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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

You Should Know B4 You Vote in 2014 - Part II


·      Tea Party Texan Ted Cruz led the government shutdown of October 1-16, 2013 that caused about 800,000 federal employees to be furloughed and 1.3 million to report to work without knowing when they would get paid. Operations resumed October 17 after an interim appropriations bill was signed for fiscal year 2014. Note: In August 2011, the US credit rating dropped for the first time in history because a timely budget was not achieved.

·         The US has been trying to get health care since 1854; Democrat Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill saying he believed social welfare was the responsibility of the states. Democrat and Republican presidents alike have over the years tried to build a health care system but it was not until Obamacare was passed in March 2010 that a comprehensive plan was enacted. Although, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare in 2012, Cruz continues to lead the way in trying to eliminate it; by March 2014, Congress had voted on it 54 times.


·         According to a report on outsourcing by Working America, manufacturing employment went from 19.5 million workers in June 1979 to 11.5 million in December 2009, a drop of 8 million workers. Although unemployment fell by September 2014, there were still 9.3 million workers without jobs. A 2012 survey from Duke’s Fuqua School of business found “only 4% of large companies had future plans for relocating jobs back to the US.” Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform, Center for American Progress, explained that the US tax code “rewards companies for making investments abroad—and leads to them shifting offices, factories, and jobs abroad even if similar investments in the US would be more profitable absent tax considerations.” On ABC’s This Week John Boehner on September 28, 2014, said - there are 40 bills in the Senate and gave the examples as the repeal of taxes on medical devices and implementation of the Keystone Pipeline. In my opinion, these are poor examples of job creation (the pipeline from Canada to TX is short term, will pollute the land and afford only Texans with ongoing job opportunities. 

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