“Romney Unveils Agenda”: His “Five-Point Plan” Is Vastly Less Specific Than His “One-Point Plan”
Ask and it shall be given, Mitt Romney’s campaign seems to be saying today to critics Left and Right. Need a positive campaign message? Want an agenda? Well, here you are, per Byron York:
[O]n Thursday, the campaign rolled out “Mitt Romney’s Plan for a Stronger Middle Class,” which boiled down nearly every domestic policy proposal Romney has made to just five points: energy independence, education, trade reform, deficit cutting and a plan to “champion small business.”
And on Thursday afternoon, there was Romney, addressing supporters in Golden, Colo., in front of a giant banner that said ROMNEY PLAN. In his remarks, Romney criticized Obama; nothing wrong with that. But he laid out his larger purpose at the very beginning. “Today, I come to talk about making things better,” Romney said, laying out his plan. “If we do those five things, those simple five things … you’re going to see this economy come roaring back.”
“This is the path to more jobs and more take-home pay and a brighter future for you and your kids,” Romney added. “And I know that because I’ve seen it.”
Romney was clear, sharp and focused. If he stays that way, he’ll likely quiet some of his GOP critics, at least for a while.
Well, that’s nice, and clearly more substantive than just touting his own success and rugged good looks as a sufficient agenda. But Lord a-mercy, this five-point plan raises a few follow-up questions, eh? I mean, would Barack Obama dispute any of these five goals? I don’t think so.
The funny thing about this “five-point plan” is that it’s vastly less specific than what you might call his “one-point plan:” the Ryan Budget, which shows in detail how Romney and a Republican Congress would go about achieving those five goals. Until Romney is willing to talk about that, then he can call his vague talking points a PLAN all he wants, but it’s about as accurate as taking photos of a city from an airplane window at 40,000 feet, and proclaiming it all neat and pretty.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 3, 2012
“Debt, Depression, DeMarco”: How Economic Policy Has Been Crippled By Unyielding, Irresponsible Republican Opposition
There has been plenty to criticize about President Obama’s handling of the economy. Yet the overriding story of the past few years is not Mr. Obama’s mistakes but the scorched-earth opposition of Republicans, who have done everything they can to get in his way — and who now, having blocked the president’s policies, hope to win the White House by claiming that his policies have failed.
And this week’s shocking refusal to implement debt relief by the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a Bush-era holdover the president hasn’t been able to replace — illustrates perfectly what’s going on.
Some background: many economists believe that the overhang of excess household debt, a legacy of the bubble years, is the biggest factor holding back economic recovery. Loosely speaking, excess debt has created a situation in which everyone is trying to spend less than their income. Since this is collectively impossible — my spending is your income, and your spending is my income — the result is a persistently depressed economy.
How should policy respond? One answer is government spending to support the economy while the private sector repairs its balance sheets; now is not the time for austerity, and cuts in government purchases have been a major economic drag. Another answer is aggressive monetary policy, which is why the Federal Reserve’s refusal to act in the face of high unemployment and below-target inflation is a scandal.
But fiscal and monetary policy could, and should, be coupled with debt relief. Reducing the burden on Americans in financial trouble would mean more jobs and improved opportunities for everyone.
Unfortunately, the administration’s initial debt relief efforts were ineffectual: Officials imposed so many restrictions to avoid giving relief to “undeserving” debtors that the program went nowhere. More recently, however, the administration has gotten a lot more serious about the issue.
And the obvious place to provide debt relief is on mortgages owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lenders that were effectively nationalized in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration.
The idea of using Fannie and Freddie has bipartisan support. Indeed, Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard, a top Romney adviser, has called on Fannie and Freddie to let homeowners with little or no equity refinance their mortgages, which could sharply cut their interest payments and provide a major boost to the economy. The Obama administration supports this idea and has also proposed a special program of relief for deeply troubled borrowers.
But Edward DeMarco, the acting director of the agency that oversees Fannie and Freddie, refuses to move on refinancing. And, this week, he rejected the administration’s relief plan.
