“Americans Who Do Not Pay Taxes”: Isn’t Mitt Romney A Member Of The 47 Percent?
Mitt Romney, a son of privilege who used family connections and family advantages to accumulate a “vulture capitalist” fortune, and who now collects multimillion-dollar checks for doing absolutely nothing, claims to have identified 47 percent of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them.”
Most of these people, Romney gripes, “pay no income tax.”
That, Romney suggests, makes them non-entities in his political calculus.
“My job is is not to worry about those people,” says Romney, who predicts all the “dependent” voters will back Barack Obama this year. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
But Romney should not be so dismissive of the tax-avoiding class. After all, he’s one of them.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says roughly 46 percent of Americans paid no income tax for the last year where numbers are available, 2011. Slightly less than half of those who do not pay take advantage of tax breaks designed to ease the burden on elderly Americans who live on fixed incomes. Roughly a third of them do not pay because they are beneficiaries of tax credits designed to help the working poor and children to get by.
In other words, the Americans who do not pay taxes are, for the most part either low-income workers or retired low- or middle-income workers. They are not dodging tax responsibilities. They are filing forms and taking exemptions that were designed to relieve or eliminate tax burdens for those who are least able to pay.
The Tax Policy Center offers the example of a working couple making minimum wages who have two children and earn under $26,400 a year. Using standard deductions and specific exemptions designed for families in their circumstance, they can file a form that has a zero in the amount due column.
Tens of millions of American households—many of them our hardest-working citizens—find themselves in this category. Remember that, according to the Census Bureau, 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty in 2011.
Mitt Romney is not a member of this class of Americans. As a quarter-billionaire, he is part of a multi-generational elite—the most privileged 1 percent of the 1 percent—that has never ever had to worry about making ends meet at the end of the month.
But Mitt Romney has something in common with the working poor.
Like them, he benefits from federal programs that are designed to allow some Americans to avoid paying some or all of the taxes that would otherwise be due from them.
Roughly 13 percent of high-income Americans use itemized deductions—mortgage interest, health payments, or charitable contributions, education tax credits, or tax-exempt interest—to zero out their taxes.
Mitt Romney has not released the tax returns that his dad said a candidate for the presidency owes the American people—forms for the twelve years before their candidacy. So we do not know if he is an actual member of the 47 percent.
By Mitt Romney’s own admission, his accountants make sure that he does not “pay any more (taxes) than are legally due.”
All indications, from Romney and his campaign, are that he has taken full advantage of: tax exemptions, tax credits, tax havens and tax loopholes.
What sort of loopholes? We get an indication from documents filed by the firm that continued to stream money into Romney’s personal accounts long after he quit as a partner.
“The Bain documents posted [in August] show that Bain Capital will go to great lengths to help its partners and its investors avoid tax,” explained Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel at Citizens for Tax Justice. “Beyond simply putting their funds offshore, the Bain private equity funds are using aggressive tax-planning techniques such as blocker corporations, equity swaps, alternative investment vehicles and management fee conversions.”
That’s how someone who makes tens of millions of dollars says he pays around 13 percent of his annual income into the US Treasury, as opposed to the top marginal tax rate of 35 percent. For 2011, he estimated that he would pay $3.2 million on income of $21 million.
If Mitt Romney had paid at the 35 percent rate that he is supposed to be paying at, the check he wrote would have been for $7.4 million.
So he avoided paying $4.2 million in taxes.
That’s the same as the total amount that—were they paying at the marginal rate that would apply to the working poor if there were no exemptions—would be paid by roughly 1,100 of the low-income families Mitt Romney dismisses as “dependent.”
At the very least, it would seem that Mitt Romney has earned honorary membership in the 47 percent.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, September 18, 2012
“Hating On Ben Bernanke”: Mitt Romney Takes Up Residence In The Right’s Intellectual Fever Swamps
Last week Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, announced a change in his institution’s recession-fighting strategies. In so doing he seemed to be responding to the arguments of critics who have said the Fed can and should be doing more. And Republicans went wild.
