Explaining Romney's Four Percent

Chris Kelly does an excellent job of explaining Mitt Romney's four percent solution . What Romney really means is less for health care, Social Security and veterans, and more for weapons.

According to the Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #2012, March 5th, 2007, the only way to get that kind of money is through tough "entitlement reform."

The implications for national defense are clear. Spending 4 percent of GDP for national defense will quickly become impossible unless Congress reforms Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid...

Okay. I mean, sure, that sounds stupid and cruel, cutting support for sick people, the old and the poor. But at least it's going to the troops, right? Right? Nope.

The Heritage Foundation is just getting warmed up:

... If retirees receiving Social Security benefits are asked to accept less generous indexing of those benefits, it is entirely appropriate to ask the same of military retirees...

... While the (military health care) system is clearly one of the most generous, it may be one of the most inefficient.

A key problem with the U.S. health care system overall is that it often precludes individuals from assuming at least some responsibility for making decisions about their care. The military health care system is more extreme in this regard because it encourages beneficiaries to treat health care as a free good or service and consume it on the basis of whim as opposed to need.

Structuring the military health care system as a defined contribution plan would give its 9.2 million participants greater freedom of choice...

Just so we're all clear: That's what Mitt Romney means when he says he wants to spend 4% of the GDP on defense. It's not just some random nonsense. What he means is he wants to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and restructure military health care as an HMO. So that Private Ryan -- that whiner -- stops consuming heath care "on the basis of a whim."

And I guess that's a policy. But you wouldn't want to go to a factory in a working class city and smile and shake hands and brag on it on Remembrance Day.

Unless you there was nothing inside you but poison slime.