I swear the Republicans are the stupidest people on the planet.

It’s the first time since I have been voting that we actually have a candidate with a higher disapproval rating than his approval rating.

Even in losing, McCain, Kerry and Gore enjoyed double digit approval ratings. Romney is negative five percent.

He is losing by 24 percent in California. Why?

The GOP blames Hispanics and the poor, when it’s their penny-wise and pound-foolish approach to reining in entitlements to blame.

They say we have got to have a border fence but too many must have Medicare and Social Security left “as-is.” Maybe it’s the cost cutters like the one from Bain Capital instead who want to socialize their expenses by eliminating benefits?

Look at the nation’s largest private employer (Wal-mart). They pay people less than $20,000 a year and have eliminated healthcare benefits for all part-time workers.

I recently listened to a Christian school teacher with no benefits who just refinanced her house to buy a 2009 Accord. The fact is people use their home equities to get by.

The equities collapsed largely due to a toxic mortgage industry rife with Ninja (no-income-no-job-no-asset) mortgages that artificially hoisted values. And Fannie and Freddie rescued those mortgages in 2009.

I can’t talk to any Republican without hearing about the evil illegal immigrants (meaning Hispanics) whose numbers are actually in free fall. Republicans are in absolute denial that hoards of people in their 40s and 50s are on tax-free Social Security disability. Yet they still work under the table with Medicare health insurance.

I can name self-employed contractors, handymen and nonprofit religious workers that do this.

It is mathematically impossible for the $16 trillion U.S. deficit to be the fault of three or four percent of the U.S. population that overstayed their tourist visa from Asia or Europe or snuck across the southern border to replace the entitled American young men who can’t or won’t work.

One in six American men under 30 years old don’t work and are not even looking for work. Why should they?

Mom will pay his way. Close to 90 percent of welfare goes to female heads of households. Half of all U.S. births are now to single moms who have four times the poverty.

One could argue that handouts are too generous but opportunities for the uneducated are also too low. The fact is four out of five high school dropouts will either end up on government assistance or incarcerated.

I agree education is the great equalizer, but with fewer and fewer students willing to do the heavy lifting to actually get a marketable college degree or even a high school diploma, why bother?

All this failure exists while the entire public sector is going on unabated with its bloated pay, early retirements and fat pensions. Yet too many of us can’t even pay our taxes.

Romney’s “47 percent” remark simply played into the “only the rich matter,” which we all knew was too true to begin with.

So the majority wants to put the greed of the Tax Evaders Association (TEA) party in its place and that will give us four more years with the allegedly lesser of two evils in charge.

Happy 2016!

Mike Reno
Pine Cove