Who is Ed DeMarco? He’s a civil servant who became acting director of the housing finance agency after the Bush-appointed director resigned in 2009. He is still there, in the fourth year of the Obama administration, because Senate Republicans have blocked attempts to install a permanent director. And he evidently just hates the idea of providing debt relief.
Mr. DeMarco’s letter rejecting the relief plan made remarkably weak arguments. He claimed that the plan, while improving his agency’s financial position thanks to subsidies from the Treasury Department, would be a net loss to taxpayers — a conclusion not supported by his own staff’s analysis, which showed a net gain. And it’s worth pointing out that many private lenders have offered the very kinds of principal reductions Mr. DeMarco rejects — even though these lenders, unlike the government, have no incentive to take into account the way debt relief would strengthen the economy.
The main point, however, is that Mr. DeMarco seems to misunderstand his job. He’s supposed to run his agency and secure its finances — not make national economic policy. If the Treasury secretary, acting for the president, seeks to subsidize debt relief in a way that actually strengthens the finance agency, the agency’s chief has no business blocking that policy. Doing so should be a firing offense.
Can Mr. DeMarco be fired right away? I’ve been seeing conflicting analyses on that point, although one thing is clear: President Obama, if re-elected, can, and should, replace him through a recess appointment. In fact, he should have done that years ago. As I said, Mr. Obama has made plenty of mistakes.
But the DeMarco affair nonetheless demonstrates, once again, the extent to which U.S. economic policy has been crippled by unyielding, irresponsible political opposition. If our economy is still deeply depressed, much — and I would say most — of the blame rests not with Mr. Obama but with the very people seeking to use that depressed economy for political advantage.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 2, 2012
“Mitt Romney Passes Wind”: He’s Perfectly Happy To Maintain Subsidies For The Oil Industry
What happens when the preferences of the economic base meet the preferences of the ideological base?
Mitt Romney was in Colorado yesterday, where some people aren’t too pleased with him. This week he came out in opposition to an extension of the wind-power production tax credit (PTC), which is set to expire at the end of the year. The tax credit helps make wind power competitive and is credited with enabling the creation of thousands of jobs in manufacturing and construction. This is almost certainly not going to be a huge issue in the campaign, but it does reveal some interesting things about where Romney is vis-a-vis the Republican Party. On one side, you have the parochial economic interests of many Republican members of Congress and some very well-heeled Republican economic constituency. On the other, you have the purely knee-jerk reaction of Tea Party types to anything hippies might like. Guess where Mitt comes down?
Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee passed an extension of the credit with bipartisan support. The PTC has support from members of Congress from both parties who have wind projects in their states, and a number of prominent Republicans like Chuck Grassley have urged Romney to change his position. There are thousands of jobs at stake; as Phyllis Cuttino of the Pew Clean Energey Program writes, “This uncertainty has put off investors and led to boom-and-bust cycles in the industry: Wind installations have declined by 73 to 93 percent in years without a PTC. Because of the long timelines (wind projects can take nine to 16 months from groundbreaking to power generation), investors seeking new wind projects must look two to three years into the future to decide whether the costs and benefits warrant investment. As we’ve seen in the past, investors are wary of supporting new projects if the availability of the tax credit is uncertain.” That brings up a peculiar footnote to this issue: Some of the biggest beneficiaries of this tax break are banks like Goldman Sachs, which is investing heavily in clean energy and so has a substantial stake in the PTC being renewed.
But when the issue came up, Mitt Romney’s spidey-sense, with which he tunes into every whim and grunt from Republican-base voters, began to tingle. Let’s dispense with the idea that anyone on either side has a principled position on these kind of tax credits that they hold to irrespective of the activity that the tax credit supports. In the case of liberals, there’s no hypocrisy involved: We’ll freely admit that there are some things government should support, and in a case like renewable energy, some of these industries need a boost in their early stages in order to become competitive. Part of government’s job is to create the conditions where the market can operate freely, efficiently, and justly. All of us (well, most of us) would agree that if we got all our energy from renewables and that energy was affordable, that would be better than our current situation, in which most of our energy comes from sources that have substantial environmental costs in both their extraction and their use. The question is what we’re willing to do in order to approach that better world, and liberals believe that some tax credits for renewables are a perfectly reasonable part of the price. We also assume that these tax credits are finite and that as the industry matures they can be phased out.
