“Confronting Health Care Reform”: What Romney Won’t Do On Health Care
He has awful plans that he’ll probably never implement.
Despite what the average voter probably thinks, presidential candidates keep the overwhelming majority of the promises they make. And most of the ones they don’t keep aren’t because they were just lying, but because circumstances changed or they tried to keep the promise and failed. But that’s in the big, broad strokes, while the details are another matter. It’s easy to put out a plan for, say, tax reform, but even if you achieve tax reform, it’s Congress that has to pass it, and they will inevitably shape it to their own ends. This happened to a degree with President Obama’s health care reform: it largely resembles what he proposed during the 2008 campaign, but not entirely. He had said he wanted a public option, for instance, but eventually jettisoned that, and had rejected an individual mandate, but eventually embraced it as unavoidable.
Which brings us to Mitt Romney’s health care plan. In its details, it’s quite horrifying. Jonathan Cohn has done us the service of giving it a close read, and explains: “He wants to scale back health insurance, so that it reaches less people and provides less protection from medical bills. In theory, this transformation will unleash market forces that restrain the cost of medical care. In practice, it will cause serious hardship, by exposing tens of millions of Americans to crushing medical bills or forcing some of them to go without necessary, even life-saving care.” Estimates are that under Romney’s plan—which repeals the Affordable Care Act, makes Medicaid a block grant (leading almost inevitably to fewer people getting covered), eliminates the tax advantage for employer-sponsored coverage (leading to more employers dropping coverage) and turns Medicare into a voucher, as many as 58 million fewer Americans could have health insurance than will once the ACA fully takes effect. Wow.
So the question is, is Mitt Romney really going to do this? I’m guessing the answer is no, and here’s why. If he becomes president, he’ll confront health care under one of two scenarios. The first is one in which the Supreme Court has upheld the ACA. In that case, conservatives are still mad, and will want to repeal it. But as long as there are more than 40 Democrats in the Senate to mount a filibuster, they won’t let repeal happen. So faced with the inability to achieve great big things on health care, Romney will probably settle for some smaller bills, probably including malpractice reform. One year into his presidency, the ACA will take full effect, and at that point, implementing his plan would mean not just preventing people who don’t have insurance from getting it, but actually tossing people who have insurance off their plans. Which just isn’t going to happen.
The second scenario is that the Supreme Court overturns the ACA, in which case they will have largely done Romney’s job for him. The elements of his plan that don’t relate to the ACA—block granting Medicaid, ending the tax exemption for employer benefits—will still run into unified opposition from Democrats, and as far as congressional Republicans will be concerned, the battle over health care will be over, and they’ll move on to other things.
In any discussion of health care, it’s important to remember that Republicans don’t really care about the issue, except insofar as it’s a bludgeon they can use to beat Democrats with. They just don’t. They care about taxes, and regulation, and defense, and many other things, but they’re happy not to worry about health care unless they have to. So chances are that whatever the Supreme Court decides, big, dramatic changes to the health care system during a Romney presidency are going to be talked about briefly, then put on the back burner permanently.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 24, 2012
“There Are Known Unknowns And Unknown Unknowns”: What We Don’t Need To Know About Bain Capital
We’re asking the wrong questions about private equity.
The debate over Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital has moved through a number of phases, from “Did Mitt Romney do awful things at Bain Capital?” to “Should the Obama campaign be criticizing Mitt Romney for what he did at Bain Capital?” and now, “Is private equity a good thing or a bad thing?” Shockingly, people in the private equity business think the answer to the last is that it’s quite good. The predominant opinion from other people is that it’s sometimes good and sometimes bad, which from what I can tell it’s a pretty good summation of Romney’s PE career. At times, he helped start companies that went on to thrive, or helped companies perform better and survive. And at other times, he acted as what Rick Perry called a “vulture capitalist.”
But while it may be an interesting discussion for economists and economic writers to mull over, “Is private equity good or bad?” really isn’t a question we need to answer in the context of this presidential campaign. The question we need to answer is, “Does running a successful private equity firm mean you’ll be a successful president?” Mitt Romney’s answer to this question is, “Yes, because running a successful private equity firm means you know how to create jobs.” Barack Obama’s answer to this question is, “No, because being president is nothing like running a private equity firm. And also, Mitt Romney is a jerk for profiting while all those people got pink slips.”
