A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for George W. Bush

Eight years of George W. Bush gave us $10 trillion of national debt, two long wars, a housing bubble, a stock market crash and massive layoffs. Do you want more of the same...tax cuts for the rich, budget cuts for us, and more low paying jobs?

What do all these rich Republicans and Tea Partiers have in common?

Mitt Romney, Bill O'Reilly, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity, Eric Cantor, Glenn Beck, Rick Santorum, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, David and Charles Koch, Paul Rand, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Jim DeMint, Scott Walker, Kevin McCarthy, Pete Sessions, Chris Christie, Rick Scott, Joe Walsh, John Kasich, Rick Synder, Nikki Haley, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Darrell Issa.

They all want to cut, cut, cut. They want to cut taxes for the rich and cut your government safety nets. They want to further redistribute the wealth to the top 1%. The nation's wealth has already been extracted from average working Americans for decades, but these same people keep trying to convince us that it's been trickling down. (Trickle-Down Economics: The Cruel 30-Year Hoax)

Republican millionaires and billionaires have already had historically low tax rates for the past 10 years, but they're pushing back hard at the thought of raising their taxes to help pay down our government debt. Instead, to reduce the federal budget, they want to accomplish this by cutting government programs that the middle-class and poor rely on.

These same wealthy Republicans, who also want to cut wages and eliminate the minimum wage for average working Americans (saying it will make corporations "more competitive in the global marketplace"), also want their taxes lower than they already are. Why? Don't they have enough?

They claim that by cutting corporate taxes (especially for the most profitable U.S. companies), and reducing their CEOs capital gains taxes, it will help to create more jobs. Oh really? Like at Wal-Mart and McDonalds?

None of them want to raise taxes on the very wealthy (which includes themselves), even though they claim they are all soooooooooo concerned about the national debt. Instead, they would prefer that the very poor "put more skin in the game".

The New York Times just reported that in the fourth quarter of 2008, while still under George W. Bush, median household income was about $55,380 a year (which would equate to $27,690 per person in a two income household).

After President Obama took office in the first quarter of 2009, the median household income fell slightly to $54,798 year (that's about $27,398 per person in a two income household).

As of the last quarter of 2011, median household income fell again, to about $26,188 per person in a two income household (or about $52,378 per median household income), about $3,000 less per household over the last three years.

Why? For two reasons mainly. In the aftermath of the Great Recession after the massive layoffs in 2008-09, we had a lot of low-paying jobs being offered during the economic recovery. Businesses have a "buyer's market" when it comes to hiring because the jobless rate is so high. People are desperate for work, and will work for less; while businesses have been doing more with less, including increased "worker productivity", using newer technologies, and by outsourcing jobs overseas for cheaper labor.

Stocks are up 100% on the Dow Jones Industrial Average since the March 2009 low. Corporations and banks have been making recorded profits and their CEOs, multi-million dollar salaries...but they're still not satisfied.

These Republicans aren't concerned about creating jobs (especially ones paying a "living wage"), they're more concerned about corporate profits and their CEOs (those "job creators").

The decline in median household incomes is nothing new, especially if you factor in the value of the dollar, the ever rising cost-of-living, and the depressed and stagnant wages, in part because of union busting and the outsourcing of jobs over the past 30 years. Just under George W. Bush alone we've lost 52,000 factories.

Republican policies have driven this economy into a service industry, servicing the top 1%. The "land of opportunity" has become the "land of low wages". Those who are looking to replace their good-paying office or manufacturing job, will now find a host of jobs paying less than $10 an hour according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (if they're even hiring).

The most recent decline in median household incomes was due mainly because of the intervening layoffs during the Great Recession. Just in one year alone, from October 2008 until the unemployment rate had peaked in October of 2009 (when the U-3 rate was reported at 10.2%), 15.9 million Americans were out of work at that time. That's what helped contribute to the national debt -- unemployment benefits, TANF, Medicaid, and food stamps for all those who lost their jobs and their employer-related healthcare insurance. See the post "Obama's 'Welfare State' "

"It's the classic downward spiral and race to the bottom" said Bud Meyers, founder and editor of the website Blogster-at-Large. "Since the stock market crash in 2008 and the housing bubble bust, we've had millions of Americans who may have once earned $2,657 a month [$31,888 a year] before being laid off. After that, they were only taking home $1,328 a month in unemployment benefits."

On average, those benefits ran out after 60 weeks. Some people, if they qualified, could receive the maximum amount of 99 weeks in some of the higher unemployed states, but this is poised to be reduced by congress, perhaps to 75 weeks.

And many politicians want to cut unemployment benefits even further, as well as food stamps, Medicaid, and public assistance. They already have in many of the Republican controlled states. They've also initiated drug testing as one way to disqualify people from receiving them, and allowing employers to make people work for free under the "Georgia Plan".

After these people exhausted all their UI benefits (and any and all other available resources) they become totally indigent. Once they've hit rock bottom, they can be means tested to receive a meager $600 a month of food stamps and public assistance such as TANF. The luckier ones might find job at some time during their financial freefall, but usually earning much less than they previously did.

If they were old enough, they might have taken a early Social Security retirement at 62, paying much less than they otherwise would have received with the maximum benefit, had they been employed until they turned 65.

Others may have taken an early withdraw on their 401ks or union pensions if they were allowed, and paid a penalty and a higher tax rate than Mitt Romney.

During his long primary campaign, Mitt Romney vowed to balance the federal budget by 2020 and sharply shrink spending by 2016. To cut $500 billion from projected spending in 2016 as promised, Mr. Romney would reduce all other federal spending by 25%, including programs such as Medicaid, which provides health care for the poor, and food stamps.

Unlike President Obama, Mitt Romney and all the aforementioned rich Republicans and Tea Partiers refuse to raise taxes (just a little) on millionaires and billionaires to help offset these costs.

Last year 50% of all U.S. workers earned less than $26,364 a year, when the poverty level for a family household of four is considered to be $22,350 a year (which is a very low government assessment). How can two adults and two children live on that, especially in larger cities. Maybe Mitt Romney knows, and he can empathize with the poor, the destitute and the homeless.

Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University asks in the New York Times, "Why do many middle-class families now struggle to get by on two paychecks, whereas most got by on just one back in the 1950s and ’60s?"

One answer is, according to the book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke (co-authored by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia), sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before. (See the post, "Will 2 Paychecks Be Enough in 2012?"

The Republicans, and most recently, George W. Bush, drove the economy off the cliff --- and then they blamed Obama for gravity. A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Bush W. Bush, and all we'll get from the rich Republicans and Tea Partiers is just "more of the same"....tax cuts for them and budgets for us.

My prediction is, expect "more of the same" in 2013, no matter who is elected, because the corporations have already been running this country for decades.

Below is a video I made dedicated to:

Mitt Romney, Bill O'Reilly, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity, Eric Cantor, Glenn Beck, Rick Santorum, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, David and Charles Koch, Paul Rand, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Jim DeMint, Scott Walker, Kevin McCarthy, Pete Sessions, Chris Christie, Rick Scott, Joe Walsh, John Kasich, Rick Synder, Nikki Haley, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Darrell Issa.