“Magic Asterisks”: Buffett Rule Is Not Raising A Tax; It’s Closing Republican Tax Loopholes
The debate over the Buffett Rule is missing something important. As it stands, the fight is between Democrats who believe millionaires shouldn’t pay a lower tax rate than the middle class vs. Republicans who says no one’s taxes should go up by any amount at any time for any reason.
That’s a legitimate fight, to be sure, but there’s more to it: approving the Buffett Rule would mean closing a loophole, and in the larger context of the debate over tax policy, this makes all the difference in the world.
Let’s step back for a second. Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget plan appears to add an additional $5.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Ryan insists that’s not the case — once he “clears out all the special-interest loopholes,” his numbers will start to add up.
Which loopholes? Well, it turns out that Ryan refuses to say. Maybe they’re secret loopholes; maybe they’re imaginary loopholes; but either way, he hasn’t identified any — literally, not one — loophole he’s willing to close to help pay for his own agenda. It is, as Paul Krugman put it, the “mystery meat” of the Republican plan.
“Oh, yeah?” my Republicans friends ask, “well why don’t Democrats come up with some loopholes to close?”
And therein lies the point: the Buffett Rule closes a loophole. It’s a quirk of the tax code that certain millionaires who enjoy private-equity riches pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families, and approving the Buffett Rule would not only mean establishing a degree of fairness, it would also mean scrapping this loophole.
The point is not lost on President Obama, who made this observation on Wednesday:
“I’d just point out that the Buffett Rule is something that will get us moving in the right direction towards fairness, towards economic growth. It will help us close our deficit and it’s a lot more specific than anything that the other side has proposed so far.” [emphasis added]
In other words, where Paul Ryan is vague and evasive, Obama is being direct and specific. The president is identifying actual loopholes he wants to see closed (Buffett Rule, corporate-jet loophole, tax subsidies for oil companies), which would total tens of billions of dollars in the coming decade. Meanwhile Republican leaders talk about loopholes, but choose not to back this talk up with anything substantive.
One approach represents an honest budget policy. The other, relying on magic asterisks, is a fraud.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 13, 2012
“An Unrepresentative Woman”: Typical Stay-At-Home Mom Bears No Resemblance To Ann Romney
You’d have to be a monster to deny that Ann Romney has had a rough time of it these last few years. Breast cancer and multiple sclerosis? We should obviously sympathize and send her well wishes. But nothing about that should prevent us from also looking honestly at her background and asking how representative a symbol of twenty-first century American womanhood she is. Liberals shouldn’t sneer at the fact that she never held a job outside the home (if only Hilary Rosen had phrased it in the clinical, social science-y way I just did, this “controversy” probably never would have erupted!). But conservatives have no business pretending that she represents anything beyond what she in fact is, which is a woman who was born to fantastic privilege and who married into even more fantastic privilege, and who simply hasn’t had to make the hard choices that many women have to make. She turns out not even to represent stay-at-home moms very well at all, and if Republicans think this little fracas is rallying stay-at-home moms to their reactionary cause, they’re deluding themselves.
First, a bit about Ann nee Davies. She grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of American’s wealthiest suburbs. She attended the posh private sister school of the posh private school her future husband attended. Her father was the president of a company that made maritime machinery. While still in college, she married the son of an ex-automobile company CEO. The couple would have to make its own way in the early years, as young couples do, but surely they knew that if a serious crisis hit them, they’d have someone to turn to. They’d never end up on the street or on a relative’s Castro convertible.
I’m plenty aware that I am going to be accused in the comment thread of class envy, but I’m just laying out facts. They shouldn’t be held against her: For all I know Ann Romney is the most generous, empathetic, and self-abnegating woman in the United States. But it’s simply a fact that she’s never had to worry about how she was going to feed her kids, or what she might do if tragedy befell. And lo and behold, tragedy, or something very close to it, did befall. She received two devastating diagnoses. She undoubtedly had excellent insurance coverage and undoubtedly received the best possible care. And since conservatives are so obsessed with pillorying the people they think of as the undeserving in society, I say it’s not unreasonable of me to point that out she “earned” her excellent insurance and care by marrying well.
But what of the millions of women who share her bad luck health-wise but don’t share her good luck wealth-wise? We don’t know what she thinks, and maybe since she’s not the candidate she is under no obligation to tell us, interesting as it might be to find out. But we do know what her husband, her own presumed insurance provider, thinks. He thinks the hell with them. He used to care about them, when he passed a law giving them a fair shot at buying affordable coverage, but now he wants to repeal the law that does the same thing nationally, and the only reason is political calculation and cowardice. That’s his, not hers. But I do wonder whether she agrees with him that these women should be left on their own because to help them would be to hand a political victory to the enemy.
