Lies and half-truths are making up many - of not most - political advertisements in this campaign season.
If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, there is no escaping from the advertisements.
One example that effects all legal Americans is Medicare.
Pretty much everyone - from the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to the man and woman in the street - knows that Medicare as we know it is doomed. It will run out of funds. How soon is anyone's guess - some say within a few years, others within a decade.
There's no argument that Medicare's future is limited; it's demise is imminent.
President Barak Obama's campaign tells us Mitt Romney is going to end Medicare.
Period.
Seniors will be left on the medical garbage heap.
Trouble is, that's both a half-truth and lie.
Romney and his figure-crunching VP candidate, Paul Ryan , DO intend to try to change Medicare - this cannot be done by White House fiat - BUT, anyone 55 years old or older is "grandfathered". When a 55-year-old "youngster" hits Medicare age, that person will be covered by Medicare as we know it today.
People currently less than 55-years-old - like my sons and daughter, will have a different program, BUT they will have a program.
Let me put this into very simple English.
Medicare as we know it will be around for all those currently 55-years-old and older.
Medicare as we know it will be going away for those currently less than 55 years old. There will be a "safety net," but it will be structured differently.
What about Social Security?
It, too, is in jeopardy. Not from the Republicans but from the simple facts that
(a) politicians - Mr. Obama among them - have been stealing from Social Security to pay for other government programs; never mind that Social Security was supposed to be sacred, untouchable, and
(b) population - the working world is getting smaller, partly due to the economic disaster with which we still are struggling, and partly because of demographics.
Someone looked at the federal budget and determined that entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare, etc. - take up the entire Federal budget income. Everything else - the military, the sundry Federal departments - are paid for by selling America to, at the moment, primarily the Chinese (who, in addition to sending shoddy and dangerous goods to these shores and stealing our technology, buy our IOUs at a favorable - to whom? - interest rate).
The person who claimed entitlement programs ate up all of the Federal government's income (taxes and fees) noted that in order to pay our bills - that is, stop borrowing - taxes would need to be much higher.
If anyone looks at countries with cradle-to-grave entitlement programs, they will see tax rates well above 50% of a person's or organization's income.
During World War 2, the Feds put a 10 percent excise tax on certain products - primarily jewelry. That "war time tax" lasted will into my lifetime. Perhaps it's time for another "temporary" tax.
There is advertising talk about a "flat tax" which, Obama's supporters allege, would increase the tax on the "average middle class person" by several thousands of dollars.
That simply does not compute.
A flat tax would set the same tax rate for earned income (compensation for work performed) and for dividends. Currently the super rich and the less rich, including Romney, make their pocket change from dividends and pay a lower tax rate - according to Obama's ad folks, Romney paid taxes at a 14 percent rate -than the working stiffs who pay 28 percent (twice Romney's rate) or more.
If Romney, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and others on the Fortune 400 list of richest Americans (see http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/) paid their "fair share" of taxes, in theory, the overall tax rate should go down or, the increased Federal income might be used to pay down our debt (that is, buy back America from the Chinese).
At the same time, does America REALLY need to be the world's policeman? Do we REALLY need to have troops stationed in, for example, England; is the air base in Thule Greenland REALLY necessary in this age of in-air refueling and intercontinental ballistic missiles? (It was necessary in the 1940s and maybe into the 1950s, but today ??)
Does the U.S. REALLY need to send troops into harm's way during a foreign civil disturbance.
(I have no problem with humanitarian aid if we are not expected to carry the full load.)
Do we REALLY need to give billions of foreign aid to countries that prove, again and again, that we cannot "buy" friends - or even reliable allies.
At the risk of offending someone, political advertising is following the Josef Goebbels' philosophy: "the principle and which is quite true in itself and that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily" (see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels).
