Back in the early days of the Obama Administration when the Republicans were fighting so hard to block expansion of the Childrens Health Insurance Program, Senator Charles Grassley was bemoaning how "devastating" to the private insurance industry how such expansion would be. There one insurance company is/was located in his home state of Iowa in the city of Des Moine, that deserves to be put out of business! That company was American Republic Insurance Company. Because of my mild to moderate ulcerative colitis (which is well controlled), that company would not touch me with a "ten-foot colonoscope" with respect to offering me any form of health insurance product, but would sell me a badly overpriced life insurance product. At the same time, when no company would underwrite my late wife for any new life insurance product because of her recently discovered polycystic kidney condition, they would offer he a health insurance product, with any form of kidney condition excluded from coverage, of course. One year later, at the urging of the then family financial advisor, the product was to be dropped. In the state of Kansas, a salesman is allowed under these circumstances to make a last ditch sales call. When it became obvious that the life insurance product was going to be replace, he told, out of frustration of an article that appeared in one of its internal company publication in which the underwriters were chortling over how "cute and clever" they were in that they would issue health insurance for a skydiver, but not life insurance!
You say you are "a poor person who receives an extremely generous amount of government aid." Don't you see that a Paul Ryan type of plan would remove that and leave you destitute?
Having accused President Obama of being foreign, too European, Romney/Ryan are certainly ready to embrace European austerity measures, which we all know are NOT working too well.
It boggles ones mind that they are still sticking to cutting taxes for the wealthiest,saddling the middle class with more taxes (how does that sit with Grover Norquist?), and the poor even more poor by reducing social services, hoping against all hope that those job creators will actually create some jobs for which they've had more than 12 years to prove themselves as saviors of the middle class - NOT!
Ryan - a good Catholic? Nonsense - has he ever asked himself "what would Jesus do?" for the poor? Ayn Rand, an atheist (although I have nothing against atheism) as his driving force and inspiration to go into politics? How does he reconcile this other than suddenly distancing himself from her?
This is why nothing appears to be working in the US. Imagine Paul Ryan voted for the US to go to a war that the Congress forgot to include in its budget. There appears to be a lot of amnesia in budgetary planning on Capitol Hill. The rich appear to be forgotten in the shared sacrifice of budgetary planning. Instead, the poor are being asked to perform more miracles by the Ryan budget and to turn water into wine. In these times, it is to turn garbage green -- literally -- into dollar bills.
In addition, could you imagine running a country in the absence of well researched data but based on a person's personal predilections. One only has to go through C-Span's videos to see Republican representatives sharing their personal stories on why certain policies should be adopted and can work. For how many decades now, it has been proven that when more is given to the rich, they demand more and find secret bank accounts to stash the excess. Yet, Ryan's budget unrealistically seeks more income for the rich, the logic being that if poor people have less assistance, they will be forced to extract blood out of stones. The exception has become the norm in the Republican House of Dreams.
So right. Defeatism and apathy are the biggest obstacles to positive change. The truth is, I cannot change another person. I can only change me. If I change me, maybe the other person will notice and think about changing themselves. If enough of us see the value is these changes, we can change the world. I hope enough people see the value in reducing our footprint on the planet in time to slow or reverse the damage we have already done. I would like to believe my great grandchildren will not inherit a dying planet.
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