“Logic, Fairness, And Common Sense”: The Final Days, The Biggest Issue, And The Clearest Choice
As we go into the final days of a dismal presidential campaign where too many issues have been fudged or eluded — and the media only want to talk about is who’s up and who’s down — the biggest issue on which the candidates have given us the clearest choice is whether the rich should pay more in taxes.
President Obama says emphatically yes. He proposes ending the Bush tax cut for people earning more than $250,000 a year, and requiring that the richest 1 percent pay no less than a third of their income in taxes, the so-called “Buffett Rule.”
Mitt Romney says emphatically no. He proposes cutting tax rates on the rich by 20 percent, extending the Bush tax cut for the wealthy, and reducing or eliminating taxes on dividends and capital gains.
Romney says he’ll close loopholes and eliminate deductions used by the rich so that their share of total taxes remains the same as it is now, although he refuses to specify what loopholes or deductions. But even if we take him at his word, under no circumstances would he increase the amount of taxes they pay.
Obama is right.
America faces a huge budget deficit. And just about everyone who’s looked at how to reduce it — the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the bi-partisan Simpson-Bowles Commission, and almost all independent economists and analysts — have come up with some combination of spending cuts and tax increases that raise revenue.
Just last Thursday, executives of more than eighty large American corporations called for tax reform that “raises revenues and reduces the deficit.”
The practical question is who pays for those additional revenues. If Romney’s view prevails and the rich don’t pay more, everyone else has to.
That’s nonsensical. The rich are far richer than they used to be, while most of the rest of us are poorer. The latest data show the top 1 percent garnering 93 percent of all the gains from the recovery so far. But median family income is 8 percent lower than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation.
The gap has been widening for three decades. Since 1980 the top 1 percent has doubled its share of the nation’s total income — from 10 percent to 20 percent. The share of the top one-tenth of 1 percent has tripled. The share of the top-most one-one hundredth of 1 percent — 16,000 families — has quadrupled. The richest 400 Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.
Meanwhile, the tax rates paid by the wealthy have dropped precipitously. Before 1981 the top marginal tax rate was never lower than 70 percent. Under President Dwight Eisenhower it was 93 percent. Even after taking all the deductions and tax credits available to them, the rich paid around 54 percent.
The top tax rate is now only 35 percent and the tax on capital gains (increases in the value of investments) is only 15 percent. Since so much of what they earn is from capital gains, many of the super-rich, like Mitt Romney himself, pay 14 percent or less. That’s a lower tax rate than many middle-class Americans pay.
In fact, if you add up all the taxes paid — not just on income and capital gains but also payroll taxes (which don’t apply to income above incomes of $110,100), and sales taxes — most of us are paying a higher percent of our income in taxes than are those at the top.
So how can anyone argue against raising taxes on the rich? Easy. They say it will slow the economy because the rich are “job creators.”
In the immortal words of Joe Biden, that’s malarky.
The economy did just fine during the three decades after World War II, when the top tax rate never fell below 70 percent. Average yearly economic growth was higher in those years than it’s been since, when taxes on the rich have been far lower.
Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich and the economy did wonderfully well. George W. Bush cut them and the economy slowed.
The real job creators are America’s vast middle class, whose spending encourages businesses to expand and hire — and whose lack of spending has the opposite effect.
That’s why the recovery has been painfully slow. So much income and wealth have gone to the top that the vast majority of Americans in the middle don’t have the purchasing power to get the economy moving again. The rich save most of what they earn, and their savings go anywhere around the world where they can get the highest return.
It would be insane to compound the damage by raising taxes on the middle class and not on the rich.
Logic, fairness, and common sense dictate that the rich pay more in taxes. It’s the key to avoiding January’s fiscal cliff and coming up with a “grand bargain” on taming the budget deficit. And it’s central to getting the economy back on track.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, October 28, 2012
“The Publisher Made Us Do It”: The Des Moines Register’s Practical Joke
This Romney endorsement editorial, if you actually bother to read it, is little more than a practical joke. First of all, it has all the hallmarks of having been ordered by the publisher over the objections of the editorial board. Normally, a sentence like “the Register’s editorial board, as it should, had a vigorous debate over this endorsement,” translated into blunt English means: “Our idiot publisher forced this tripe down our throats, and we’re counting on you the more knowledgeable readers to understand this.”
The argument, such as it is, is as substanceless as meringue. Mitt Romney could “forge compromises with Congress” to get the economy rolling again? The first part of that might actually be true, but only because the Democrats in Congress aren’t nearly as ideologically hidebound and politically obstreperous as their GOP counterparts.
But the second part, fixing the economy, creating jobs, tackling the deficit? Romney has been ridiculously vague on all these things. The editorial doesn’t so much as gesture in that direction. And then bam, the editorial ends. Just when you think it might start mounting such “arguments,” it ends. I actually hit the refresh button three times, as I couldn’t believe the entire editorial had loaded properly. It’s as Potemkin Village-ish a piece of journalistic writing as I’ve seen in a long time.
