If one bases the rebuttal of the President’s speech on a false premise that is diametrically opposed to what the speech was about, it makes the rebuttal at best disingenuous if not outright false.
Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity.
But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems. That the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough and control enough. And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.
This idea – that our problems were caused by a government that was too small – it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.
And the idea that more taxes and more government spending is the best way to help hardworking middle class taxpayers – that’s an old idea that’s failed every time it’s been tried.
His entire speech is encapsulated in the above multitude of lies. The president has never spoken about government being too small. He has spoken about right sizing government for the job and not right sizing to ensure the hoarding of capital by the real takers in our society, those that manipulate capital without a real day’s work.
It is ludicrous to assert that the economy was brought down by reckless government policies as opposed to a deficit in government regulations, that allowed the bankers to decimate the world’s economies for the gain of a few. It was the bankers, the private sector that created financial instruments like CDS and CDOs to get around government regulations. Many of these unregulated instruments (derivatives) had no assets backing them and when one collapsed, the world economy fell like a house of cards.
To imply that more taxes on the wealthy from the current low rates and spending on programs to enhance education, research, and the like do not help the middle class is to forget that the past is prologue. He should remember programs like the GI Bill, Social Security, `and other programs that provably were the catalyst to moving many into the middle class. Maybe Rubio should read Roosevelt’s 2nd bill of rights, an unrealized hope that America’s middle class should force politicians to effect.
Rubio said Obamacare was a failure. Maybe he should ask all those that had pre-existing conditions that now have insurance. Maybe he should ask those who are waiting for October 1st to jump into a healthcare exchange where their application cannot be denied. Maybe he should talk to those who were on the verge of bankruptcy because of either rescissions of their policies or reaching the cap on their policies. Maybe he should remember that for all the years his party was in control, they had no major legislation on healthcare except for an unpaid budget busting drug program in an attempt to win the vote of the elderly.
Rubio was supportive of immigration in this speech. Votes are what are important in politics. When he had the opportunity to vote for the Dream Act, he voted NO; family values anyone?
Rubio continued to pound by stating that if one disagreed with the president he accused them of wanting to protect the rich. If the policies that one supports protects one class the, the rich, at the detriment of the other, the poor and middle class, then facts and outcomes are probative.
Rubio in his speech, and Republicans in general, have been continuously pushing the tenet of growing out of deficits and lowering taxes will enhance growth. Unfortunately Bush’s very low taxes did not improve our economy. Reagan’s low taxes occurred with exploding deficits and large military expenditures, a Keynesian boost to the economy. George HW Bush/Bill Clinton tax increases did return both economic growth and fiscal sanity. There are specific reasons for this beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the marginal propensity to consume of the masses is larger than on the wealthy, and taxing the wealthy to prevent taxing the middle class more increases overall economic activity with a government that does less borrowing.
There was nothing else of material value in Rubio’s speech other than boilerplate cliché’s that have no basis in fact or act. The speech rebutted a speech President Obama did not give. His speech presented generalities without real world implementations. His bottle water moment was necessary to deflect examination of his speech that was nothing more than the rehash of an ideology that has never worked, an ideology that has been systematically killing the middle class.