Now, many people on the right have long been obsessed with the notion that we’ll be facing runaway inflation any day now. The surprise was how readily Mitt Romney joined in the craziness.
So what did Mr. Bernanke announce, and why?
The Fed normally responds to a weak economy by buying short-term U.S. government debt from banks. This adds to bank reserves; the banks go out and lend more; and the economy perks up.
Unfortunately, the scale of the financial crisis, which left behind a huge overhang of consumer debt, depressed the economy so severely that the usual channels of monetary policy don’t work. The Fed can bulk up bank reserves, but the banks have little incentive to lend the money out, because short-term interest rates are near zero. So the reserves just sit there.
The Fed’s response to this problem has been “quantitative easing,” a confusing term for buying assets other than Treasury bills, such as long-term U.S. debt. The hope has been that such purchases will drive down the cost of borrowing, and boost the economy even though conventional monetary policy has reached its limit.
Sure enough, last week’s Fed announcement included another round of quantitative easing, this time involving mortgage-backed securities. The big news, however, was the Fed’s declaration that “a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens.” In plain English, the Fed is more or less promising that it won’t start raising interest rates as soon as the economy looks better, that it will hold off until the economy is actually booming and (perhaps) until inflation has gone significantly higher.
The idea here is that by indicating its willingness to let the economy rip for a while, the Fed can encourage more private-sector spending right away. Potential home buyers will be encouraged by the prospect of moderately higher inflation that will make their debt easier to repay; corporations will be encouraged by the prospect of higher future sales; stocks will rise, increasing wealth, and the dollar will fall, making U.S. exports more competitive.
This is very much the kind of action Fed critics have advocated — and that Mr. Bernanke himself used to advocate before he became Fed chairman. True, it’s a lot less explicit than the critics would have liked. But it’s still a welcome move, although far from being a panacea for the economy’s troubles (a point Mr. Bernanke himself emphasized).
And Republicans, as I said, have gone wild, with Mr. Romney joining in the craziness. His campaign issued a news release denouncing the Fed’s move as giving the economy an “artificial” boost — he later described it as a “sugar high” — and declaring that “we should be creating wealth, not printing dollars.”
Mr. Romney’s language echoed that of the “liquidationists” of the 1930s, who argued against doing anything to mitigate the Great Depression. Until recently, the verdict on liquidationism seemed clear: it has been rejected and ridiculed not just by liberals and Keynesians but by conservatives too, including none other than Milton Friedman. “Aggressive monetary policy can reduce the depth of a recession,” declared the George W. Bush administration in its 2004 Economic Report of the President. And the author of that report, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw, has actually advocated a much more aggressive Fed policy than the one announced last week.
Now Mr. Mankiw is allegedly a Romney adviser — but the candidate’s position on economic policy is evidently being dictated by extremists who warn that any effort to fight this slump will turn us into Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe I tell you.
Oh, and what about Mr. Romney’s ideas for “creating wealth”? The Romney economic “plan” offers no specifics about what he would actually do. The thrust of it, however, is that what America needs is less environmental protection and lower taxes on the wealthy. Surprise!
Indeed, as Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute points out, the Romney plan of 2012 is almost identical — and with the same turns of phrase — to John McCain’s plan in 2008, not to mention the plans laid out by George W. Bush in 2004 and 2006. The situation changes, but the song remains the same.
So last week we learned that Ben Bernanke is willing to listen to sensible critics and change course. But we also learned that on economic policy, as on foreign policy, Mitt Romney has abandoned any pose of moderation and taken up residence in the right’s intellectual fever swamps.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, September 16, 2012
“There Is No Real Romney”: Mitt Was Really Saying To Plutocrats, “I’m You”
Whenever we get a glimpse of a candidate speaking in a place where he didn’t know he was being recorded, there’s a powerful temptation to conclude that the “real” person has been revealed. After all, campaigning is almost all artifice, and every other moment at which we see the candidate, he’s acutely aware that he is on stage, with people watching his every expression and listening to his every word. This is how many people are interpreting Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments we learned about yesterday, even though Mitt was certainly on stage, even if he didn’t know he was being recorded. For instance, Jonathan Chait says, “the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party.” McKay Coppins reaches the same conclusion, that “Romney seemed to give the closest thing to a candid description of his worldview,” as evidenced by the fact that “his delivery carried none of the discomfort or scripted nature of his stump speeches, and the tone was markedly different from that of the remarks he delivers at fundraisers open to the press.” Our own Bob Moser agreed yesterday.
