“Momentary” Lapse Of Judgment: Mitt Romney Does It Again
Mitt Romney can’t help but reveal that he’s a boring technocrat.
Mitt Romney’s main problem with conservative voters is that they don’t trust him or his commitment to conservative values. And for good reason; it’s only been six years since he left office as the moderate, pro-choice governor of a liberal state who pioneered health care reform for the country. Romney has tried to overcome this with constant pandering, open contempt for President Obama, and casual dishonesty, but it hasn’t done the trick. What’s more, there are times when the mask slips, and Romney reveals how much he actually is a boring technocrat. Yesterday was one of those times:
Speaking in Shelby Township, MI, the former Massachusetts governor took a question about the Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission empaneled by President Obama to address the nation’s deficit and debt issues. In his response, he said that addressing taxes and spending issues are essential.
“If you just cut, if all you’re thinking about doing is cutting spending, as you cut spending you’ll slow down the economy,” he said in part of his response. “So you have to, at the same time, create pro-growth tax policies.”
In other words, Romney just admitted—in a momentary lapse of judgment—that some form of government spending can grow the economy during a recession. Nevermind that this is the accepted position of most economists, conservative and otherwise. It runs counter to the core dogma of the conservative movement, that spending cuts (and tax cuts) always grow the economy. It’s a relatively small slip—like his “severely conservative” comment at CPAC—but it’s emblematic of Romney’s distance from the party he wants to lead.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 22, 2012
Mitt Romney: “Scourge Of The One Percent”
When Mitt Romney unveiled his new tax plan cutting taxes across the board by 20 percent in Arizona today, he pledged that he would “make sure the top one percent keeps paying the current share they’re paying or more.”
This illustrates how much the landscape has shifted in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the broader public’s rising preoccupation with inquality. After all, only last month, Romney attacked Obama as divisive for using the 99-versus-one-percent language, which he termed as “entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”
That aside, his rhetoric raises a question: What does his new plan actually mean for the wealthy?
I just got off the phone with Bob McIntyre, the president of the liberal-leaning-but-nonpartisan Citizens for Tax Justice. He says the upshot for the rich is a huge tax cut that’s paid for by cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Total taxes cut in the plan: $10 trillion over 10 years, by his calculation.
The central feature of Romney’s new plan is an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut — on top of continuing the Bush tax cuts, by McIntyre’s reading. For the top earners, that means the tax rate drops to 28 percent. The plan also cuts the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, repeals the estate tax, and maintains the current tax rate of 15 percent on income from capital gains.
Bottom line?
“The wealthy will pay far less in taxes than they do now, including a wealthy person named Mitt Romney,” McIntyre says.
McIntyre notes that the plan does allow for the closing of some loopholes enjoyed by the wealthy, but said we need more detail to see whether they will constitute anything meaningful.
The plan appears to be paid for by unspecified cuts to Social Security and Medicare. On the latter program, Romney’s plan envisions a “a premium support system that gives each senior the freedom to choose among competing private plans and traditional fee-for-service Medicare.” That appears to be a reference to the Ryan-Wyden Medicare plan.
So how does this all square with Romney’s claim above about the one percent? McIntyre says the key is that Romney said the one percent’s “share” would not drop. He didn’t say the amount the one percent pays wouldn’t drop.
“If you reduce the whole thing by 20 percent then they can go down by 20 percent and still pay the same share,” McIntyre explains.
So there you have it.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, February 22, 2012
“Primary Pander Mode”: Severely Conservative Mitt To Rollout New Tax Plan
What do Republican politicians do when they need to pick it up a step? You’ve got it: they propose more tax cuts.
So it’s no great surprise that Mitt Romney is signaling that he’s coming out with a new, “bold” tax proposal to coincide with his stretch drive towards primaries next week in Michigan and Arizona, not to mention the upcoming Super Tuesday (March 6).
The chosen herald for this news appears to be that intrepid supply-sider, Larry Kudlow of National Review, who reports, with barely restrained excitement, that Mitt’s new tax cuts will be “across-the-board with supply-side incentives from rate reduction, and that it will help small-business owners as well as everyone else.”
You may wonder why Romney didn’t find space for this stuff in his previously released 159-page economic plan. Looking at that beast for the first time in a while, it already includes making the Bush tax cuts permanent; abolishing estate taxes; a partial abolition of taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains; and lower corporate tax rates. Ah, but there it is, the placeholder for new goodies: “a conservative overhaul of the tax system over the long term that includes lower, flatter rates on a broader base.”
