PrintSeptember 8, 2009
GOP missing a big issue
What on earth is the Republican Party thinking? Or rather, what is it foolishly ignoring? The Obama administration has handed Republicans and conservatives a huge club with which to pound their Democrat opponents and to my knowledge, it has been ignored almost entirely. Certainly the biased media has ignored any discussion of the topic but then that is to be expected nowadays. The national media no longer serve their nation; they slobberingly serve only their Democrat masters.
The issue? After decades of the Democrats scaring senior citizens prior to every election with phony accusations that the Republicans would reduce or eliminate their Social Security benefits, guess who has actually done so? That's right, Bubba, a Democrat administration has put a freeze on Social Security cost of living increases, the first in 35 years, effectively reducing the income of all us SSA recipients.
Yeah, yeah, I know that the SSA COLA is indexed to the CPI and that according to the Feds, we seniors got an undeserved bonus in our COLA this year due to deflation; therefore the lack of a COLA in 2010 and 2011 is to offset that gain.
But that is all beside the point. At the same time the Administration is putting the screws to Social Security recipients, whose average federal remuneration is less than $14,000 per year, it's handing out a 2.0% COLA in 2010 to federal employees whose average annual salary is $79,000 per year. Does anyone honestly believe that the Democrats wouldn't be flogging a Republican administration to its knees with this issue were the positions reversed? As has been frequently pointed out by various writers and commenters at American Thinker, we're too damned good for our own good. We give tumbrel rides to the political guillotine to our own Republican miscreants, while the Democrats give theirs ticker tape parades. We helplessly sputter and futz when the Democrats make some outrageous accusation against us but then, in a far too gentlemanly manner, resolve not to stoop so low when the Democrats provide a juicy, legitimate target of opportunity such as this issue.
Here's what this old senior citizen knows. That missing cost of living increase in my social security check would have absorbed most of the increased cost of electricity that the Democrats' Cap and Trade bill is going to cost me. My wife's COLA might have helped to offset her increased health insurance premiums that Obama's health care program is sure to bring. Guess what, Bubba? Both those increases are going to come out of our hides instead, and the way I see it, our bucks are going straight into the pockets of some unionized federal employee whose average benefit package totals almost $120,000 per year.
I'm no politician but I bet you I could get one helluva bunch of senior citizens to listen to political fodder like that between now and the 2010 midterm elections. Democrats have been playing the class envy card for years, and now here we have America's most dedicated bloc of voters being exploited to the advantage of Unionized Federal Employees? And Republicans aren't screaming to high heaven about it?
