Hi, here in NW North Carolina we are having a letter writing campaign to send hand-written letters to 6000 single women voters. They tend to vote more Democratic but also tend not to vote.
One of my jobs was to come up with Talking Points and facts that could be used not only in these letters but in our canvassing efforts.
I haven't finished these, as it is a very time-consuming thing to check all these facts on the internet, in magazines and news articles. I have yet to get to the War in Iraq, Terrorism, the Environment, or Civil Liberties, among other things, so sorry about that. I only have so much time. But, as for these facts, I have printouts of everything to back them up, although not every single point is documented below.
I'm going to split this up because it is really long and I can only post two a day, but I'm hoping that other people can use these.
One thing I'm sure many people will notice is that I didn't mention some very important issues. But I steered clear of abortion, Separation of Church and state and gun control, among other things because these red flag issues stir up people emotionally to the point where you often just lose them if you get onto these topics.
We have so many reasons to vote to oust Bush that we CAN use that persuade people. We canvassed all day yesterday and registered people to vote. They are very concerned about the economy and health care and the war. Many people I talked to were fervently for Kerry (or at least fervently for getting rid of Bush. Some Republicans we spoke to admitted that they didn't like the direction their party was going but virtually NO Democrats felt that way. If anything, the Democrats were just dispirited because they didn't feel Kerry was articulating their concerns, but they intended to vote for him anyway.
Talking Points for Single Women Letters
WHICH PARTY CARES MORE ABOUT ORDINARY PEOPLE ?
TALKING POINT: The Democrats have always been the party that has put ordinary people's needs first rather than those of the wealthy and big corporations.
The Democrats passed the Social Security laws and created Medicare and Medicaid against Republican opposition. Democrats support social programs that help the elderly, the poor, and single parents. Before Democrats passed these laws, people without resources had to depend on family members when they got in trouble or they would starve.
Just a week ago, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report that shows that the number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.3 million last year. In fact, this number has gone up every year since Bush took office. The Bush administration doesn't want you to know this, so they changed the date to release these figures so they would come out in August when many reporters and Americans would be on vacation and so they wouldn't come out right after their National Convention in September.
TAXES
TALKING POINT: The Welfare of the People vs. Corporate Welfare: Unfair Tax Laws Favored by Republicans.
1. "Welfare" is a bad word unless you are a corporation:
The Republicans have made "welfare" for people who are struggling a bad word. But they don't mind welfare for corporations. More than 60% of U.S. Corporations pay no income taxes at all. This situation has gotten steadily worse under the Bush administration. They have reduced the penalties for corporate tax avoidance and reduced audits of corporate tax returns. The result is that illegal corporate tax avoidance is skyrocketing.
2. The Bush Tax cuts don't really benefit ordinary people:
Republicans like to make it sound as though tax-cutting is a good thing for everyone. But really all it does is deplete the national treasury so there is less money for social programs and the country gets terribly in debt (see Debt below). This is no accident. They want to do this, as they want to starve the government of cash so they can justify doing away with social programs that benefit you and me. They say this in articles they write for each other, but the Bush administration pretends that it isn't true.
While getting $350.00 or so back from the government in taxes a couple of years ago because of Bush's tax cut seemed like a really good thing to most people, the fact is that while the middle class got a small amount, the wealthy and corporations got benefits in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The average tax break for the top 1 % of earners was $96,634. The bottom 60% got an average of $350.00. Bush himself got over $31,000 in tax savings from the tax-cuts he pushed through Congress. Meanwhile, people who are too poor to pay taxes got nothing. In fact, most of these who got nothing were women and children. There were 17 million women and children left out of Bush's 2001 tax cut.
3. Tax laws are written to benefit the wealthy in other ways.
You and I get taxed on everything we make, but the wealthy can exempt large amounts of money because they can invest their extra cash (they HAVE extra cash!) in tax-free investments, such as municipal bonds. Also, they only have to pay social security taxes on the first $87,900 they make. Since most ordinary people don't make that much money in the first place, that means that we are being taxed for Social Security on our entire incomes while they are being taxed on only a portion of theirs.