Conservatives, on the other hand, claim that they believe in the free market and that industries should rise or fall on their own merits without any help from government. But in practice, their opinions on particular cases show no adherence to this principle they allegedly hold. Instead, they favor tax credits for industries they like for one reason or another and oppose them for industries they don’t like. In the past few years, opinions on energy have become one more culture-war marker for conservatives, with people gleefully chanting “Drill baby drill!” at Republican rallies and leaders like Rush Limbaugh waging holy war against electric cars, for no particular reason other than liberals like renewable energy, and they hate liberals. So Mitt Romney is perfectly happy to maintain subsidies for the oil industry but opposes subsidies for the wind-power industry. There isn’t some fundamental principle about the relationship of industry and government at work here. He’s just channeling the opinions of his party, as always.
For a long time, it seemed that whenever there was a direct conflict between the preferences of the GOP’s economic base and its grassroots ideological base, preference went to the economic base. Those conflicts were rare—part of the great trick the economic base pulled was convincing the grassroots base that if Jesus returned tomorrow, he’d favor cutting the capital gains tax. I doubt Romney feels particularly strongly about this. But his default impulse, at least for the moment, is to do whatever he thinks the most extreme Tea Partier would prefer. As I said yesterday, it’s almost as though he doesn’t realize the primaries are over.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 3, 2012
“Voter Registration Drives”: Federal Court Blocks Most Of Texas Voter Suppression Law
A federal judge in Galveston on Thursday partially blocked new Texas registration laws that critics say amount to vote suppression because they prevent large voter registration drives.
U.S. District Judge Gregg Costa blocked the state from enforcing five provisions of the laws that its defenders say are aimed at preventing voter fraud.
“Today’s ruling means that community groups and organizations like Voting for America and Project Vote will be able to run community voter registration drives in Texas,” plaintiff’s attorney Chad Dunn said. “These drives are important to reaching the millions of Texans, including three-quarters of a million African-Americans and 2 million Latinos, who are eligible but still not registered to vote.”
Dunn represents two Galveston County residents and the nonprofit voter registration group Voting for America, an affiliate of the nonpartisan Project Vote based in Washington, D.C.
“They don’t care how you vote as long as you get registered and participate,” Dunn said.
The plaintiffs sued Galveston County Tax Assessor-Collector Cheryl Johnson and Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade
“It was a scholarly opinion, he obviously put a lot of thought into it, but I am very disappointed by the outcome,” Johnson said. State officials could not be reached for comment.
Costa granted a preliminary injunction on five sections of the law until a trial on whether the entire law violates the plaintiffs’ civil rights and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.
Key Points
Under the ruling, the state may no longer require that deputy voter registrars live in Texas, a law Voting for America said prevented it from organizing voter registration drives.
It also may not prevent deputy registrars from registering voters who live outside their county; prevent organizations from firing or promoting employees based on the number of voters registered; prevent organizations from making photocopies of completed voter registration forms for their records; or prevent deputy registrars from mailing completed applications.
Johnson said allowing groups to copy registration applications could violate privacy rights.
“I intend to start calling state representatives tomorrow to change the content of voter registration applications,” she said. Johnson wants social security numbers, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers removed.
“Is there going to be a huge increase in voter fraud? I hope not,” she said, adding that her office would redouble its scrutiny of completed registration forms.
The plaintiffs had asked Costa to block eight sections of the law enacted in 2011 so that they could register voters before the national election in November. Costa declined to block enforcement of laws that make it a criminal offense for a deputy registrar to submit a partially completed form, a restrictive training requirement, and a requirement that deputy registrars wear an identification badge. He left the legality of those laws to be decided at trial.
Appeal Possible
Dunn said the attorney general could appeal the injunction to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Dunn, who has represented Democrats in redistricting lawsuits, said the Legislature’s redistricting plan, photo identification bill and registration requirements are evidence of voter suppression.
“This Legislature will do anything to prevent Texans from voting,” Dunn said.
By: Harvey Rice, Chron.com, August 3, 2012
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