“Assuming Voters Are Fools”: GOP Tax Talk Takes A Trivial Turn
For more than three years, Republican critics of President Obama’s health care reform law have come up with all kinds of reasons to hate the law, most of which fall apart rather quickly under scrutiny. Thanks to last week’s Supreme Court ruling, however, the right has a new talking point they’ve largely ignored up until now: Obamacare raises taxes.
For Republicans, this should effectively end the conversation. The individual mandate counts as a “tax”; taxes are inherently evil; ergo the law is awful and anyone who supported it deserves to be publicly flogged. What’s more, conservatives are arguing that this wasn’t just any ol’ tax increase — it was the Largest Tax Increase Ever.
On Fox News, Jim Pinkerton characterized the mandate as “the biggest tax increase in the history of the universe.”
I hope most objective observers can agree this is, for lack of a better word, dumb. As Josh Marshall explained, “The Congressional Budget Office says the mandate penalty will raise $27 billion between 2012 and 2021. $27 billion over a decade. Anybody who cares to can do the math. But if you want to call it a ‘tax increase’ — which is debatable — it’s clearly one of the tiniest ones in history.”
This one tax penalty raises less than $3 billion a year, and it would affect about 1% of the population. What’s more, even if we’re generous, and assume the right is talking about all of the provisions within the law that raise new revenue, it’s still not even close to being the largest tax increase ever.
And just to top this off, Mitt Romney, the man Republicans want to be president, created and imposed the exact same tax penalty. He is, in fact, the only public official in American history to implement the policy the right is now pretending to find outrageous.
The entire argument is demonstrably ridiculous, apparently crafted under the assumption that voters are fools. We’ll see if the assumption is correct.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 2, 2012
“Completely Disingenous”: Can Romney Remain Absurd Until November?
If you will forgive yet another post on the implications of the Supreme Court’s ACA decision, it is important to understand that for all the “excitement” and “motivation” it may create among “base voters,” this development also makes every day on the campaign trail a tightrope for Mitt Romney. He was already going to have to navigate his way to November talking constantly about the economy and the federal budget even as he was stuck with economic and budget policies that would horrify swing voters if they were aware of them. And now there will be no escape from the subject of a national health reform initiative modeled on his own plan in a gubernatorial administration that now seems about a million years away from where he has landed ideologically in order to win his party’s presidential nomination.
National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh refers to Romney’s current positioning on health care as presenting an “Absurd Romney:”
The difficulty of Absurd Romney’s task is pointed up by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped Romney design his 2006 health insurance program in Massachusetts. He says that the then-governor used reasoning and language very similar to that of Chief Justice John Roberts in arguing for the necessity of an individual mandate. While Roberts said that Congress did not have the right to mandate behavior, it did retain the right to “tax and spend,” including penalizing people for not buying health care.
“It’s a penalty for free riding on the system. That’s the way Gov. Romney talked about it,” says Gruber, who later became one of the key architects of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was modeled in part on the Romney law. “Justice Roberts used similar language today.” Back in the 2000s, when Gruber demonstrated to Romney with computer models that, absent an individual mandate, one-third of Massachusetts’ poorest and sickest would remain uninsured (and drive up costs for everyone), Romney jumped on the point, instantly converted, says Gruber. Romney went at the problem “like a management consultant or an engineer” with no ideological taint, even against the advice of his conservative political advisers, Gruber says. “They were concerned about the politics of universal health care. He argued them down.”
Today, says Gruber, Romney is being “completely disingenuous” in arguing against a law whose principles he once embraced. And somewhat absurd. Gruber says Romney’s suggestion that, as in Massachusetts when he was governor, states should be permitted to decide on their health care plans is also disingenuous. Massachusetts could devise its health care law only because it had access to a large amount of federal money, a $385 million Medicaid grant that it needed to use to extend care to the poor. “He says the states could do it but not the federal government. Well, actually the states can’t do it” because they don’t have the money, says Gruber. “What he should be saying is that he ‘ll give the states a trillion dollars to come up with their own plans, but he’s not going to do that.”
Now some readers will say Romney and most of his supporters don’t give a damn about consistency, logic, or avoiding the appearance of being Absurd, and will just brazen it out. That may be true. But the thing about lying all the time about who you are, what you’ve done, and what you intend to do is that it frequently causes even the most disciplined dissembler to screw up or at least fail to make sense to voters with even minimal discernment. That’s the risk Romney is going to have to take nearly every time he opens his mouth over the next four months.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 29, 2012
“Offshored And Outsourced”: Mitt Romney’s Bain problem
While the Supreme Court’s upholding of the health-care law was last week’s most important event in historical terms, it will not be the decisive event of the 2012 election. In the long run, polling in swing states suggesting that Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is hurting him could have larger implications for where this campaign will move.
It’s certainly true that had the court knocked down President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the defeat would have been woven into a narrative of ineffectual leadership and mistaken priorities. Instead, the president found vindication not only from the court’s liberals but also from Chief Justice John Roberts.
But precisely because the decision saved the president from disaster on health care, it only reinforced the importance of the economic argument Obama and Romney have been having for months. And here is where Romney’s Bain problem kicks in.
As Democrats, mostly from Washington and New York, debated the efficacy of attacks on Romney’s role in Bain, an entirely different conversation was being driven in the swing states, courtesy of ads broadcast by the Obama campaign and especially by Priorities USA Action, the pro-Obama super PAC. The ads portray highly sympathetic workers who lost their jobs and companies that collapsed even as Bain’s principals made substantial profits.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last week provided surprisingly dramatic evidence of how much these commercials are wounding Romney.
