Reality Check for President Romney

Gov. Mitt Romney has been making campaign promises.   His main promise seems to be that he will end "Obamacare" on his first day in the Oval Office.   Of course, he surely knows that the President does not have the power to simply revoke federal laws by fiat.   He will have no authority to simply decree an end to the Affordable Care Act on day one or any other day.   And unless the Republicans take over about 15 or so additional Senate seats in the November 6th election, which seems highly unlikely at this point, he will not have the power to get it done at all.   And with the Republicans' recent  liberal use of the filibuster rule to prevent the Senate from enacting any of President Obama's initiatives, completely unprecedented in the history of this country, you can bet that the Democrats will filibuster any attempt to eliminate the Affordable Care Act.   So Promise No. 1 just isn't happening.

Gov. Romney's other big promise is to lower everybody's income taxes by 20%.   "Hey, vote for me and I'll lower your taxes by 20% and I'll make somebody else pay for it and it won't increase the deficit one bit!!!!"   What a great deal!!!!    Voodoo economics revisited.   However, once again, a President Romney (I hate even typing that) will have no power to arbitrarily lower our taxes by 20%.   He will have to work through Congress to accomplish that, and, once again, unless he has 60 solid Republican votes in the Senate, which he isn't going to have, that will just simply never be enacted into law.   And even some Republican Senators might balk at the fiscal insanity of trying to attack our large deficit problem by LOWERING everybody's taxes by 20%.  

So you can forget about Mitt delivering on his two main promises.   And all that assumes that he won't just change his position once he gets elected, which seems to be a pretty risky assumption given his track record.   There are numerous other criticisms that might be leveled at Gov. Romney's plans but the main problem with his plans is that it is completely unrealistic to believe that he could accomplish a large part of his (latest) program even if he wanted to.   Mitt Romney is running against President Obama but his main opponent is reality.