Why I hate Rafael Edward Cruz
Point/Counter-Point: To see the other side of this argument, read “A Case for Ted Cruz”, here.
While Donald Trump is running away with the Republican Party nomination, Ted Cruz sits in the shadows— and rightfully so. The face of "repeal Obamacare" can't elude the fact that he's simply unlikeable. It's his elitist arrogance, his McCarthy-esque finger wagging and that his name isn't even Ted.
Ted is typically short for Theodore. Mr. Cruz's real name is Rafael Edward Cruz, but I doubt that name would go over too well with the predominantly white Republican voters he tries to appeal to. The constructed character known as "Ted," built on lies and playground tactics, is dedicated to sticking to his beliefs even when disputed by simple facts and logic.
This is particularly evident in his distaste for Obamacare, which he called "the biggest job-killer in this country." Upon a simple fact-check, what Ted would call "yellow journalism," one will see that since Obamacare was passed by the Senate in 2010 (took effect in 2014), the number of jobs has risen and the unemployment rate has actually been halved. I'm not implying that Obamacare is what caused the unemployment rate to drop, however, the fact of the matter is that Obamacare hasn't resulted in a loss of jobs.
Despite these facts, Ted Cruz put himself in the spotlight in 2013 by assisting congress in the federal government shutdown. He spoke for 21 straight hours on the Senate floor in an effort to repeal Obamacare. Cruz found Dr. Seuss' children's book "Green Eggs and Ham" to be such a great example of why Obamacare should be repealed that he felt the need to read it on the Senate floor, oblivious to the irony that the book is all about trying something before saying you hate it.
When he's not being a grown man reading children's books or fabricating lies about Obamacare, he's shows an inability to have a sophisticated grasp on how to handle ISIS and other threats from abroad. If Cruz becomes president, he said, "We will carpet bomb [ISIS] into oblivion. I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out." It became apparent that he was unaware of what carpet bombing was, when he could not explain it and was under the impression that it was just a term for coordinated airstrike.
Cruz has repeatedly tried to blur the line between being Muslim and being an extreme radical. According to Cruz, we have our very own "jihadists" in Indiana and Arkansas. When talking to a forum in Iowa last year, Cruz referred to the involvement of the LGBT community in those states as a "jihad" that is being waged against Christians. Classifying those in the LGBT community as being on the same level as Muslim terrorists should have been a low enough point for Cruz, but somehow he felt that his message was still unclear. Cruz then went to Texas to offer his view of how the expansion of ISIS is bad for gay rights, which made things even less clear.
If you manage to look past his inability to decipher between the LGBT community and ISIS, you have a man trying to ride the support of small businesses. In his opinion, besides carpet bombing Obamacare, the best way to help small businesses is by implementing a flat tax rate and not raising the minimum wage.
It's true that implementing Cruz's flat tax might actually help keep money in the hands of small business owners. However, the flat tax will give tremendous tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent of the country. With this tax plan, over the course of a decade, the federal government would lose out on $8.6 trillion in revenue. Part of government income goes to federal loans that help start small businesses. If the government doesn't have the money to give to new businesses, then how will the small business sector be rewarded with this tax plan? It won't.
Not raising the minimum wage sounds like a good idea, however, since the minimum wage hasn't changed with inflation over the years, people aren't able to feed their families working 40 hours a week. Without a higher minimum wage, more people will have to turn to government run agencies to seek assistance. If the employer isn't willing to pay a higher minimum wage, the government has to pick up the tab. If you support a smaller government that offers less federally-funded programs, then raising the minimum wage and making the employers themselves pay would be a more feasible idea.
In spite of his major policy flaws, Cruz has drawn many comparisons to the President beloved by democrats, Barack Obama. They both come from American mothers and immigrant fathers. They both ran for president after only one term as a Senator and graduated from Harvard Law School. However, Barack Hussein Obama ran for president with the name on his American birth certificate. Ted Cruz isn't even running for president with the name on his Canadian birth certificate.