It would actually help us understand this better if Mitt Romney talked more specifically about what exactly he learned at Bain that he’ll bring to the Oval Office. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get into much detail about his time there. If you asked him the question, he’d almost certainly say he learned that taxes should be cut and regulations should be scaled back, and that will create jobs. In other words, he’d repeat the standard Republican economic arguments, which really tells us nothing. But maybe I’m not giving him enough credit. Maybe there are some surprising insights about the working of the economy that he could only have gleaned at Bain. If there are, he hasn’t shared them yet.
And that’s really the rub. President Obama is right when he says that the presidency is a very different job from being a private equity CEO. Just when it comes to the economy, creating the right conditions for widely shared growth is not only a matter of wanting to do the correct things, it’s also about being able to accomplish them–convincing Congress to go along with your agenda, insuring that it’s implemented properly, balancing the competing interests that press on a president, and so on. Romney says he knows what to do because of his time at Bain (even if the substance of what he wants to do is the standard Republican wish list) but he hasn’t explained how his time at Bain taught him how to do it. He might argue that he learned that being governor of Massachusetts. But he almost never talks about his time as governor—it’s his time in the private sector that he says is the reason he can be a good president. And that’s not even mentioning all the other aspects of the presidency, like foreign policy, that I assume not even he would claim you prepare for by buying and selling companies.
Chances are slim that Romney is going to get too far into the details of what a private equity firm like Bain does, because the picture is mixed. Yes, he can point to some successes, companies Bain helped build or saved from decline. But that means he’ll also be asked about the failures. And as Tim Noah explains, the whole genius of private equity is that guys like Mitt Romney win either way. If the company they buy succeeds, they’ll get spectacularly rich. But if the company fails, they’ll still get rich, because the money they used to buy it was borrowed, and they were raking in huge management fees all along the way. That’s a story Romney would rather not tell. So he’ll stick to simple assertions, like “I know how the economy works.” Which leave us not knowing what he really knows, or doesn’t.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 23, 2012
“The RNC Can Thank John Roberts For A Job Well Done”: GOP Super PACs Dominate Early Ads With Lies
The five Republican stooges on the Supreme Court must be very happy. They clearly hoped to give Republicans an advantage in future elections when they took the extreme judicial activist measure in the Citizens United v. FEC decision of overturning a major chunk of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance–reform law. By opening the floodgates to unlimited secret corporate contributions, they figured that they would help the party of corporate cronyism outspend Democrats. So far, they are being proven right.
The most recent financial disclosure reports released by the Federal Elections Commission over the weekend show conservative Super PACs heavily out raising and outspending liberal ones. And while President Obama will be able to compete financially because his campaign will raise plenty of money on its own, Democrats may be at a serious disadvantage in down ballot races where candidate fundraising is considerably lower and a national Super PAC can deluge a small media market with misleading negative advertisements and mailings.
“Conservative interest groups have dumped well over $20 million into congressional races so far this year, outspending their liberal opponents 4 to 1 and setting off a growing panic among Democrats struggling to regain the House and hold on to their slim majority in the Senate,” reports the Washington Post. “The money could be particularly crucial in races below the national radar that can be easily influenced by infusions of outside spending.”
So far this money is being used to drive the future Republican caucuses in the House and Senate further to the right. From the Post:
One example came this week in Nebraska, where a dark-horse Republican Senate candidate upset two better-funded rivals in the GOP primary thanks in part to a last-minute, $250,000 ad buy by a billionaire-backed super PAC. And in Indiana this month, veteran Sen. Richard G. Lugar was ousted in the GOP primary by challenger Richard Mourdock with the help of millions of dollars in spending by conservative groups. The Club for Growth, which backed a losing candidate in Nebraska, spent more than $2 million to help Mourdock in Indiana.”
Up until now there were other theoretical explanations—besides the obvious one, which is that it pays to be a tool of the rich and powerful—for why Republicans had so much more Super PAC money than Democrats. Initially Republicans supported the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that created Super PACs and Democrats, especially President Obama, did not. So Republicans jumped out to an early lead in Super PAC fundraising, which allowed them to vastly outspend Democrats in close congressional races in 2010. Then in 2011 and early 2012, Republicans were engaged in a competitive presidential primary while Democrats were not, and Super PAC spending was heavy on behalf of candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich but not President Obama. Obama gave Democratic donors the green light to pour money into the Priorities USA Super PAC, but it has not kept pace with its Republican counterparts. The Huffington Post reports, “The group has raised $10.57 million since being founded in 2011, far behind the $50-plus million raised by Restore Our Future and the $28 million raised by American Crossroads.”
