Republicans may have trouble making Washington's hogs 'squeal': Neil Macdonald

Republicans may have trouble making Washington's hogs 'squeal': Neil Macdonald

by Neil MacDonald at the CBC (Canada)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/republicans-may-have-trouble-making-washington-s-hogs-squeal-neil-macdonald-1.2824576

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Ernst was light on policy throughout the campaign, instead preaching the “Iowa way” and promising to take a “good hard look at entitlement programs.”


Presumably, though, the Iowa way (service, self-sufficiency, thrift) doesn’t include eliminating the billions in agricultural subsidies – government handouts – that farmers in this nation of rugged individualists enjoy so much.


Nor does it mean trimming the single biggest area of federal spending – the military. The Iowa way, Ernst explained in a triumph of circumlocution, “means keeping America strong in the world, because the world is a safer place when America is the strongest nation in it.”


The Iowa way also means preserving social security and Medicare, massive entitlement programs that happen to be massively popular and that threaten to mushroom out of control unless benefits are cut or taxes are raised to pay for them.



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