The Case for Mitt Romney - President

The Case for Mitt Romney- President
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Monday, Nov. 5th, 2012

This is an insightful article by Rich Lowry in Time Magazine - Nov. 12, 2012

1.) He and running mate Paul Ryan are the candidates of change at a time when our future depends on it. The welfare state is in crisis around the Western world, especially in Europe but also here at home - acutely in such states as California and Illinois. It is creaking under dated assumptions, aging populations & the unavoidable truth … that you can’t spend money that you don’t have….

2.) For all his invocations of hope and change, President Obama has governed as the last President of the 20th century. He hasn’t reformed government, he has made it larger. His re-election campaign reeks of intellectual and policy exhaustion. He released a purported second-term agenda with more glossy pictures of him than text, just 14 days before the election. His campaign continually resorts to the small-minded and demagogic in defense of a manifestly inadequate status quo…

3.) The dirty secret is that Obama’s central fiscal initiative, a tax increase on the rich, would raise only $80 billion annually at a time of yearly $1 trillion deficits. Eventually funding current levels of government will mean broad based tax increases on the middle class….

4.) The President’s budget have failed to get any votes in the Senate for two years running. The health care entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest drivers of the debt. Even Obama says Medicare is unsustainable on its current trajectory, Romney wants to block-grant Medicaid to the states so they can experiment to improve it….

5.) Of course, Romney also famously want to repeal Obamacare. The President’s signature health care program is a sprawling $2 trillion mess sold under false pretenses. The government’s own scorekeepers say it won’t control costs… The Lewin Group a respected health care consultancy says employers could dump million of people out of their health plans…

6.) Romney has talked about a free market alternative that would make it easier for people to own their own insurance. A tax credit for individuals to buy to their own insurance could cover tens of millions more people. Properly designed high risk pools could limit the problems of sick people unable to get coverage. Such a plan could achieve the same goal as Obamacare at a fraction of the expense while encouraging more innovations and cost control in the health care system…

7.) Romney promises a regime of regulatory restraint. His Evironmental Protection Agency, in particular, can be trusted not to interfere with the revolutionary oil and gas boom driven by fracking or to impose cap-and-trade system by administrative fiat….

8.) The President’s case for re-election has been weak, in keeping with the weakness of his record. Let’s stipulate that he inherited a punishing recession. But the argument that Bush’s policies “got us into this mess” (and extension, that Romney’s would do the same) is better partisanship than history. In 2007, years after the Bush tax cuts, the budget deficit was all of $161 billion. There is no plausible economic theory which tax cuts caused the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis.

9.) The mantra that Obama saved us from another Great Depression rings hollow since the recession officially ended in June 2009, before any of his policies had a chance to take effect. He shot $800 billion on the stimulus and got nothing for it except some pleased spendthrift allies in Congress…. His green-energy program has been an expensive fizzle… The vaunted auto bailout, the second half of “the Joe Biden rallying cry “Osama Bin Laden is dead, GM is alive!” doesn’t bear much scrutiny. The GM bailout cost some $35 billion…. Foreign policy … the unraveling of Obama’s Mideast policy, punctuated by the debacle at Benghazi, Libya…. He embraced the basic legal architecture of George W. Bush’s war on terror as President after denouncing it for years…. The retirement of the President Obama is that it would improve the tone of our politics. Whatever his failings, Romney is unlikely to demonstrate the same high-handed contempt for the other party that Obama has, [a Chicago characteristic ] or the same shocking classlessness…. George H. Kubeck