Now lots of folks in both parties think it might be possible to have lower income tax rates if the lost revenues are offset by aggressive elimination of tax expenditures, from fossil fuel subsidies to the mortgage interest deduction, all of them zealously defended by some powerful lobby. It will be interesting to see if Romney moves in that direction, or instead (as one might guess from Kudlow’s enthusiasm) relies on the old voodoo magic of supply-side economics, and pretends lower rates will pay for themselves. Since he’s in full primary pander mode, it’s unlikely he’ll propose anything a signfiicant number of GOP primary voters will find objectionable.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 21, 2012
“Shadowy Billionaires”: The Men Who Own The GOP And Your Democracy
Have you heard of William Dore, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, Peter Thiel or Bruce Kovner? If not, let me introduce them to you. They’re running for the Republican nomination for president.
I know, I know. You think Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are running. They are – but only because the people listed in the first paragraph have given them huge sums of money to do so. In a sense, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul and Romney are the fronts. Dore et al. are the real investors.
According to January’s Federal Election Commission report, William Dore and Foster Friess supplied more than three-fourths of the $2.1 million raked in by Rick Santorum’s super PAC in January. Dore, president of the Dore Energy Corp. in Lake Charles, La., gave $1 million; Freiss, a fund manager based in Jackson Hole, Wyo., gave $669,000 (he had given the Santorum super PAC $331,000 last year, bringing Freiss’ total to $1 million).
Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, provided $10 million of the $11 million that went into Gingrich’s super PAC in January. Adelson is chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. Texas billionaire Harold Simmons donated $500,000.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, provided $1.7 million of the $2.4 million raised by Ron Paul’s super PAC in January.
Mitt Romney’s super PAC raised $6.6 million last month – almost all from just 40 donors. Bruce Kovner, co-founder of the New York-based hedge fund Caxton Associates, gave $500,000, as did two others. David Tepper of Appaloosa Management gave $375,000. J.W. Marriott and Richard Marriott gave a total of $500,000. Julian Robertson, co-founder of hedge fund Tiger Management, gave $250,000. Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman gave $100,000.
Bottom line: Whoever emerges as the GOP standard-bearer will be deeply indebted to a handful of people, each of whom will expect a good return on their investment.
And this is just the beginning. We haven’t even come to the general election.
Nonprofit political fronts like Crossroads GPS, founded by Republican political guru Karl Rove, are already gathering hundreds of millions of dollars from big corporations and a few wealthy individuals like billionaire oil and petrochemical moguls David and Charles Koch. The public will never know who or what corporation gave what because, under IRS regulations, such nonprofit “social welfare organizations” aren’t required to disclose the names of those who contributed to them.
Before 2010, federal campaign law and Federal Election Commission regulations limited to $5,000 per year the amount an individual could give to a PAC making independent expenditures in federal elections. This individual contribution limit was declared unconstitutional by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in a case based on the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision at the start of 2010, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission.
Now, the limits are gone. And this comes precisely at a time when an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s income and wealth is accumulating at the top.
Never before in the history of our Republic have so few spent so much to influence the votes of so many.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, Published in The Huffington Post, February 21, 2012
Righteous Rick Santorum Is His Own Worst Enemy
The current frontrunner’s backers complain that he’s being unfairly targeted with distracting gotcha questions, but he’s the one who put the spotlight on secondary issues like Obama’s theology, homeschooling, and prenatal testing.
Why is everybody suddenly picking on poor, misunderstood Rick Santorum?
Die-hard supporters of the former Pennsylvania senator insist that he’s received unjust, unmerited criticism from establishment insiders desperately determined to protect their favored candidates (presumably Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) from the sudden Santorum surge.
According to this line of reasoning, raging controversies over recent comments by Righteous Rick reflect persistent media bias, an outrageous effort to distract attention from the president’s economic failures, and a ruthless determination to destroy the one candidate best equipped to shake up the Washington status quo.
The most conspicuous example of such allegedly unfair treatment involved this Sunday’s Face the Nation, when CBS veteran Bob Schieffer concentrated solely on an oddly assorted array of Santorum remarks on seemingly irrelevant topics, allowing the sweater-vested conservative champion no chance for important or positive policy proposals.
For instance, the broadcast began with damning tape of the candidate telling a cheering weekend rally that for Obama, “It’s not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology.”
Any conservatives who believe that Schieffer and CBS had no right to confront Santorum with these comments should try an uncomfortable thought experiment: Imagine that President Obama (or, far more conceivably, Vice President Biden) had assaulted Santorum himself, or one of the other GOP candidates, for basing his policies on “some phony theology.”
Would Republicans rightly react with profound indignation and demand an apology?
For Obama, of course, the issue of “phony theology” is particularly explosive due to previous criticism regarding his long association with the faith-based crackpot Jeremiah Wright, and frequent charges from the right-wing fringe that the Leader of the Free World is actually a secret Muslim. (In defending Santorum’s remarks on MSNBC, the former senator’s press spokeswoman even cited the president’s “radical Islamist policies” before she apologized.)
