Juan Cole: Coming Disasters If America Picks Romney!!

What will the United States look like in 2016 if Mitt Romney wins? While predicting the future is of course impossible, actually my experience is that you play out known possible scenarios in your mind, you can often get a fair idea of the likely course of events. 1. Austerity does not work. It produces massive unemployment and deficits. The tight money policies tried in Europe, predictably, have produced spiraling unemployment and ballooning deficits with a continued mortgage crisis in Spain. US corporations are sitting on trillions that they are refusing to invest in the US economy, and only government can continue to get money into the economy. If Romney follows through on his pledge of austerity policies, US unemployment will likely increase, and we will replicate manyof the Rajoy government's mistakes in Spain. Romney will abolish the Affordable Health care Act, or Obama-care, throwing tens of millions of Americans back out of health insurance programs, and leaving them, as he suggests, to the mercies of emergency room treatment. Emergency room treatment is much more expensive for taxpayers than would be the ACA, and having 30 or 40 million people dependent on it is highly undesirable. It cannot provide pregnant women with prenatal care, which in turn is correlated with better health for mother and child. And, there simply are not enough ER doctors and nurses to care for that many people. With ACA, we have a chance to forestall the current 26,000 deaths a year, resulting from people lacking health insurance. If ACA is repealed, they'll still die, and over the four years of a Romney administration there will be 104,000 extra needless deaths among the uninsured.