The Bush administration wants to make this situation worse. Not only did they lower the taxes on investment dividends in the Bush tax cuts already passed, but in the new 2004 Republican Party Platform, they state that their goal is to make all of Bush's tax cuts permanent and to require a two-thirds vote (instead of a simple majority vote) in the congress to raise any taxes. Politicians never want to vote for tax increases since they want to get re-elected. Only people concerned about the good of the country will take this risk and there are a lot fewer of them in Congress. So, this will make it very hard, if not impossible, to ever get the government out of the terrible debt the Bush administration has got us into. It also means there will be little money to help ordinary people or to give to the states during emergencies.
4. Coming, if Bush wins -- a "Flat tax"?
Many Republicans want what they call a "flat tax" and plan to work for that after the election if Bush wins. This means that everyone pays the same rate. This sounds fair until you notice that this reduces the amount that the wealthy pay by a lot while increasing the rates that ordinary people pay.* In the meantime, the wealthy would still be exempt from paying taxes on much of their investment income. In short, those who are richest are favored under our tax laws. Democrats favor a "Progressive tax system," which means that the people who benefit most from the current system pay a higher rate than those who benefit less. Democrats feel that those who can most afford it should pay a higher amount of taxes than people who need money for basic survival or who have very little money left over after they pay their bills.
* Fact: the rate the Repubicans usually say they want for a Flat Tax is 20%. Right now, most lower and middle class people pay 15%. The top rate for the wealthy is 33%. This means that under a flat tax ordinary people will pay 5% more, while the richest Americans will see their taxes lowered once AGAIN by 13%.
THE ECONOMY
TALKING POINT: The Economy is in bad shape no matter what the Republicans tell you:
1. The National Debt (or Federal Deficit) under the Bush Administration is projected to be minus $2.3 trillion dollars by 2011.
In contrast, when Bill Clinton left office, he left a Federal Surplus (extra money) of plus $5.6 trillion.
This means that Bush and the Republicans (unless stopped) have already spent in the last three years all Clinton's extra money and, at this rate with their policies, will spend another 2.3 trillion on top of that. Thus, they will have gone through almost $8 trillion dollars of our tax money by the year 2011!
Bush has promised to halve the debt in the next five years, but the Congressional Budget Office has reported (September 8, 2004) that this is impossible, even if all the costs of the Iraq War were miraculously eliminated.after this year (which isn't going to happen) and even if Bush's most favorable budget projections are used.
How does Bush plan to reduce the debt? It's very hard to say as he wants to make his tax cuts for the wealthy permanent which will make the situation worse not better. If he does this, it will add another 2.2 trillion dollars to the debt by the year 2014!
Think about what happens at your house when you get so in debt that you can't pay your bills. You certainly have no money left over for anything else that you might need. Plus, you could lose everything. The same thing could happen to our country. Some economists predict a disaster in the future if we don't pay attention to this problem. This debt is going to have to be paid off, if not by us, then by our children and grandchildren. It will make it very hard to have an economic recovery and to ever be able to afford health care or money to run the National Parks or provide basic services that ordinary people need. It may cause interest rates to go sky-high again as they did in the 1980s when President Reagan also ran up huge debts.* The Republicans are already using it as an excuse as to why they are going to have to cut Social Security in the future or make us all work until we are in our 70s to receive it. Yet Bush wants to continue to give tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy and even increase these.
* The huge deficits that Reagan run up were nothing compared to the ones that Bush has run up. According to the Wall Street Journal, today foreigners hold 40% of all our Treasury debt while in the Reagan era they only owned 15% (and if they ever decide that we aren't reliable, they can quit investing in America, that is, lending us money --and we will be in terrible trouble).