But they aren’t anywhere near parity yet and they may never reach it. The reason is obvious. Republicans represent the narrow economic interests of entrenched wealth and privilege, while Democrats advocate for a stronger social safety net and reduced inequality. This has always given Republicans some advantage in fundraising, since the wealthy will obviously give more than the poor or middle class. But the wealthy are also fewer, and their donations were limited to reasonable maximums by campaign finance law, while corporations were banned from giving to candidates. Now that corporations and billionaires have a vehicle for unlimited donations, just one of them can give more than if millions of Americans each donated their entire savings. Giving to Republicans can turn a profit when they are elected and fulfill their promises to crush collective bargaining, quash environmental and workplace safety regulations, and cut taxes. So corporations and their wealthy owners have an incentive beyond mere ideology to give heavily.
And so the partisan disparity in Super PAC spending on congressional races from 2010 is being recreated in 2012. During the Republican presidential primaries in some states, Super PAC spending on advertising outstripped spending by the campaigns themselves. As the New York Times notes, “Through the middle of May, Restore Our Future had spent more than $44.5 million on advertising, direct mail and other advertising, roughly double what Mr. Romney’s campaign had spent during the same period.” If that holds true in the general election, it will favor Republicans, especially in down ballot races, immensely.
These advertisements that conservative Super PACs buy, which are nominally about educating the public rather than electing candidates, are in no way educational. In fact, much like Fox News coverage, which often repeats the claims these ads make verbatim and without fact-checking, they are primarily focused on spreading lies.
Consider the recent ad buys, including one of $25 million, by Crossroads. In April Crossroads released an ad attacking Obama for being an unserious “celebrity” who appears on late night television while the country goes to Hell. Its statistic to burnish this dark view: “Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad.” What survey? It turns out, according to Politifact, that the survey in question was the product of an obscure and now defunct firm that will not divulge any information about its methodology. But the firm’s director did say the survey was done “years ago” and is therefore not appropriate for use in an ad on the current president’s record in office. A March 2012 report from the Pew Center found 42 percent of college graduates 18 to 29 years-old living at home. The ad earned a “false” rating from Politifact.
And the ad that is getting $25 million worth of airtime? Factcheck.org finds its central claim to be “almost entirely false.” They write:
The latest multimillion-dollar attack ad from Crossroads GPS claims President Obama broke a promise to not increase taxes for families making less than $250,000 a year. That’s almost entirely false.
The truth is that Obama repeatedly cut taxes for such families, first through a tax credit in effect for 2009 and 2010, and beginning in 2011, through a reduction in the payroll tax that is worth $1,000 this year to workers earning $50,000 a year. And while it’s true that some tax increases contained in the new health care law would fall on individuals, they have mostly not taken effect yet and are small compared with the cuts the president already enacted. And this ad exaggerates them greatly.
The other claims in the ad are judged by Factcheck.org to be “misleading,” and you can read their full debunking here.
Of course, Super PACs are legally barred from coordinating with campaigns and there is the possibility, remote as it may be, that some Super PAC spending can do more harm than good. Last week Romney condemned a plan by billionaire investor Joe Ricketts to run a $10 million ad campaign tying President Obama to the inflammatory statements of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. As Politico notes:
The risk from rogue third-party groups is a potential menace to both Republicans and Democrats. The GOP has seen more super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups form to support its candidates, but there’s nothing to stop an individual liberal gazillionaire from commissioning ads on a subject the Obama campaign doesn’t want to talk about — say, Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith. And rogue ads could create friendly fire as much as score points against the opposition, as the official GOP’s repudiation of the Ending Spending plan showed.
But that too can be a blessing as much as a curse. Draft dodger George W. Bush disassociated himself with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smearing of war hero John Kerry’s record of service in Vietnam. But Bush benefited enormously from the widely repeated claims in the ads. Even news stories debunking the falsehoods peddled by the Swift Boat group may have reinforced negative images of Kerry. Certainly it put him on the defensive. Indeed, this outsourcing of attacks—with a wink and a nudge—has been around almost as long as television commercials for candidates. The most famously effective attack ad in recent presidential politics, the 1988 commercial blaming Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis for a murder committed by a convict named Willie Horton who was out of prison in a furlough program, was not actually paid for by Dukakis’ opponent, George H.W. Bush, but by an outside group. Romney may have ultimately benefited from the opportunity to remind voters of Obama’s inflammatory pastor without having to do so himself.