Sadly, it probably will make a small difference, although I’m sure the politically inside elite out in Iowa is laughing about it this morning. Most polls indicate that Obama has a couple of points to spare in the state. We’ll see. You can ask Hillary Clinton how much good the DMR did her in January 2008.
Meanwhile, Obama has been endorsed by: Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Miami Herald, Las Vegas Sun, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Raleigh News & Observer. I’ll grant that this is more newsworthy because it’s a flip since 2008, but that doesn’t make it more important in Iowa than the Sun is in Nevada.
Anyway, go read it. You’ll see what I mean. It reads like a practical joke, and a half-baked one at that. DMR: You still have time to publish your serious endorsement, you know, the one that lists actual reasons why you support the guy!
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 28, 2012
“Libyan Head Fake”: GOP Pretends No One Cares About Abortion
With a major storm and presidential election arriving within a week of each other, the penultimate batch of Sunday morning political talk shows before the election were dominated by talk of how Hurricane Sandy might impact the election. But abortion and Libya also made appearances. Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson wins our award for hackiest political analysis of the week (and there’s a lot of competition) for saying people care more about the GOP’s pet Libyan conspiracy theory than about abortion.
As for the storm, everyone of course said their focus is on the well-being of people in the storm’s path, but pundits couldn’t help but try to find the political angle as well. There seem to be two main theories: One is that the race will essentially be frozen in place as the media and everyone else shifts focus away from the election for the next few days. Since Obama remains slightly ahead in key swing states, this scenario is seen as helping him by preventing Romney from gaining traction. Obama could also earn points by “looking presidential” while leading a successful federal response to the disaster, pundits said.
On the other hand, Obama is crushing Romney in early voting, which is already going on in key states, especially Ohio, and any obstacle to getting people to the polls this week could be bad for the president. Likewise, if the storm lowers turnout in general on election day, that’s also seen as hurting Obama, since he needs strong support from demographics that tend to vote in lower numbers, like young people and Latinos.
But here’s how the storm will actually affect the election: No one knows. Anything else is pure speculation, but apparently both the Obama and Romney campaigns are concerned. For what it’s worth, Bob McDonnell, the Republican governor of battleground Virginia, which is expected to get hammered, said on CNN that they’re prioritizing election infrastructure in their response to the storm, so everything should be normal by election day.
Leave it to Newt Gingrich to politicize the storm to an almost comical degree. “You’ll notice he’s canceling his trips over the hurricane. He did not cancel his trips over Benghazi. And so you have to wonder, between Benghazi, the price of gasoline, and unemployment, just how much burden the president’s going to carry into this last week,” Gingrich told George Stephanopoulos on ABC. From there, it was quick jump to: “I think [Romney’s] actually going to end up winning around 53-47.”
Benghazi, of course, refers to the attack on American diplomats in the Libyan city, over which Republicans have been hammering Obama. It almost sounds like Gingrich doesn’t think Obama should cancel trips to deal with the hurricane, but it’s also unclear why Obama would have canceled a trip to deal with Benghazi, as the whole incident lasted a matter of hours, not days like the hurricane will. As for Newt’s political forecast, it seems only slightly more plausible than a moon base. Real Clear Politics’ polling average has Romney less than a percent ahead of Obama nationally. Nate Silver projects Obama squeaking out a two point popular vote victory over Romney on November 6. It’s entirely possible that Romney wins the popular vote, but not by six points, sorry Newt.
But Benghazi did come up a lot today, suggesting the GOP has decided to concentrate its fire on the topic. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, on CBS’ Face the Nation today, suggested it was even worse than Watergate. “This tragedy turned into a debacle and massive coverup or massive incompetence in Libya is having an effect on the voters because of their view of the commander in chief,” he said. “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘This is as bad as Watergate.’ Nobody died in Watergate,” McCain added.
While there’s no doubt officials made some tragic errors around the attack, the Republican narrative against Obama just isn’t based in reality, as Candy Crowley’s real-time fact check of Romney in the second debate demonstrated. Their smoking gun is an erroneous bit of early intelligence that ended up being wrong and it’s not even clear what they’re accusing Obama of doing anyway. Mostly, their obsession with the topic comes off as little more than party-endorsed conspiracy theorizing that seems to be dog whistling that the president actually wanted the Americans killed, or at least didn’t mind much that they died.
It’s interesting that Romney surrogates and allies are going all in on Libya considering that the man himself has been largely avoiding it. Libya disappeared from Romney’s stump speeches in recent days. And in last week’s foreign policy debate, he completely passed on every opportunity to slam Obama on the attack. In that debate, moderator Bob Schieffer’s first question was on “the controversy over what happened” in Libya. But Romney’s response almost completely ignored Libya, spending more time on Syria and Mali instead.
Which brings us to our Sunday Best, which has to do with the intersection of Benghazi and abortion, which apparently exists somewhere. A frequent topic of discussion today was Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s comments on how a pregnancy from rape is actually a “gift from God.” But according to the (almost all male) representatives of the Republican Party on TV today, no one cares. “I think the reality is, Candy, overwhelmingly, I promise you, people out there are not talking about what Richard Mourdock said,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus assured CNN’s Crowley.