2. More jobs have been lost under the Bush administration than under any President since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Here are the facts:
a. The number of jobs lost since Bush took office 1.2 million
b. The number of job promised to come from
Bush tax cuts which never showed up 5.5 million
c. The number of jobs created during the
Clinton administration 21 million
Bush claims that we have "Turned the Corner" with the economy. However, this isn't true. Right after the Republican Convention, the August jobs report came out. It said that 144,000 jobs had been created in August. Since only 32,000 were created in July and very few in June (although these figures were revised slightly upward), Bush used this figure to tell everyone that he was right. Well, the problem with this is that it takes at least 150,000 new jobs just to give jobs to new workers entering the labor force. It doesn't even begin to get people who have lost jobs back to work or count the many people who get so discouraged that they drop out of the labor force entirely.
This means that the Bush administration isn't generating nearly enough jobs to change the unemployment situation in this country. In fact, he will be the first President since Herbert Hoover, in the Great Depression, to have lost more jobs than he gained during his four years in office. That number of lost jobs currently stands around 1 million.
3. Oursourcing or sending jobs overseas is hard on people and is getting worse:
You may have suffered, or a family member may have lost a job because it has gone overseas because of free trade agreements (such as NAFTA) with other countries that have been supported by both parties in the past. In North Carolina this is a tremendous problem, as our basic industries in furniture and textiles and even in the tobacco industry (the companies are now trying to get people in Brazil to grow tobacco because they can pay them less) are in serious trouble.
While both parties supported NAFTA, the Democrats now realize that they need to deal with this problem. Kerry and Edwards are concerned about people's livelihoods and ( in their 2004 Democratic party platform) they want to give companies incentives to keep jobs here instead of sending them overseas. They also want to stand up to countries such as China and insist that they honor their side of the trade agreements and not dump cheap goods into the United States and put our companies out of business.
The Bush administration also tells you that it is concerned about jobs, but Bush's chief economic advisor, N. Gregory Mankiw, said last February that "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade. More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing." People like Mr. Mankiw acknowledge that individual people suffer when they lose their jobs, but the Republicans see the situation in abstract terms. They believe in what they call a "Free Market economy" which isn't regulated by the government. In their view, this kind of economy causes some people to suffer but others to thrive. By this belief, the people who are suffering will supposedly do something to stop their suffering, like look for another kind of job or get re-trained and so the government doesn't need to (and shouldn't) help them.
However, this only works if you are young enough to get retrained or have enough money or education to get another kind of job or if there are other kinds of jobs available. This attitude doesn't help people who are old or don't have the money or the education to get retrained or who live in towns where the main factory jobs that they used to be able to get to support their families aren't there anymore. The trouble with such theories is that people aren't abstractions. They have to make a living. They have to take care of themselves and their families.
Facts:
a. Number of U.S. jobs lost in the manufacturing
sector alone under Bush Adminstration 1.7 million.
b. Number of jobs lost in software producing
industries from 2000 to 2004 128,000
Number of jobs gained in India in software
producing industries from 1999-2003 150,000
4. Many of the new jobs that have been created in the last three years pay less than the old jobs that have been lost.
For those lucky enough to land a new full-time job, the median pay rate fell from $681 per week in their old job to $572 per week in their new job. That's a 16% loss in pay.
Fact: Number of states shifting from higher-paying
to lower paying jobs since November 2001 48
5. Child poverty has increased:
Perhaps this accounts for the fact that the number of children living in poverty has increased by 11 percent over the last three years. 12.9 million children are now living in poverty in the richest nation in the world. Overall, the U.S., with 20.3 percent child poverty, ranks behind all European nations. Sweden, for instance, only has 2.4 percent child poverty,
6. People often have to work two and three jobs just to make ends meet:
CNN reported in September, 2004 that their polls showed that 12% of the people in this country work 50 hours a week or more. Ten percent of the people work two jobs to try to make a living.
It didn't used to be like this. In the 1940s, 50s and 60s, a man could get one job that would allow him to support his family and his wife could stay home with the kids. Now it takes both husband and wife working full time to take care of their children.
7. Single women really have it bad, as without two incomes, it's almost impossible to make ends meet. This is why families headed by women are much more likely to live in poverty than any other families. Women in general are worse off under the Bush administration.
