Backing Mitt Romney(Part 3)…

I want to start off by saying No, Mitt Romney is not perfect by any means.  Frankly I think Fred was VERY close to what I’ve wanted in a candidate for a long time and now with Fred gone I am forced to go with my number two candidate.  That happens to be Mitt Romney if you couldn’t tell already.  I actually feel he’s very, very intelligent.  Very knowledgeable on most of the issues.  As I’ve said before I think all of the republican candidates left viable would be fine on foreign policy so I turn to domestic and Mitt seems the best to me.  I want to continue this series talking about his views on Free Trade and Entitlement reform. 

I’ll be honest.  His record on Free Trade is scarce considering he was a governor.  However his talking points are very supportive of the concept of Free Trade.  A concept I happen to agree with very much.  We need a President, in my opinion, that understands the relationship between a strong, growing economy and free trade.  In a speech in 2005 Romney encouraged Corporations to trade aboard rather than fall towards protectionism.  Romney was quoted as saying “We must move ahead in technology and patents. I don’t like losing any jobs but we’ll see new opportunities created selling products there. We’ll have a net increase in economic activity, just as we did with free trade. It’s tempting to want to protect our markets and stay closed. But at some point it all comes crashing down and you’re hopelessly left behind. Then you are Russia.”  I know many do not like the CAFTA decision.  They see some jobs leave because of it and it becomes a panic.  However, to counter China’s growing demand it was necessary to open these trade agreements especially in our own backyard.  He was quoted as saying “It does make me chuckle, when you see Congress struggling about whether we should open our trade with Central America. When Asia is looming off the horizon, we’re worried about El Salvador and Guatemala?”  China is a much bigger threat and I believe Romney understands it and knows how to battle them economically.

Entitlement reform is something that excites me when candidates talk boldly about it.  It’s something that needs to happen and happen now.  It’s an albatross on our country and of course liberals wish to expand these ridiculous programs.  BRILLIANT!  Anyways, now on to Mitt Romney’s record.  Romney helped push state legislation to not only by increasing the number of hours required to work in order to receive welfare, but also placed a 5 year limit on receiving benefits.  I LOVE this kind of thinking.  Romney also to the dismay of liberals successfully pushed for medicaid recipients to pay for some of the services.  He also successfully pushed for workers to pay 25% of their health-care costs which was up from 15%. 

As far as social security goes he has not embraced any known plan yet.  Personally, I think the Galveston plan is wonderful.  How do I know this?  The government rejects and will not permit it, anymore after 1983.  However, Romney refuses to raise social security taxes.  He also supports personal accounts and reducing the growth rate of future benefits.  Truly I feel if anyone can look at this problem and fix it in a practical manner that Mitt can based on his knowledge of these types of issues.  However, I would like to see more talk about this very important subject.

Now we get into an issue which Romney and I differ a little bit on, but I understand in part about why he had to go the route he had to go.  This, of course, is his health care ideas.  He has received much scorn for this from republicans and probably rightly so.  However, we have to consider the fact that he was working with a massively northeastern liberal legislature(which he has been pretty decently successful with in pushing right wing values) and the fact that he was also facing a Bush threat to cut off $385 million per year in federal Medicaid funds unless the state reduced the number of uninsured people. 

He does deserve credit for attempting under these conditions to move a bad system more towards the free market.  Many of the health-care problems are because of federal law in which Romney’s hands are obviously tied.  He proposed a plan that encourages individual-owned health insurance and that would bypass some of the unfairness in the federal tax code(the tax code impedes individual ownership of health insurance).  Frankly it’s not a plan I feel he should brag about, but maybe brag about any of the actual gains he made under those conditions.  In contrast to subsidizing hospitals he chose to subsidize individuals in the way of an assistance program.  I really dislike programs in general, but this in a way seems to move toward encouraging private ownership of health insurance instead of just giving the hospitals money.  Romney’s original proposal offered the individual the option of forgoing insurance and posting a bond in an interest-bearing account.  This is more the direction we want to go, but the liberal legislation shot it down.  This alone tells me he’s not in any kind of favor of universal health-care and I was harsh on him at first hearing about this plan not taking into account what kind of legislation and pressure from the Bush administration he was dealing with so I have to credit him at least that much. 

The health plan that did come to pass certainly is not the total direction we want to move toward that’s for certain.  However, judged by earlier proposals that were shot down I have to believe he truly is for free market health-care and individual ownership of health insurance.  That being said he needs to stop bragging about that plan in Massachusetts in my opinion.  However, thanks to research it’s not nearly as much of an issue for me anymore in supporting Mitt Romney.  Some of Romney’s ideas for reform(especially on welfare) are fairly exciting.  I like that he has that mindset.  However, I wish he would get on the ball with tax reform and more-so social security reform.  That being said he does lean in the right position on most of these issues and that is encouraging for me in a candidate.  The next installment will be about regulation.  Another touchy issue with me.