Retire Garrett

My apologies to all for missing the Sunday debate between Congressman Scott Garrett and challenger Adam Gussen.  Family responsibilities made my attendance impossible.  Fortunately, I’ve been able to get a good idea as to what took place from friends in attendance and from reading reports from the news agencies covering the event.

Here’s something that jumped out at me from Phillip Molnar at The Express Times (Lehigh Valley):

Garrett said small businesses needed “certainty” in health care laws, financial markets and the tax code before they could hire new people. He said Congress needed to repeal and reform parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial legislation and reform the Affordable Care Act.

“Provide certainty in the marketplace and people will have the optimism going forward in the economy in hiring and that will be good for the country and New Jersey and the 5th Congressional District,” Garrett said.

Even though Republicans across the country make this argument, the truth is actually quite different from their perception of reality.   In the real world, the “Job Creators” learned in December 2010 that they would not have to worry about higher taxes until at least January 2013.   Yet it’s no surprise that the great “Trickle Down” in job creation Scott Garrett said would happen, never materialized.

The only uncertainty in the health care and financial industries come from people like Scott Garrett who promise to repeal both Dodd-Frank and The Affordable Care Act if Americans turn control of the legislative and executive branches back to Republicans.

I’d be interested in hearing a credible argument – and not just some political spin unsupported by hard data, which shows how rolling back provisions like requiring health care companies to spend at least 80 percent of your premium on actual health care or gutting derivative reforms contained in Dodd-Frank would create stability in the market and create jobs.

If someone were trying to create uncertainty in the marketplace, he or she would be hard-pressed to cause more damage to our fragile economy than repealing the health care and financial reforms put in place over the past four years.  If anything, these measures need to be strengthened, not eliminated.  Scott Garrett does not represent the average resident of New Jersey’s 5th Congressional District unless the average citizen is an ultra-rich, Tea-Party Conservative who believes in the dis-proven theory of trickle-down economics.