A few years back, I worked at the circulation department of a small daily newspaper, The Chillicothe Gazette. Part of my job was to help carriers within my “Zone” collect money from subscribers. In the system we used, subscribers would pay up-front – usually for a month’s worth of papers. No problem for most of our customers, but there were the occasional sticks in the mud who argued that they had a problem with the system. “After all,” they reasoned, “I don’t pay ahead when I go eat at a restaurant.”
Obviously, they either hadn’t been to one of a number of fast food emporiums, or decided to conveniently forget about paying for one’s meal and then waiting for it.
Those folks should be livid about a stated Republican plan to eliminate Social Security and Medicare – programs most of us have been paying into for most of our lives, waiting to collect on what we paid into the plans when we become eligible. In other words, I paid for my newspaper, now someone wants to steal my paper from my porch!
What’s worse is that there are solid Republicans of my acquaintance who are quite happy with taking advantage of both Social Security and Medicare while using whatever tricks they can think of to maximize those benefits. “We paid into the system, we should get a payout from the system,” they’ll tell us. And that’s fine. What irks me is that at the same time, they are supporting politicians who would bring the government to a halt in order to get their way and eliminate the very programs from which they benefit.
And if you don’t believe me about bringing the government to a halt, watch what happens in the next couple of months if Republicans gain back their majority in the House and Senate in November.
That’s why Republicans are stopping at nothing to get voters voting for them. At least, so it seems.
In the past two years, we’ve seen Republican-majority state governments come up with all sorts of new rules and regulations intended to stifle the vote, or, “prevent voter fraud.” Interesting that of the very few voter fraud cases found and prosecuted from the 2020 election, most of the incidents (if not all of the incidents) were caused by Republicans.
Then there’s the misinformation. The local fellow running for Congress in our area has been running ads on the internet to the effect that the current administration’s hiring of tens of thousands of new IRS agents will be used to wring more taxes out of the middle class. It has been publicly stated that most of the agents in question would be hired to replace” overworked agents who would be retiring over the next ten years. Less than 10% would be “new adds,” allowing the IRS to go after higher-income taxpayers who find ways to game the system to their advantage. There are billions of dollars which can be collected from taxpayers in the upper brackets without touching the middle class.
Other misinformation seen here in Texas centers on “hot button” issues known to trigger ultra conservatives; claiming that Democrats are for things like “On Demand Abortions,” “Open borders,” and against preachers saying what they want when they are in the pulpit.
Putting the hot button issues aside, Republicans don’t have many talking points about what they hope to accomplish if elected other than to decimate social programs or put the kibosh on the economy if they don’t get their way. Given what they’ve already said about what they plan to do, they’re better off attacking the other side to hide their true intent.
Three weeks. Let’s hope that we elect politicians willing to allow us to keep what we’ve already paid for.
Be Seeing You!
bdharrellauthor 