The interesting thing about all this is that your “typical,” if there is such a thing, stay-at-home mom bears not the remotest resemblance to Ann Romney. The Census Bureau studied this question for the first time (?!) in 2007, and the results were, to me, totally surprising and fascinating. Stay-at-home mothers, you probably think, are more likely to be white, well-off, proper, all-around June Cleaver-ish. Uh, June Cleaver was around 50 years ago and lived on TV. In today’s actual America, stay-at-home moms are more likely to be: younger; Hispanic (Latina, if you prefer); foreign-born; less well educated. About one-quarter of married mothers of children under 15 didn’t work outside the home, the bureau found; and fully 19 percent of that one-quarter had less than a high-school degree, while that was true of just 8 percent of working mothers. This suggests pretty clearly that a significant number of women who stay at home don’t do so by choice, but because they don’t have marketable skills—or because they can’t get jobs that pay enough to cover the cost of childcare.
The study found 5.6 million stay-at-home moms in all. The above numbers suggest that maybe half of them or thereabouts are there by total choice—have decided to stay home and raise multiple children. The rest are probably there because of crappy educations—their fault in some cases, no doubt, the system’s in others. Whichever the case, these women are not staying home by “choice,” and they tend to be the women society really forgets about and pays no attention to. I doubt pretty strongly that they identify much with Ann Romney or are rallying to her husband’s cause.
This whole fracas happened simply because conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse liberals of being elitist. There was a whiff of that in Rosen’s wording, but at least Rosen is affiliated with the side in American politics that wants women who didn’t grow up in Bloomfield Hills and marry well to have a chance to receive excellent health care if they ever find themselves in Ann Romney’s position.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 14, 2012
“A Matter Of Economic Necessity”: Thanks To Republicans, Moms Must Work
You want to talk about a war on stay-at-home moms? How about Republican economic policies that prevent women from ever becoming one.
I’m talking about policies, for instance, like the equal-pay-for-equal-work law that embattled Governor Scott Walker just shot down in Wisconsin, thus guaranteeing that when Badger State mothers do go to work to put food on their family’s table they’ll now have to spend more time away from their kids in order to do it. Three cheers for Republican Family Values!!!
Republicans have always understood better than Democrats that a good offense is the best defense. And so, with the gender gap between Democrats and Republicans approaching Grand Canyon proportions, it’s no mystery why Republicans are eager for a replay of the Mommy Wars of the late 1960s and early 70s when bra-burning feminists squared off against Mrs. Beaver Cleaver and her tastefully arranged string of white pearls.
And so, there was Mr. Etch-a-Sketch himself, chief Romney PR flack Eric Fehrnstrom, tweeting after a left-leaning CNN talking head put her foot in her mouth: “Obama adviser Hilary Rosen goes on CNN to debut their new ‘kill Ann’ strategy, and in the process insults hard-working moms.”
Some things never change. Eric Fehrnstrom is still a thug and Democrats are still incurable weenies.
Hysterical that someone might think calling Mrs. Romney a pampered plutocrat who never worked a day in her life was an implied slur on apple pie and motherhood, the rush by Democrats — up to and including the First Couple – to degrade themselves running away from Hilary Rosen and her ill-chosen words shows just how much Democrats are counting on that 19-point hole Republicans have dug themselves into with woman.
Republicans, as we’ve learned the hard way, are terrific when it comes to starting wars on false pretenses. So, if Democrats applied even a fraction of the strategic thinking Republicans use all the time to the Republican’s made-up War on Homemakers, they’d see Republicans have given them a golden opportunity to go on the attack and pivot back to their signature issue in this campaign: economic justice.
Social conservatives like nothing more than to assert it’s liberals and feminists who are pushing women into the workplace against their will by making those who’d rather be homemakers feel inadequate and unfulfilled for their politically incorrect choice of careers. But the truth is most of these moms couldn’t stay home even if they wanted to since working isn’t a career choice but a matter of economic necessity.
That’s why the idea of casting millionairesses like Mrs. Romney as self-sacrificing stay-at-home-moms is, when you think of it, laughable if not ludicrous.
By now we know the statistics by heart. Over the past 40 years, only incomes in the top 20% have seen any growth at all. During this time, average incomes for most Americans have either stayed level or declined. Whatever wage increases average households have earned in the past generation were made by women entering the workforce. And this at a time when incomes for those in the top 1% grew from an average of $500,000 a year to more than $2 million.
These trends haven’t changed even since the Wall Street-engineered collapse of the global credit markets in 2008.
As Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post, “three years after economic growth resumed the real value of Americans’ paychecks is stubbornly still shrinking.”
Profits by the S&P 500 are up 23% since 2007 while cash reserves have increased 49% during that time, in large part because firms are neither hiring in the US nor raising worker wages — even though on average workers are generating nearly $50,000 more each year in revenue than just three years ago, says Meyerson.
So where is all the extra income going? According to University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, all income growth in the US in 2010 went to the wealthiest 10% of households, and 93% to the wealthiest 1%.