In the country as a whole, 23 percent said they viewed Romney more positively because of his experience “managing a firm that specializes in buying, restructuring and selling companies,” while 28 percent said this made them view Romney more negatively. But in this year’s 12 battleground states, many of which have gotten a heavy run of the anti-Bain ads, only 18 percent viewed Romney’s business experience positively; 33 percent viewed it negatively. Obama led Romney by three points nationally but by eight in the battlegrounds.
This is disturbing news for Romney, who hoped his business experience would be an unalloyed asset. The numbers also underscore voter resistance to the core conservative claim that job creation is primarily about rewarding wealthy investors and companies through further tax cuts and less regulation. Americans are not anti-business, but they are skeptical that everything that is good for corporations is also good for their employees, and for job creation itself.
The Bain ads have done double-duty, specifically undermining Romney but also serving as a parable for how aspects of the current financial system hurt workers and local communities. Profits and productivity can rise even as real wages stagnate or fall, and jobs can be offshored and outsourced. The Romney campaign’s response to a recent Washington Post story describing Bain’s record on outsourcing — the campaign sought to “differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring” — sounded more like bureaucratic gobbledygook than an effective answer. Obama picked up on the story immediately, calling Romney an “outsourcing pioneer.”
But can the Obama campaign turn the argument over Romney and Bain into a broader challenge to the Republican claim that the only thing government can do to spur job creation is to get out of the way? “Jobs” will remain the Romney battle cry for the rest of the campaign, but the success of the anti-Bain offensive points to an opportunity for Obama to engage in a kind of political jujitsu. He can argue that Romney’s primary interest is not in job creation at all but in low-tax and deregulatory policies he would favor whether the economy was soaring or flat.
In a recent talk at the Center for American Progress, Stefan Löfven, the new leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, outlined a way to turn the debate around, arguing that job creation worldwide should be the focus of center-left parties. New policies on job creation should also be concerned with the quality and conditions of the jobs, how quickly the unemployed can be moved to new work and how the unemployed are treated and assisted toward new opportunities.
Here are the questions voters should be encouraged to ask in 2012: Should government focus directly on innovative approaches to creating good jobs in a new economy? Or should it be relegated to a position of powerlessness in which its only option is to concede ever more benefits to those — including the financial wizards at Bain — who are already doing very well indeed?
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 1, 2012
“Mitt Romney, The Godfather Of ObamaCare”: Wrong Argument, Wrong Candidate
Remember the line Rick Santorum took against Mitt Romney in March? The race for the Republican nomination was not quite over, and the former senator, referencing health care policy, told voters in Wisconsin, “Pick any other Republican in the country. [Romney] is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.”
Yesterday’s developments help reinforce the fact that Santorum had a point.
Consider today’s Boston Herald. For those unfamiliar with the outlet, the Herald is an unabashedly conservative paper, which goes out of its way to boost Republican candidates. Its front page headline this morning reads: “For Romney, Obamacare Ruling’s Just What The Doctor Ordered.”
Contrary to conventional wisdom, an anti-tax backlash over the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision upholding Obamacare could propel Mitt Romney all the way to the Oval Office, national Republicans said…. President Obama had originally promised the overhaul wouldn’t tax the middle class, and Republicans quickly seized on the ruling to point out that is exactly what the law does.
“Chief Justice John Roberts has all but gift-wrapped the election for Republicans with this ruling,” said Keith Appell, a GOP consultant based in Washington, D.C. “Now every single Democrat will have to defend the largest tax increase in American history during a bad economy in an election year.”
As a matter of policy, this is deeply silly. The mandate remains a tax penalty that will only apply to free riders — about 1% of the population, according to the CBO, who can afford insurance but refuse to get it.
But even if we put this aside, there’s that nagging detail the Boston Herald and other Republicans keep overlooking: Mitt Romney’s health care law in Massachusetts, his crowning accomplishment in government, has an identical mandate and an identical tax penalty. If Obamacare’s mandate must be considered a tax increase, Romneycare’s mandate must also be considered a tax increase.
Indeed, we can make this even more explicit: Mitt Romney is the only public official in American history to approve and implement this specific tax increase.
The conservatives who rushed yesterday to fill Romney’s coffers are supporting the godfather of Obamacare — the guy who imposed this health care mandate (read: tax increase) before the president was even elected. It’s exactly why Santorum called him the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama,” and why in retrospect, Santorum had a point.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 29, 2012
“Decency Is Irrelevant”: Romney Still Palling Around With Trump
Last month, reality-television personality Donald Trump reiterated his support for a ridiculous, borderline-racist conspiracy theory, but that didn’t stop Mitt Romney from cozying up to him.
As of last night, the Republican presidential hopeful is still palling around with the guy. ABC News reported yesterday afternoon that the Romney campaign’s “Dine With the Donald” luncheon had been postponed, but a Romney/Trump dinner last night in New York was not.
Although the lunch event was rain checked, tonight’s dinner fundraiser at the private residence of Martin Zweig will go on as planned. The dinner — which is reported to have raised millions of dollars and will host more than 50 guests — starts at 6:30 p.m., at Zweig’s residence in the Pierre Hotel, touted as one of the most expensive homes in Manhattan.
“Despite the multitude of erroneous reports today, I can assure you Mr. Trump and Gov. Romney both look forward to seeing one another this evening,” Cohen added.
Of course they will.
Remember, in May, when reporters yesterday whether Trump’s ugly antics gives him pause, Romney was unconcerned. “You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get 50.1% or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”
In other words, decency is irrelevant — the Republican presidential candidate should partner with anyone, no matter how vile, so long as it furthers his ambitions and gets him more votes.
As of last night, that still appears to be the case.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 29, 2012
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