However the specifics of each ad play, it is clear that overall the flood of money from billionaires and corporations into campaigns is helping one party more than the other. The RNC can thank John Roberts for a job well done.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 22, 2012
“Weakness Is His One Consistency”: The Romney You See Is The One You’d Get
For all of Mitt Romney’s talk of what he would do on Day One in the White House — Bomb Iran? Or was it Planned Parenthood? — there’s just as good a chance he would be tacking up two pictures on the wall. One would be of George H.W. Bush and the other of Jimmy Carter. They both became one-term presidents after they were challenged in the primaries. This is a lesson for Romney.
It is also a lesson for everyone who thinks that if Romney becomes president, he would govern from the center. This is a widely held belief, encouraged by the Romney camp itself and the supposed gaffe of Eric Fehrnstrom that the world would see a different Romney in the general election: “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.” This is not a gaffe but a feint. Romney would be able to restart nothing.
In the first place, Romney would likely have a Republican House, and maybe a Senate, too. This means he has to work with a party that has just recently punished Richard Lugar for excessive moderation and is willing, at this very moment, to bring down the country’s credit rating another notch rather than budge on the debt ceiling. To Romney, who made a fortune with the clever prestidigitation of debt, this has to make no sense, but he would go along because (1) he’d have to, and (2) he always does.
Congress, though, would be the least of President Romney’s troubles. The real threat will come from the Republican Party’s very core, which likes him little and trusts him less. The moment he shows the slightest moderate or rational tick, someone such as Rick Santorum will barrel out of the GOP’s piney woods, screaming oaths, and enter the 2016 Iowa caucuses that, you might remember, Santorum won in 2012. He must be itching for such a fight, having already called Romney “the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.” That, folks, is not a fudge.
As luck would have it, the Supreme Court has enabled any billionaire to effectively fund a presidential campaign. Santorum’s guy was Foster Friess, who anted up $2.1 million for the Red, White and Blue Fund, but there are plenty of others. It took a herculean fundraising effort by Pat Buchanan to challenge the elder Bush in 1992 (and get 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire), but it now takes one guy. The conservative movement is lousy with such people, rich men who play with politics as they once did with electric trains.
It’s hardly conceivable that, as president, Romney will become the Romney some think he is. The forces that shaped him in the primaries and caucuses will not go away. He has been clay in the hands of the political right, and this will not change. After Romney recently disparaged Carter’s political courage, Gerald Rafshoon, once Carter’s communications director, shot back with this via Bloomberg View: “Scour Romney’s record for a single example of real political courage — a single, solitary instance, however small, where Romney placed principle or substance above his own short-term political interests. Let me know if you find one.” Rafshoon’s phone has not been ringing.
The widespread belief that Romney would govern from the center is supposedly supported by the equally widespread belief that he is a liar. I hear this all the time: Never mind what Romney said in the primaries, he is a moderate Republican. These people point to Romney’s record as the moderate governor of liberal Massachusetts — even though he has renounced his moderation, as if it was an unaccountable episode of mental instability. The belief that he would revert is the desperate rationale of nominal Democrats who have had it with Barack Obama and want to be excused for abandoning ship. (In the business community, little distinction is made between Obama and Leon Trotsky, another community organizer . . . so to speak.)
According to what a family friend told the New York Times, Mitt and Ann Romney decided he should run for president because they both “felt it was what God wanted them to do.” Having done just that, Romney has left it to others to define what sort of candidate he would be. Nothing would change if he were president. Weakness is his one consistency.
By: Richard Cohen, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 21, 2012
“No More Tax Cuts For The Wealthy”: As Debt Battle Looms, No Option But To Raise Taxes
President Obama and Republican leaders in Congress made history of sorts last year when they agreed to a 10-year plan to reduce annual deficits with spending cuts and no tax increases. Mr. Obama vows not to let it happen again.
Both he and Speaker John A. Boehner put down their respective markers this week, suggesting a potential replay of their damaging showdown over the debt ceiling last summer. On Tuesday, the speaker reiterated what has become known as the Boehner Rule: House Republicans will not increase the debt ceiling again without spending cuts of a greater amount. Mr. Obama, on Wednesday, told him Congress must pass a “clean” debt-limit increase to cover the nation’s obligations; there will be no more deficit deals, he said, without higher tax revenues from the wealthiest Americans.