I’m not buying it. As I’ve maintained for some time, for all intents and purposes there is no “real” Mitt Romney. His political beliefs are the equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat. They exist in every state at once until you open the box to observe them. If the one opening the box is a Tea Partier, they instantly lock into place as a set of Tea Party beliefs; if it’s a bunch of GOP plutocrats staring down, that’s whose beliefs he’ll mirror. Romney has spent the last five years in an intensive period of study, with his subject the contemporary American conservative mind in all its permutations. He’s well aware that the misleading talking point about 47 percent of Americans not paying taxes gets repeated all the time on the right, in private and public. What he was telling the people in that room is what he tells any group of people he speaks to. His message was, in Christine O’Donnell’s immortal words, “I’m you.”
And it just happens that before this particular group, “I’m you” was absolutely true. But it was necessary for Romney to explain to them not just that he’s like them, but he believes everything they believe. And the Randian idea that society is made up of makers and takers, and all those shiftless mooching takers are voting for their patron Obama, is something those funders believe with every fiber of their beings. Does Romney actually believe, as he says on the tape, that “I have inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have, we have earned the old-fashioned way”? Maybe, maybe not. But he knows that the ideas that every rich person got rich on nothing but merit, gumption, and hard work, and your wealth is proof of your virtue as a human being, have become absolute gospel among the kind of people who plunk down $50,000 to have dinner with the Republican nominee for president.
I’m not trying to let him off the hook here; “I was only pandering” is no defense for the repetition of abhorrent views (and subsequently, Mitt has insisted that he wasn’t only pandering, but saying what he really thinks). But show me an instance in which Mitt Romney tells a group of people something they don’t want to hear, and then I’ll believe we’ve gotten some insight into the “real” Romney.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 18, 2012
“The Tin Man With No Heart”: Mitt Romney, A Hollow Man Who Views The Presidency As His Entitlement
Mitt Romney, now we know you after a lost seven days in September which you and Ann will look back on and forever rue by the fireplace in one of your vacation compounds.
As one volunteer at the Democratic convention put it, “He’s the Tin Woodman with no heart, in the Wizard of Oz.” She did the stiff walk that, sure enough, captured the starched style of the man seeking a job that requires some heartfelt encounters with the American people. Starting in frigid Iowa, along a campaign trail that resembled the freakish Wizard quest, there has been precious little show of heart from a hollow man that views the presidency as his entitlement. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the enchanting tale published back in 1900, remains a rich source for American character archetypes.
The volunteer’s name was Brenda Lee Monroe, a 51-year-old African-American Atlanta resident, laid off three weeks earlier from a good job managing medical records. Jobs in her field are being outsourced as far as India. Yet she was upbeat and undefeated that night in the Charlotte arena, which was hopping.
To Romney, this spirited woman of grace would be part of the 47 percent, to be exact, which are not his “job to worry about,” as he callously put it in at a tony May fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. The tape of his talk to wealthy donors was released yesterday by Mother Jones magazine.
But first there was the unforgivable foul on the foreign policy front. To review: Romney didn’t wait for the sun to rise, for the bodies of four countrymen to grow cold, before he started blaming and speaking way out of school on the death of the American ambassador in Libya. The tone-deaf, tin Romney stooped so low he violated the laws of decency, not just politics, with his ugly outburst. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, said it was strange. Let’s get more real: It was un-American.
Romney’s rashness added to fears and whispers that if elected, he and his good buddy Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who’s hectoring President Barack Obama on Iran like a spoiled child, might just rush to judgment on bombing Iran. That would be bad, literally igniting the Middle East.