Gingrich again gets the prize for going too far. Asked by Stephanopoulos to respond to Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter’s comments on Mourdock, Gingrich told Cutter to get over it. “OK, so why can’t people like Stephanie Cutter get over it? We all condemn rape,” Gingrich helpfully explained. As we’ve noted, conservatives seem to have a thing for dismissing Cutter in personal ways.
But Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson won the day. Abortion is “not even an issue here in Wisconsin,” Johnson said on Fox News Sunday after being asked about Mourdock’s comments. “It doesn’t even move the radar at all… What people are concerned about, like I said yesterday — it was amazing how many people are coming up to me demanding answers on Benghazi,” Johnson said.
Considering that barely half the country even knows about Benghazi, according to a recent Pew poll, that seems hard to believe. The Pew survey found that 56 percent said they were following news about the attack, and that almost 30 percent had no opinion about the administration’s handling. Contrast that with polling on abortion, which regularly shows that upwards of 97 percent of Americans have strong opinions on the issue.
Abortion is by far the “most important issue for women in this election,” according to women polled by Gallup. A plurality of 39 percent listed it as their top issue, while jobs came in a distant second at 19 percent, followed by healthcare at 18 percent. Not even one percent of women listed national security as their top concern. Among men, just 4 percent did.
By the way, after a week dominated by talk of abortion in the wake of Mourdock’s comment, who did the Romney campaign and the GOP send onto the major Sunday shows? About a dozen Republican men and just one woman. The one woman was Carly Fiorina, the former HP exec and former California GOP Senate candidate. On Meet the Press, she denounced Murdock’s comment, but said they don’t really matter. “Women care about the role of government. Women care about their children’s education,” she said.
That’s all true, according to the polls, but they care about abortion more and it will only hurt Republicans as long as they pretend that’s not true.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, October 28, 2012
“You’re On Your Own”: Mitt Romney Called Federal Disaster Relief “Immoral”
Hurricane Sandy now threatens the eastern seaboard of the United States. You can follow the storm here. As the storm disrupts the final days of the presidential election, it’s important to think about the candidates’ positions on disaster relief.
During the GOP primary, as the candidates pitted themselves against each other in a contest to see who could call for more austerity, Mitt Romney called the money the federal government spends on disaster relief “immoral”:
“We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all”.
Of course the amount of money we spend on disaster relief – approximately $6.1 billion is allocated for 2013 — is a fraction of the estimated $294 billion Mitt’s latest proposed tax cuts would cost.
During the Republican National Convention, as Hurricane Isaac forced the GOP to cancel the first day of its festivities, Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy looked at how Romney’s proposals and his running mate Paul Ryan’s budget would affect disaster relief and found that “…under a Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan administration, FEMA’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to natural disasters could be severely inhibited.”
But at least disaster victims would have the relief of knowing that the rich have more tax breaks to keep them warm.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 28, 2012
“Fantasy And Fear Based”: Why Mitt Romney’s Bogus Jeep Claims Matter
Mitt Romney campaigned in Defiance, Ohio, last night, and rolled out a new argument. “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” he said. “I will fight for every good job in America, I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair, America will win.”
There are a few problems with this line of attack, starting with the simple fact that Romney wasn’t telling the truth. As Chrysler itself explained, the company intends to build Jeeps in China to be sold in China, but isn’t moving American jobs abroad.
On Oct. 22, 2012, at 11:10 a.m. ET, the Bloomberg News report “Fiat Says Jeep® Output May Return to China as Demand Rises” stated “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley (President and CEO of the Jeep brand) referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.”
Despite clear and accurate reporting, the take has given birth to a number of stories making readers believe that Chrysler plans to shift all Jeep production to China from North America, and therefore idle assembly lines and U.S. workforce. It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.
Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation. A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments. [emphasis in the original]
All of this, incidentally, is rather ironic given the successful efforts of the Obama administration when it comes to China and Jeeps, specifically.
Greg Sargent explained well why this matters: “Romney may very well be the next president. That’s a position of some responsibility. Yet he and his campaign rushed to tell voters a story designed to stoke their fears for their livelihoods without bothering to vet it for basic accuracy. This is not a small thing. It reveals the depth of Romney’s blithe lack of concern for the truth — and the subservience of it to his own political ambitions.”
Indeed, we can take this a step further.
Romney specifically urged business leaders to give their employees voting instructions — many took Romney’s suggestion seriously — and as a consequence, workers in a growing number of businesses are being told their jobs may be dependent on the outcome of the election.
Romney’s comments in Defiance are part of the same kind of fear-based argument: vote the right way or you’ll be unemployed. Your livelihood is at stake, so support the candidate who opposed President Obama’s successful rescue of the auto industry and got rich laying off American workers.
For additional context, it’s worth noting that the Detroit News reports today that Chrysler is adding an additional 1,100 new jobs. Why? To build more Jeeps right here in the United States.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 26, 2012
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