While the Republicans largely prevailed last year, this time the Obama administration believes it has the greater leverage. The pain of the reductions is being felt as House Republicans advance the annual spending bills; already they have proposed to raise the spending caps for the military, and they are squabbling over domestic programs.
“It’s not reasonable or right for there to be another discussion of a spending-only package” for reducing deficits, said Jacob J. Lew, the White House chief of staff and former budget director. “When you look at how we got into the hole we’re in, it’s very clear that tax cuts for the wealthy were part of contributing to the deficits we’re now trying to close.”
Mr. Obama’s position leaves open the question of whether election-year politics will play to his advantage among voters who do not like deficits or the measures needed to reduce them. Neither party expects the fight to be resolved until after the election, the results of which will determine who actually has the upper hand in a lame-duck Congress. The debt limit must be raised by early 2013, Treasury has said.
The two budget deals last year — the deficit-reduction compromise in August and a smaller agreement before that — called for cutting $1.7 trillion from so-called discretionary spending, which covers the bulk of federal programs whose budgets Congress controls annually, including air-traffic control, the military, education, research and much more.
Those deals left unscathed the entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which, given the growing aging population, are driving projections of unsustainable deficits.
And those deals, because of Republicans’ resistance, did not raise taxes, unlike the deficit measures of the 1980s and 1990s.
“Tax hikes destroy jobs,” Mr. Boehner said in his speech on Tuesday.
But veterans of past budget wars say that discretionary spending for domestic programs, which make up just 15 percent of the federal budget, cannot continue to bear the brunt without significant implications for government services. “They’ve gone way past fat and are cutting into muscle,” said Bruce R. Bartlett, who was a Treasury official in the Reagan administration.
Nor, these people say, would the public support the deeper reductions that would have to be made in programs like Medicare if taxes are not part of the mix.
“That’s basically why I, and a very large number of other people, conclude that you do need some additional revenues,” said Rudolph G. Penner, a Republican who headed the Congressional Budget Office in the 1980s and was co-chairman in 2010 of a blue-ribbon panel that proposed a debt-reduction plan.
“I’ve been kind of surprised at these recent agreements, where almost all of the reduction comes from discretionary programs over 10 years,” he said. “What you’re talking about is a very large number of years of austerity — through various Congresses, elections and possible natural disasters and terrorist attacks and on and on, which is just not plausible to me.”
Barry Anderson, a former deputy director of the White House and Congressional budget offices, said, “Eventually you’re going to have to increase taxes across the board” — not just for the wealthy — “by at least a third.”
Former Senator Pete V. Domenici, who was the chairman or senior Republican leader on the Senate Budget Committee from 1981 to 2007, said in an interview, “Adequate projections of revenues and expenditures have to be put on the table. Everything has to be on the table.”
Senator Domenici, with Alice Rivlin, a former budget director for Congress and the Clinton administration, was chairman of a panel in 2010 of former lawmakers, administration officials, academics and executives, that produced a blueprint for debt reduction. It came just before a roughly similar plan from a majority on Mr. Obama’s fiscal commission, which was led by Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine B. Bowles, a businessman and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.
All three recent debt proposals — Bowles-Simpson, Domenici-Rivlin and that of Mr. Penner’s group, sponsored by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration — recommended trillions of dollars in savings, both from higher taxes and reduced entitlement spending. Yet it is those two sources that the White House and Congress have avoided, given Republicans’ opposition to tax increases and Democrats’ to cutting Medicare unless taxes are raised.
Tax increases were part of nearly every significant deficit-reduction measure of the 1980s and 1990s, including the 1982, 1984 and 1987 packages signed by Ronald Reagan, the 1990 accord under George H.W. Bush and Mr. Clinton’s 1993 measure. The exception was a deal in 1997, though by that agreement Congressional Republicans ratified Mr. Clinton’s 1993 tax increases that they had vowed to repeal.
Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Mr. Lew, participated in most of those deals, as an aide to House Democratic leaders and then as Mr. Clinton’s budget director.
“The history of dealing with big problems like this is, almost in every case, it’s been a balanced package” of taxes and cuts in both discretionary and entitlement spending, Mr. Lew said. “So it’s not like it is some radical Democratic position.”
By: Jackie Calmes, The New York Times, May 18, 2012
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