On Face the Nation Santorum reassured the public that “I accept the fact that the president is a Christian,” and he adamantly maintained that the “phony theology” crack only pertained to a “radical environmentalist … worldview” that he imputed to Obama. But if he accepted Obama’s Christian self-identification, then why would he use the term “theology,” while specifically insisting that the “phony” faith in question was non-Biblical and therefore non-Christian?
Of course, Santorum would prefer to spend his precious moments on network TV talking about something else, but why then did he make the decision to use a raucous and very public campaign rally to raise the issue of “phony theology”?
The same question applies to the next subject raised on Face the Nation: Santorum’s claim at another Ohio campaign stop that an Obamacare mandate for free prenatal testing “ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”
His tortured response when asked to defend this idea in no way resulted from the sort of nasty “gotcha” question that Newt Gingrich passionately denounced earlier in the campaign. When Gingrich famously denounced CNN’s John King for beginning a televised debate with scurrilous charges from an angry ex-wife, most Republicans instinctively sympathized with the former speaker. Newt had never raised the issue of his second divorce (no candidate could be that stupid) and clearly preferred not to talk about it.
But if Santorum wanted to avoid the subject of prenatal testing, then why in the world did he bring it up on the stump just hours before his scheduled showdown on Face the Nation?
Instead of discussing aggrieved Catholic charities in the context of religious liberty and freedom of conscience (where many people of faith agree with the conservative critique of Obama policy), the candidate found himself struggling to make distinctions on details of prenatal testing—which nearly all prospective parents embrace in one form or another.
When questioned about his prior stumble into this medical and ethical thicket, Santorum could have easily affirmed that “I believe in complete freedom of choice when it comes to prenatal testing—no federal interference with doctors or parents who want to test unborn babies, and no federal policy to compel them to do so.” This declaration could have enabled the beleaguered candidate to turn to the far more legitimate issue of requiring religious charities to insure medical services (like sterilization) of which they disapproved and to again defend the principle of freedom of conscience.
Finally, Santorum’s gaggle of gaffes led him to an even more disastrous exchange on an even more unnecessary controversy: state (not federal!) support for public education. In speaking to a warmly supportive crowd at the Ohio Christian Alliance on Saturday, the candidate had explained that in the past “most presidents homeschooled their children in the White House … Parents educated their children because it was their responsibility. Yes, the government can help but the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly, much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic.”
This statement enabled hostile blogger Stephen D. Foster to run the misleading (and widely circulated) headline “Rick Santorum Calls for End of Public Education, Says Parents Should Home School Their Kids,” but on CBS the former senator did little to eliminate the confusion.
As I said before, first I’d get the federal government out,” he told Bob Schieffer and the nation, echoing a viewpoint that most conservatives share. But then Santorum launched an indefensible explanation of his previous dismissal of state government “running” public education. “I would, to the extent possible, with respect to mandates and designing curriculum and the like, I would get the state government out. I think that the parents should be in charge working with the local school district to try to design an educational environment for each child that optimizes their potential.”
No governor or legislature in the country would accept the principle of “getting the state government out”—not when state governments (not localities) pay the biggest share of the bills for public schools (which educate nearly 90 percent of all school-age children in America, according to the most recent figures).
Moreover, Santorum happens to be a candidate for president, not governor of Pennsylvania (a race he declined to make two years ago), so under the system of federalism that Republicans enthusiastically endorse, he should have nothing to say about “getting state government out” of educational issues. As Ron Paul (among many others) might helpfully instruct him, the president of the United States gets to make innumerable important decisions but under the 10th Amendment he can’t dictate state policies on education.
Santorum and his madly scrambling staff might claim that such criticism, and the tough questioning on Face the Nation, amount to nitpicking—mean-spirited efforts to distract and derail a nice-guy candidate who brings fresh perspectives to vexing public issues.
But on the verge of next week’s crucial primaries in Michigan and Arizona, Santorum isn’t just running a provocative “ideas campaign” like the indefatigable gadfly Ron Paul: present polling makes him the apparent frontrunner for the Republican nomination and an increasingly conceivable choice as president of the United States.
His off-the-reservation approaches to self-defeating diversions like Obama’s theology, prenatal testing, and state-level involvement in public education become legitimate, and wholly necessary, subjects for journalistic scrutiny.
For nearly six months, Santorum complained loudly in televised debates and elsewhere that his campaign received less media attention than it deserved. He can hardly object now when his own successes have made even his random campaign comments far more significant—and potentially devastating—than ever before.
By: Michael Medved, The Daily Beast, February 21, 2012
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