OpEdNews - Article: The 2010 Elections: Bring "em on!

OpEdNews - Article: The 2010 Elections: Bring "em on!

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Like in 2008, the elections in 2010 give us an opportunity to point out the failures of long conservative reign and dare conservatives to try to take us backward.

• Don't like the deficit? Three times as much of it came from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (unpaid for) and the Bush tax cuts (without offsets) as from the Obama's Recovery Act.

Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

• Don't like the job situation? We lost 11,000 jobs in November. That's bad. But we lost533,000 jobs in November of last year, the crowning achievement of Bush's presidency. It will take a long time to turn this around. But at least we're turning.

Source: AFL-CIO

• Frustrated about health care reform? Me too. But don't forget how bad it was. Health care spending rose from 13.8 percent of GDP when Bush took office to 16.6 percent last year -- even as the number of uninsured grew by a million people every year. So we spent more every year but got less for it. In personal terms, the cost of a family premium more than doubled, from $5,791 in 1999 to $12,680 in 2008.

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation

A few years ago, guaranteed, affordable health care for all was an impossible dream.