Then came the tape that revealed how Romney would govern on domestic policy, given a chance. The answer is that he’d govern only with the upper-class half in mind, those whom he presumes would vote for him.
As for the rest of us, we are not worth worrying about, he went on, as the other half that lacks a sense of responsibility and depend on the federal government for things like healthcare, housing, and food. “My job is not to worry about those people,” he said with chilling candor. Well, not everyone can take care of themselves all the time. And the president is supposed to represent all of us, we the people, not to divide us from them.
Think about it. Have we heard a single nice word out of Romney since this whole thing began on an Iowa ice floe? No, I don’t think so. The statement that corporations are people doesn’t count. For such a high-stakes candidate, it must be hard to get good wordsmith help these days. But the real problem lies within.
Nine months is too long to hide the truth and we will soon reach that water-mark in the election cycle. Romney has not yet authentically spoken to all the American people, not a word that shows spark, compassion, wit, humanity—or a heartbeat in there. He will pay a price for that, a high price even for a rich man.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, September 18, 2012
“What Romney Left Behind”: He’s Devoted His Life To The Conservative Base
One of the common misconceptions about the presidential candidate version of Mitt Romney is that he disavowed his greatest achievement in public office, health care reform, in an attempt to appeal to his party’s base. The truth is that he never actually disavowed it or said it was a failure or a mistake. What he did was tell primary voters that Romneycare was really nothing at all like Obamacare, and anyway Romneycare shouldn’t be tried in any other state. His comments were utterly unconvincing, but since they were always accompanied by a thunderous denunciation of Obamacare, Republican voters were assuaged enough to let it slide.
Which means that had he wanted to, Romney probably could have entered the general election making a positive case on health care beyond “Repeal Obamacare!” By continuing to maintain that Romneycare was in fact a good thing when he was challenged on it (even if he didn’t want to talk about it all that much), he gave himself enough rhetorical room that he could now be using the issue to show voters that he’s both competent and compassionate, that he successfully tackled a difficult policy problem in a way that improved people’s lives. Instead, his entire case for competence is that he got really rich in private equity, and his entire case for compassion is that his wife seems nice.
As Charles Pierce explains, he could even use the issue to portray himself as someone who can get past Washington partisanship:
Mitt Romney would be well within his rights to assert that he had this idea first, and that he’d managed to get it passed without the kind of political bloodletting occasioned by the president’s efforts. There was no uprising in Massachusetts over the individual mandate, no howling about “death panels.” A popular bipartisan solution was devised to a vexing social problem, and Romney would be justified fully in basing his campaign purely on the fact that, in an era of gridlock and paralysis, he could get something like health-care reform done.
Pierce tells his own story (he has a pre-existing condition that might have made him uninsurable in any state other than Massachusetts) and reminds us of how thousands of people there have been helped, and in many cases literally saved, because of what Mitt Romney did. But Romney won’t talk about it even now, despite the fact that the pivot from what he said during the primaries really wouldn’t have been that hard to make. And here’s a partial clue why:
Mitt Romney’s campaign has concluded that the 2012 election will not be decided by elusive, much-targeted undecided voters — but by the motivated partisans of the Republican base.
This shifting campaign calculus has produced a split in Romney’s message. His talk show interviews and big ad buys continue to offer a straightforward economic focus aimed at traditional undecided voters. But out stumping day to day is a candidate who wants to talk about patriotism and God, and who is increasingly looking to connect with the right’s intense, personal dislike for President Barack Obama.
You can characterize this as a new strategic turn, but it seems to me that the Romney campaign has never been about independent voters, not for a minute. My theory about why is that for five years, nearly every waking moment of Mitt Romney’s life was devoted to the conservative base—massaging them, figuring out what makes them happy and what makes them angry, determining who they wanted to be their candidate, and trying, trying, trying to be that person. After working so hard at it for so long, he just can’t stop, and he and everyone around him are convinced that it’s the only way to win.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 17, 2012
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