Facts-- Since Bush took office:
a. The Census Bureau reports that the pay gap has widened between women and men and now women are earning only 76 cents for every dollar that men make from 77 cents.
b. 37% MORE women are unemployed.
c. 17 million women and their children were left out of Bush's 2001 tax cut.
d. More than two million women have lost their health insurance.
8. More employment facts:
a. Americans worked on average two hundred hours a year more from 1973 to 2000-the equivalent of five full-time weeks
b. Most people earn no more an hour than they did three decades ago (adjusting for inflation), but those at the top have enjoyed substantial increases in salary and those at the very top-the CEOs and top company executives-have seen their compensation go through the roof.
Ratio of CEO to Worker pay in 1965 = 26:1
Ratio of CEO to Worker pay in 1982 = 42:1
Ratio of CEO to Worker pay in 2003= 300:1
b. Most people struggle to get by. They're working longer hours or picking up a second or third job-to pay the bills and meet rent or mortgage payments. In two-parent families, increasingly both parents are in the workforce. Just to meet everyday expenses, they're borrowing more and more from credit cards, home equity loans, or second mortgages, or from legal loan sharks at check-cashing operations.
c Meanwhile, the executive class rakes in more money than ever before, and indulges new forms of conspicuous consumption. We have competition among CEOs over who has the bigger yacht. If an executive has to go to the hospital, they can check into platinum class luxury suites offered by leading medical institutions-for $10,000 a night. The New York Times recently reported on a new convenience for rich New Yorkers: private indoor pools, with startup costs of $500,000.
d. For 80 percent of the workforce, it took until the late 1990s to return to the real earnings levels of 1979.
e. The top fifth of households own more than 83 percent of the nation's wealth, the bottom 80 percent less than 17 percent.
f. The top 1 percent's financial wealth is equal to that of the bottom 95 percent.
g. Whatever the data examined, it's worse for women and people of color, who receive lower wages and have much less accumulated wealth than White men. Women and minority males earn 70 percent to 80 percent of what White men make. More than a third of single mothers with children live in poverty.*
* Taken from an article by Ralph Nader, Sept 8, 2004, Commondreams.org
9. If Bush cares so much about "Family Values" why doesn't he care about this problem? Instead, the Republicans try to make ordinary people, the poor and single parents feel like it's their fault for not being able to make ends meet, while their policies make it impossible for them to do so.
10. New overtime rules.
Is there anything the Bush administration has done to help families cope with these problems? Well, no, but he likes making it worse. Since he couldn't get this through Congress, Bush's administration went around them and got the Department of Labor to come up with new rules on who gets overtime pay. Now (August, 2004) only people who make between $8,000 to 23,000 a year are eligible for overtime. However, only one in seven of those workers actually works overtime. This rule will hurt a lot of other people who have been getting overtime and are dependent on it. The AFL-CIO estimates that six million people will lose overtime pay.
At the time of this writing (Sept. 9, 2004) the Democrats in Congress are trying to pass an amendment to the 2005 Spending Bill that would overturn these new overtime rules. However, George Bush has threatened to veto the whole bill, if they succeed.
11. Watch how the Media tries to distract you from these issues:
While this new policy was being passed, the media was focusing all its attention, 24-7, to the vicious ads being lodged against John Kerry's Vietnam War service by people that weren't even with him in combat or who had changed their stories (and who were funded by Bush cronies who make a habit of doing this in every Bush election). It's important to note that only five corporations own all the major media (TV and radio news channels) in this country. They would rather distract you from news like this, which benefits the wealthy and big business at the expense of ordinary people like you and me.
12. More Facts:
a. Household income has decreased under GWB, whereas it increased under Clinton.
Change in real, median household income (2003 adjusted dollars)
GWB - $1,535
Clinton +$5,489
b. The number of people in poverty decreased under Clinton, but increased under both of the Bush presidencies:
Change in number in poverty
GWB +4,289,000
Clinton -6, 433,000
Bush I +6, 269,000