Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Ohio is next in line...

...for Republicans in their bid to squeeze the middle class (my emphasis):

[Governor John] Kasich (above), a Republican, has expressed support for a much-contested bill that would restrict the collective bargaining rights of state employees. The bill, which has passed the Senate and is now before the House, has drawn thousands of protesters.
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Jodi and Ralph Taylor are public workers whose jobs as a janitor and a sewer manager cover life’s basics. They have moved out of a trailer into a house, do not have to rely on food stamps and sometimes even splurge for the spicy wing specials at the Courtside Bar and Grill.

While that might not seem like much, jobs like theirs, with benefits and higher-than-minimum wages, are considered plum in this depressed corner of southern Ohio. Decades of industrial decline have eroded private-sector jobs here, leaving a thin crust of low-paying service work that makes public-sector jobs look great in comparison.

Now, as Ohio’s legislature moves toward final approval of a bill that would chip away at public-sector unions, those workers say they see it as the opening bell in a race to the bottom. At stake, they say, is what little they have that makes them middle class.
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“What are they wanting?” she said of the bill. “For everyone to be making minimum wage?”

Yes. That's exactly what Republicans want.

Or as Congressman Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, calls it: "an opportunity society."

The opportunity to be poor.

Paul Krugman wrote about Ryan and his "opportunity society," or Roadmap, in a column last August, "The Flimflam Man":

The Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.

Make no mistake about it: today's Republicans are out to make the rich richer and you poorer.

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