“Generic Dubya”: Mitt Romney’s Innovative Economic Plan
When pressed for details on his economic plan, the former governor has only GOP boilerplate.
I’ll be honest: There are a few things about Mitt Romney that I find annoying. One of the biggest has to be that there is probably no sentence he has repeated more often in this campaign than “I know how the economy works,” but he never actually explains what he knows that nobody else does, or how that hard-won knowledge translates into a unique set of policy moves that only he could bring about and that would pull America from its economic doldrums.
There are really two sets of questions that absolutely must be asked of Romney in the area of economics, given the rationale he offers for his candidacy. The first is, “What specifically did you learn as a businessman that policymakers haven’t known up until now?” As far as I know, he has only been asked this question once, and the result wasn’t encouraging. (After repeating over and over that he “understands how the economy works,” Romney finally allowed that businesses spend money on energy, so if energy were cheaper, they’d have more money. Brilliant, I know.) The second question that Romney needs to be asked is, “What are you proposing to do, and how is that different than what we’ve done before?”
The natural way to ask this is the way Brian Williams asked it in an interview with Romney yesterday: “The major planks of your job plan, lower taxes, both corporate and marginal rates, and reduce regulation. Explain how that would be different from what George W. Bush tried to push through?” Republicans might say this is a “gotcha” question, since it brings up George W. Bush, whom today’s Republicans like to pretend was not actually president for eight years. But it’s a reasonable way to ask, since Bush’s presidency was pretty recent, and he did in fact implement the entire Republican economic agenda, with the exception of drastic cuts in the size of government, though that’s something Republicans are committed to in rhetoric only. So how did Romney respond?
Well, let me describe—actually, there are five things that I believe are necessary to get this economy going. One, take advantage of our energy resources, particularly natural gas, but also coal, oil, nuclear, renewables. That’s number one. A huge opportunity for us, and doing so is gonna bring manufacturing back, because low-cost, plentiful energy is key to manufacturing, in many industries.
Number two, trade. I want tre– to dramatically increase trade and particularly with—with Latin America. Number three, take action to get America on track to have a balanced budget. Now those three things, by the way, are things which we have not been doing over the last few years, which I think are essential to getting this economy going again.
Number four, we’ve got to show better training and education opportunities for our current re– workers and for coming workers. And then finally what I call restoring economic freedom. That means keep our taxes as low as possible, have regulations modern and up to date, get health care costs down. These things will restore economic freedom.
So my policies are very different than anything you’ve seen in the past. They’re really designed for an America which has some new resources, energy being one of them, trade with Latin America being another, and the need for a balanced budget now more urgent than ever before.
To review: The way Mitt Romney’s economic plan differs from what George W. Bush did is that Romney favors exploiting energy resources, free trade, having a good education system, balancing the budget (something every candidate in both parties says they’ll do, but only Bill Clinton actually did), tax cuts, and less regulation. In short, Romney’s program is exactly the same as what George W. Bush did. Yet Romney says, “My policies are very different than anything you’ve seen in the past.” Right.
It isn’t necessary that every presidential candidate come up with a set of policies that are absolutely new and unique. After all, politicians are largely creatures of their parties, and those parties have relatively consistent agendas, so no party nominee is going to offer an agenda that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. But Romney is presenting a case for his candidacy that is an unusual synthesis of the personal and the policy. Other candidates have centered their candidacies on a personal argument—Bush was a “different kind of Republican” who would deliver us from the bitter partisanship of the 1990s, Obama was the embodiment of hope and change—but Romney’s two-fold claim is that the election is all about the practical problem of improving the economy and that because of who he is, but not because of what he wants to do, only he can solve that practical problem. When he’s forced to get specific, his solution to the practical problem is the standard Republican agenda.
