This coming election cycle looks to be pretty depressing so far. As an independent who doesn’t like one party to control the House, Senate and the White House, the current GOP doesn’t give me much hope.

All I hear is fear mongering, contradictions and little in the way of vision for the future. Here are a few examples.

First, the GOP is using the mosque near ground zero to prey upon people’s prejudice and fear of Muslims and maybe even linking President Barack Obama to Islam.

Newt Gingrich, in an interview on Fox News, essentially compared the mosque supporters to Nazis. Then, there was a Pew Forum study that recently found that 18 percent of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim, a rise of 7 percent from a year-and-a-half ago.

Really? Do the analogies always have to come back to comparing someone to the Nazis or Hitler? It’s getting rather old.

I also cannot stand the ignorance and the disrespect toward Obama. Many still believe he wasn’t born here and now more people think he’s a Muslim. That’s ridiculous.

Second, the Republicans are a walking contradiction on fiscal policy. On one hand, they want to extend the Bush tax cuts, which will cost $3.1 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative.

The tax cuts are needed to help the overtaxed American. However, as professor Dave Swenson points out in his article at InsiderIowa.com, the average American pays 4.6 percent of his income to federal income taxes. That’s the lowest it’s been since Harry Truman was president roughly 60 years ago.

On the other hand, they talk about reducing the deficit. Now, I realize you can reduce the deficit in other ways like through spending cuts. However, there is little in the way of a plan on how to accomplish such an enormous task.

It just doesn’t seem feasible to make up more than $300 billion per year which would cut the projected deficits by 25 to 30 percent.

Lastly, I hear little in the way of vision for the future from Republican leaders. All I hear is the need to repeal the health care bill or that Obama is creating massive deficits that will crush my grandchildren.

There is no plan for how to fix it or make things better, except from Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin with his plan called The Roadmap for America’s Future. While it has garnered a lot of attention, it has yet to be embraced by many Republicans, which is unfortunate.

It is revolutionary vision for the future. While it still needs tweaking here and there, it is a great start to solving many of our fiscal policy issues.

It is so good that many Democrats, like Paul Krugman of the New York Times, are attacking it with misinformation which Ryan has had to respond to and correct.

Maybe things will turn around for the Republicans and I hope they do. The last time we had a Republican Congress with a Democratic president, we actually were able to achieve budget surpluses.

Unfortunately, there is little hope that will happen under the current leadership.