“Profits and dividends are up largely because wages are down,” says Meyerson. Indeed, as JPMorgan Chase chief investment officer Michael Cembalest wrote in an investor newsletter last year: “US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”
Even in today’s fragile recovery, Meyerson says most of the jobs being created are in low-wage sectors, where 70% of all job gains in the past six months were concentrated in restaurants and hotels, health care, retail trade, and temporary employment agencies.
Construction still has an unemployment rate of 17% in part due to Republican reluctance to commit public funds for basic infrastructure construction.
The disconnect between conservative praise for full-time motherhood and conservative economic policies that prevent more women from actually being full-time moms is the same contradiction we see in the abortion debate, where pro-life conservatives talk about the sanctity of life while saying it would be just terrible for the government to lend a hand to single women forced by restrictive pro-life laws into becoming mothers against their will.
Republican charges ring hallow when they accuse Democrats of disrespecting the hard work women do to raise a family, because at the end of the day choice and self-determination for women (as well as men) are liberal values, not conservative ones.
When conservatives are not demanding strict conformity to ancient and rigid gender roles based on 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian doctrines, or whatever, they are hiding behind a false “individualism” that allows a few privileged multimillionaires to take away the real individual freedoms of the millions these plutocrats are thus able to defraud, exploit and abuse.
Republicans talk a good game about the virtues of motherhood. But when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are and fighting a real war on behalf of moms who want to be moms, the Republican Party, like always, has gone AWOL.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, Salon, April 13, 2012
“A Closeted Campaign”: Tell Us More About Your “Private Views” Mitt
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed pieceon Thursday, the veteran conservative journalist Fred Barnes offered Mitt Romney some advice for improving his campaign, including the sensible (and one might also say humane) suggestion that on immigration, the presumptive nominee “would be wise to move away from his harsh position in the primaries.”
Then Barnes included this fascinating sentence: “According to a Romney adviser, his private view of immigration isn’t as anti-immigrant as he often sounded.”
What exactly does that mean? Does it mean Romney said things that he doesn’t really believe? What are we supposed to make of a candidate who takes certain public positions to court one group of voters — and then tries to reassure an entirely different group of voters by leaking the fact that he doesn’t really believe what he said to win votes from the first group? How many other “private” positions does Romney hold that we don’t know about?
This is an important question because I think the Romney campaign will be engaged in a series of two-steps between now and Election Day. On the one hand, he needs to keep reassuring conservatives that he is really with them on a whole series of issues. But the whole premise that he was the most “electable” Republican rested on the unstated — was this “private,” too? — premise that he was the most “moderate” candidate in the field and could thus appeal beyond the conservative hard core. Romney wants the GOP base to think he’s a staunch conservative and swing voters to believe he’s a closet moderate. That’s why I suspect we’ll hear more hints about Romney’s “private” views on a lot of other matters.
Romney is not the first candidate to try to be all things to all people. But he has a special problem because he has taken a great many contradictory public positions over the years, depending upon whether he was trying to appeal to a general-election electorate in Massachusetts or a Republican primary electorate nationwide. Keep an eye out for more hints about Romney’s “private” views. At some point, he will have to reconcile what he says with what his aides hint at. And he will have to do this publicly.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 13, 2012
“Guns Are People Too”: The Right To Bear Arms But Not To Get Birth Control
At his speech to the National Rifle Association convention this afternoon, Mitt Romney brought up the alleged infringement on religious freedom by the Obama administration:
Now, the Obama administration has decided that it has the power to mandate what Catholic charities, schools, and hospitals must cover in their insurance plans. It’s easy to forget how often President Obama assured us that under Obamacare, nothing in our insurance plans would have to change. Remember that one? Well, here we are, just getting started with Obamacare, and the federal government is already dictating to religious groups on matters of doctrine and conscience.
In all of America, there is no larger private provider of healthcare for women and their babies than the Catholic Church. But that’s not enough for the Obamacare bureaucrats. No, they want Catholics to fall in line and violate the tenets of their faith.
As President, I will follow a very different path than President Obama. I will be a staunch defender of religious freedom. The Obamacare regulation is not a threat and insult to only one religious group – it is a threat and insult to every religious group. As President, I will abolish it.
Of course when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney made no effort to shield religious institutions from a very similar rule. According to the Boston Globe, there was a substantially similar requirement in Massachusetts, and when proposing his own overhaul of the state’s health insurance system, he made no effort to change it based on the religious objections of Catholic institutions.
As I noted yesterday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and their allies are ramping up the “religious freedom” wars for the campaign season. Romney has taken up their cause before, but never in such an unlikely venue. He somehow wrapped the Bishops’ “religious freedom” complaints in the same packaging as gun rights. (And, for good measure, his wife Ann made a special appearance to assure one of the most powerful special interest groups in Washington that women are “special” but not a “special interest.” Ba-dum-bum.) Funny how owning a gun is now a more important right than health care and how the “culture of life” rationale of the Bishops’ opposition to birth control gets play at a convention celebrating guns.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, April 13, 2012
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