So it was just a week ago that I published my first diary in four years titled Mitt… You Just Got Me Out of Hibernation. This past week, I have spent more time thinking about you Mitt.
The biggest problem with you is that you come from a world that is far different than the one that the vast majority of us live in. By the time you were seven, your father was the CEO of American Motors. You attended a top notch elite prep school in a well off suburb of Detroit. Around the age of 15, your father was elected governor of Michigan and was popular enough to be thrust to the top of the Republican presidential nominee wish list.
Now this wealth and influence was around you all throughout your formative years -- you were even named after one of your father's closest friends, the hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott. These were the circles that you and your family walked in. We all know what advantages money and power can afford those that have it, and you were a prime benefactor of that. Despite what you would like us to believe, and no matter how many ironing boards you claim to have had to eat off of, you were born in the end zone with the football already in your hands.
You were able to take this financial head start, elite education, and influence to make your self quite a bit of money. A simple and well demonstrated truth is that the easiest way to make a lot of money is to start off with a lot of money. You and your wealthy friends in this country have been able to accumulate an ever increasingly greater share of our collective wealth these past few decades. But make no mistake about it, your road to prosperity was built through the slow and methodical extinguishing and diminishing of the middle and working classes of this country.
Let me tell you why you can never be the President of the United States. This country has become out of balance and you simply cannot see it, or worse yet, you aim to continue to shift that balance in your favor. The game has been rigged against us with ever increasingly less chance of the many to match the influence of the few.
Now about the two different worlds that we live in. In your world Mitt, getting a start on life is as simple as just borrowing some money from your parents to get an education or start a business. For the majority of Americans, getting an elite education is only possible for the most exceptional of individuals, not those with the most exceptional of wealth. For us, getting a loan to start a business is not always possible because we have very little equity to leverage for a loan.
In your world, sheltering your accumulated wealth is easily accomplished by using strategic loopholes, tax shelters, shell "companies" in foreign lands, claiming consultation fees as carried interest, diverting huge fortunes into tax free retirement accounts, etc. For the vast majority of us, these "tax strategies" are not even an option for us, and even if they were, I don't think too many of us would feel good hiding our money overseas.
In your world, you see no problem with shutting down American factories in order to turn a corporate profit (or in your case, to turn a huge consultation fee). The result of a decision such as this always results in nothing more than an increase in wealth for you and your ilk. For the rest of us in the middle and working class, this does nothing but push our wages lower and lower, emptying our savings accounts and giving us less opportunities to refill them. I can guarantee you one thing, closing a plant to ship the jobs overseas would never even be considered by those of us that don't live in your world.
To you, people taking food stamps to feed their family are moochers looking for handouts and feeling entitled to food, but record breaking profitable oil companies taking subsidies are your version of an energy policy.
The reality is that the middle class is a family making a median income of $50,000, but in your world the middle class is defined by a family making between $200,000 and $250,000 a year. If only that were true, maybe we wouldn't be so stressed out over increasing health care costs, which fortunately for you, you and your family have never had to worry about. Another example of how you clearly don't understand the life we live and the struggles we face.
The greatest joke of this election is your promise to reduce everyone's taxes by 20% while being deficit neutral. There have been some great studies and articles already demonstrating how asinine this proposal is, so I won't even bother to go into them here.
Instead, let me channel a little bit of President Bill Clinton, and try to be the explainer-in-chief for a moment. You claim that you'll cut all federal tax rates down by 20%, but at the same time you complain that 47% of the country pays zero federal income tax. A 20% reduction of zero is zero, therefore with your plan all of the benefits of your plan will go to wealthiest 53%. You talk about redistribution. Here is your damn redistribution.
Your worldview is one that never has and never will understand the struggles of the rest of us. This isn't a nation looking for a handout, but because of growing inequity in this country, more and more of us are being put into situations where we might need help just to keep our heads above water. Your approach to fixing this nations problems would do nothing more than leave us standing still on a quickly moving treadmill. This is why you can never be allowed to be president.
Allen Fire