It’s entirely possible that this argument, hollow though it is, could work. Polls seem to indicate that Romney has an advantage on which candidate voters believe would do a better job managing the economy, which is not the same as them thinking all we need to do is cut taxes for the wealthy and remove regulatory constraints on corporations. Indeed, the appropriate follow-up to the question Williams asked is, “George W. Bush did just about everything you’re proposing to do. If it didn’t work then, why is it going to work now?” But nobody has asked Romney that either, so the most advantageous thing for him to do is to keep repeating “I understand how the economy works” and hope he doesn’t have to answer too many questions about what he actually wants to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 26, 2012
“Typical Of Cowards”: Romney Blames Obama For GOP Defense Cuts
For the last two weeks Mitt Romney’s campaign has incessantly attacked President Obama for the cuts to defense spending mandated by the agreement he made with Congress to lift the debt ceiling last year. Romney and his surrogates blame Obama, instead of their fellow Republicans in Congress, for this turn of events, and claim it will damage America’s national security. They are also playing hypocritical politics, and violating their own supposed principles, by complaining that the cuts will cost jobs in swing states such as Virginia. Here’s a sampling of their statements:
§ Mitt Romney, in his speech Tuesday to the VFW: “We are just months away from an arbitrary, across-the-board budget reduction that would saddle the military with a trillion dollars in cuts, severely shrink our force structure, and impair our ability to meet and deter threats.”
§ Senator Jim Talent (R-MO) on a Romney campaign conference call: “They’re planning to cut 200,000 troops. Given the state of the economy, it’s equivalent to laying them off and the military is sending them to the unemployment lines.… at a time when Iran is making progress towards a nuclear weapon, Syria is in the middle of a civil war, Chinese power is surging, we have men and women fighting and putting their lives at risk in the field in Afghanistan. So in all my years in and around Washington, it’s the most irresponsible thing a Commander-in-Chief has done.”
§ Tea Party hero and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in a Romney campaign statement: “For President Obama to play budgetary Russian roulette with national defense is shameful. The damage to our local economy here in Virginia will be enormous. But the damage to our national security is what really counts.”
§ Representative Scott Rigell (R-VA), in a statement for the Romney campaign: “The President must address—directly and decisively—the massive, violent reduction in defense spending that is headed our way. Pink slips are looming, Virginia will be reeling come January, and our Commander in Chief is eerily silent on this issue. That, in my opinion, is a breach of his duty as head of our armed forces.
§ Romney surrogate Governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) said on CNN: “I’m worried not only about jobs in Virginia, but I’m worried about the security of the United States of America.”
As conservative Ramesh Ponnuru points out in a Bloomberg View column, Republicans are making a big-government Keynesian argument for defense spending, that it’s a necessary public employment program. They utterly reject this logic if applied to, say, retaining public school teachers or police officers. “The Republican position on federal spending could not be clearer: It doesn’t create jobs. Except when it goes to defense contractors,” writes Ponnuru.
As Dave Weigel notes in Slate, Romney and his supporters have taken to audaciously referring to “President Obama’s Massive Defense Cuts,” as if they were his alone. In fact, they are not Obama’s at all. Obama, of course, was perfectly happy to let Congress raise the debt ceiling as it always had in the past without attaching any conditions. Republicans insisted that only massive spending cuts, and no additional revenue, would have to accompany any such vote. They held the economy—which would have collapsed from a governmental debt default—hostage. So Obama gave in and agreed to spending cuts. The only concession he won in exchange for cuts to domestic spending was cuts to defense as well. But the defense cuts would have been avoided if Republicans had not been so irresponsible in the first place.
Where did Romney figure into all of this? As is typical of the coward who wants to lead the free world, he hid out, saying as little as possible. When the deal was finally reached, he simultaneously condemned it for not going far enough and for cutting defense spending. “As president, my plan would have produced a budget that was cut, capped and balanced—not one that opens the door to higher taxes and puts defense cuts on the table,” he said.
How one balances the budget without cutting defense spending remains a mystery no Republican has actually solved. Defense spending accounts for 24 percent of our total federal budget. Most of the rest is taken up by mandatory spending on entitlement programs and interest on our debt.
Republicans such as Romney make no effort to actually prove that the sequestration cuts will damage the military. They just assert it.
Any look at the statistics will demonstrate the absurdity of their claims. In 2011 the United States spent $698 billion on defense. That is 43 percent of the world’s share. China was number two, at $119 billion. Every other country in the top ten military spenders, except for Russia, was an ally. Russia and China combined, at $178 billion, spent vastly less than the United States. So which enemy is challenging us for global supremacy? How could the sequestration cuts of $500 billion over ten years, as we wind down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly make us unable to defend ourselves?
Romney doesn’t say, because he does not have an answer. Rather, he is simply flailing, looking for ways to attack President Obama on national security, when polls show Obama is more trusted on the issue. The American public is hardly known for its deep knowledge of global affairs, but they do know who killed Osama bin Laden and decimated Al Qaeda’s top leadership, and it wasn’t Mitt Romney.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, July 26, 2012
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