spectre is haunting America -- the spectre of Libertarianism. To illustrate the point,
Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan as his running mate.
After a a quick scan of the reaction from Blogistan Left, I haven't seen a single "Uh oh." From
HuffPo:
If Romney were to win with Ryan on the ticket, he would have a mandate to make sweeping changes not only to the size of government, but to programs like Medicare and Medicaid that are products of former President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program.
The Randroids have been aching for this fight. Very well: If we must have it, let's have it. Let's make this election about Medicare and Social Security.
Last year, an ABC News poll found that...
...65 percent of Americans oppose changing Medicare to a system in which the government would give seniors vouchers with which to buy private insurance. Opposition was essentially the same in a Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey when the idea came up 15 years ago.
The language may matter, in that even most Republicans, 56 percent, oppose Medicare vouchers, as do more than seven in 10 Democrats. And opposition soars to 84 percent of all Americans, including nearly three-quarters of Republicans, if government payments failed to meet the full cost of seniors' insurance coverage.
They're quite the pair, Romney and Ryan: One of them avoids taxes by using schemes available only to the ultra-rich, while the other insists that the U.S. lacks the revenue to pay for Grandma's surgery.
Of course, Ryan has a history of advocating
tax loopholes for his donors. He has also applied the label "class warfare" to any attempt to raise taxes on the very affluent, even as he advocates
raising taxes on the middle class. Ryan's proposed budget would have given away
trillions of dollars to corporations:
In all, those tax breaks amount to a $3 trillion giveaway to the richest Americans and corporations, according to the Tax Policy Center. Repealing the repatriation tax would add roughly $130 billion to that.
This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ryan insisted that the plan would generate the same amount of revenue as the government currently receives. In true Ryan form, though, he wouldn’t say how...
If Romney loses, blame the Tea Party. They forced him to veer right at a time when candidates traditionally play to the center. Choosing Ryan will please the hard-liners and the Ayn Randroids, but it will alienate many swing state voters.
Given the many failures of our current president, Romney should be jogging miles ahead of Obama by now. The teabaggers fitted the Republican candidate with iron running shoes. I hope the GOP leadership understands this lesson. Then again, if they didn't learn from the Sharron Angle debacle, perhaps they are unteachable.
What a posthumous triumph for Ayn Rand! History may say that ghost of the Great Cigarette Hag destroyed the Republican party in what should have been their year of gold. The GOP could have had the strength of Atlas, but they chose to shrug.
