Romney's plans are a bad deal for women

Heads up, ladies.  You are being offered more than a sketchy deal; you are being offered a very bad one. The GOP wants women to trade off 40 years of struggle for women’s rights for a fantasy economic plan. Mitt Romney is waving a shiny lure of 12 million jobs in four years for you yet every fact checker and the most respected financial analysts such as Moody’s say 12 million new jobs will be created anyway if we continue the course Obama has set us on.  

Now Romney is offering the oldest political trick in the business: lowering your taxes by 20%.  There has also not been a financial analyst, even the six Romney likes to cite, that say cutting all the loopholes and deductions in the world will offset the loss of $5 trillion in revenue to the treasury, much less deal with the deficit and it may even inflate it.  This is no trickle down scheme either, since any tax cuts to the wealthy would be in theory replaced by losing loopholes and deductions…in theory, and only in theory, leaving no more in their pockets to become the “job creators”, if that every would have happened.  Dream on: either the deficit will have to be blown up or everyone will be asked to give up even deductions Romney prefers to save  or taxes will rise.  None of that makes for a happy ending.

  In order to pay for Romney’s continuation of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and spend another $2 trillion in pumping up the Pentagon,  analysts concluded 40%  would have to be cut in discretionary spending, including education, child care, child health care,  research and development  and everything not required by federal law to spend.  Even this part of the Romney plan has been evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office to increase the deficit. 
 Likewise, repealing Obamacare would add to the deficit, both the CBO and the Simpson Bowles Commission concluded.

In return for this bad deal, here is what the GOP gives you in return:  They want to make it harder for women to hold a job or to earn fair pay.  Women depend on control of their health in order to be able to work: The means birth control and good health, but the GOP wants to make this harder on women and more expensive. In fact, if there was one single factor that his enabled women to work and support their families, it was their own control over their reproduction.  Thanks to that, in this recession, more women have continued to work and support their families than men.   

 They want us to continue with pay that is 70 cents on the dollar to  a man’s pay for the same job…opposing women’s ability to sue for such discrimination,  such as the Lilly Ledbetter act which President Obama signed.   They want us to continue to pay more for our health insurance than men, a practice which Obamacare forbids and the GOP wants to repeal.  They want our employers to be able to deny health insurance coverage for birth control pills for any reason (even if they are not affiliated with a Catholic institution).  They and Mitt Romney are committed to appointing members of the Supreme Court to overturn a woman’s right to choose, making abortion illegal, sending women to the back alleys again...  They and Mitt Romney are pledged to defund Planned Parenthood, the low income service that provides women health services from birth control, cancer screenings, to others. (Federal money is already forbidden by law to fund abortions).  They want to reinstate high co pays for mammograms and pap smears by repealing the benefits of Obamacare.  The GOP and many of their followers want to effectively ban forms of birth control by passing laws saying life begins at conception and giving the fertilized egg full legal protection.  Some of them have even advocated forcing women to have invasive ultrasound or letting those women legitimately raped to let their bodies stop pregnancy.

If you think I am steamed, I am.  I am, as they say, long in tooth and high in age.  I have no desire to see my two daughters return to the days of the 1950’s, the ones I faced and resented and clawed my way in my professional life to overcome.  But that is what women are being asked to do in order to grasp onto a bogus deal, more jobs that will happen even if Romney’s fantasy plans would ever work.   It is a deal women should definitely refuse.