“Mitt Romney’s Sham Economic Plan”: A Right Wing Fantasy With A Right Wing Set Of Goals
Well, it seems like a good week for Mitt Romney to try to steer the conversation back to the economy. It doesn’t help him, granted, when people like Bill Kristol are saying that Obama managed the financial crisis “pretty well.” But foreign policy and the culture-warrior stuff hasn’t played so well for him, and after all, the economy was supposed to be his raison d’être in the first place, and the first debate is coming up next week, so why not? The only problem is that the economy doesn’t really help him either. As long as he refuses to be specific about which tax loopholes he’d close, he can’t talk economy with any real credibility.
A quick catch-you-up for those you who haven’t gotten this message yet. Romney wants to cut everyone’s tax rates. He acknowledges this will reduce revenue. He says he’ll make up the revenue by closing loopholes, but only those used by the wealthy. Experts say there aren’t enough of those. So he’ll have to close loopholes that middle-class people depend on. And obviously, that is a subject he has no desire to discuss.
Romney’s tax plan is absolutely central to his economic argument—everything, from growth to jobs to cutting the deficit, starts with cutting taxes. And it’s worth noting that, on this as on all issues, he’s moved hard right. He had one tax plan last year, but it clearly didn’t placate the right wing, so he came back in the late spring and released the new and current one, bigger and “bolder,” more Ryanesque and Norquistesque.
As with everything else he’s done to please the right, it’s causing him all sorts of problems back here on planet Earth. His numbers don’t add up, he knows they don’t add up, and so when pressed, he insists that they do, while ducking the kind of questions that presidential candidates from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Gary Bauer and Lamar Alexander routinely have answers for. A number of journalists have tried, and all have failed.
And so, on 60 Minutes Sunday, Steve Kroft gave it another shot, only to be told by Romney that specifics would be a hindrance at this point because “if you want to work together with people across the aisle, you lay out your principles and your policy, you work together with them, but you don’t hand them a complete document and say, ‘Here, take this or leave it.’ Look, leadership is not a take it or leave it thing.
That’s just so obviously a dodge that he doesn’t even deserve an E for effort. No one is compelling him to say to Congress, “Here’s my plan, take it or leave it.” He can and in fact should say to Congress, “Here’s my plan, now let’s talk.” That’s actually what leadership is.
It’s my view that Romney’s intentional vagueness here is hurting him very badly. This may seem on its surface like the kind of thing that’s a little too wonky for your average American, but I say au contraire. I think most people grasp the problem here all too well.
There are a lot of details about politics and policy the American people don’t really get. But there are some things they do get. They get that they are permitted under current law to deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages. They get that their contributions to their health-care premiums are taken out of their paychecks before taxes are levied. And they—a fairly solid majority, anyway—get that supply-side economics has given the middle class the shaft and benefited the wealthy.
So when they hear a guy worth a quarter-billion dollars say he’s cutting taxes but won’t discuss loopholes, this is what I think they hear: he’s going to help himself and his friends, and we’re going to be left paying the bill. There may not be much class envy in America, but there is that much, anyway.
So let’s take a step back and unravel this. The economy was supposed to be Romney’s great strength. The Obama campaign hit him pretty hard on Bain and his business experience, so that advantage was neutralized. But still, he had the chance to say, “Bain aside, this here is how I’m going to fix the economy.” This is something all campaigns do. Romney has a five-point plan, but it’s not really a plan per se. It’s mostly just a set of goals. It’s as if I came up with a five-point plan to become rich and famous that went: write bestselling novel, win Oscar with follow-up screenplay, write movie theme song, and have Adele record it, start successful restaurant chain, invent next Internet.
It’s nice to see that this flimflam actually can’t work. People scoff at politicians’ promises, and I understand why, but in fact, behind most campaign promises are teams of policy experts at least trying to figure out how the candidate can fulfill that promise once in office. Romney’s promise is a right-wing fantasy that will benefit the same people who always benefit from Republican policies. Most voters can sense this. So he can’t really campaign now on the economy either. That doesn’t leave many options.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 25, 2012
“Romney’s Optimism Cure”: Are You Feeling Reassured By The Confidence Fairy?
Mitt Romney is optimistic about optimism. In fact, it’s pretty much all he’s got. And that fact should make you very pessimistic about his chances of leading an economic recovery.
As many people have noticed, Mr. Romney’s five-point “economic plan” is very nearly substance-free. It vaguely suggests that he will pursue the same goals Republicans always pursue — weaker environmental protection, lower taxes on the wealthy. But it offers neither specifics nor any indication why returning to George W. Bush’s policies would cure a slump that began on Mr. Bush’s watch.
In his Boca Raton meeting with donors, however, Mr. Romney revealed his real plan, which is to rely on magic. “My own view is,” he declared, “if we win on November 6, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.”
Are you feeling reassured?
In fairness to Mr. Romney, his assertion that electing him would spontaneously spark an economic boom is consistent with his party’s current economic dogma. Republican leaders have long insisted that the main thing holding the economy back is the “uncertainty” created by President Obama’s statements — roughly speaking, that businesspeople aren’t investing because Mr. Obama has hurt their feelings. If you believe that, it makes sense to argue that changing presidents would, all by itself, cause an economic revival.
There is, however, no evidence supporting this dogma. Our protracted economic weakness isn’t a mystery; it’s what normally happens after a major financial crisis. Furthermore, business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly since the official recession ended. What’s holding us back is mainly the continued weakness of housing combined with a vast overhang of household debt, the legacy of the Bush-era housing bubble.
By the way, in saying that our prolonged slump was predictable, I’m not saying that it was necessary. We could and should have greatly reduced the pain by combining aggressive fiscal and monetary policies with effective relief for highly indebted homeowners; the fact that we didn’t reflects a combination of timidity on the part of both the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, and scorched-earth opposition on the part of the G.O.P.
But Mr. Romney, as I said, isn’t offering anything substantive to fight the slump, just a reprise of the usual slogans. And he has denounced the Fed’s belated effort to step up to the plate.
Back to the optimism thing: It’s true that some studies suggest a secondary role for uncertainty in depressing the economy — and conservatives have seized on these studies, claiming vindication. But if you actually look at the measures of uncertainty involved, they’ve been driven not by fear of Mr. Obama but by events like the euro crisis and the standoff over the debt ceiling. (O.K., I guess you could argue that electing Mr. Romney might encourage businesses by promising an end to Republican economic sabotage.)
You should also know that efforts to base policy on speculations about business psychology have a track record — and it’s not a good one.
Back in 2010, as European nations began implementing savage austerity programs to placate bond markets, it was common for policy makers to deny that these programs would have a depressing effect. “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect,” insisted Jean-Claude Trichet, then the president of the European Central Bank. Why? Because these measures would “increase the confidence of households, firms and investors.”
At the time I ridiculed such claims as belief in the “confidence fairy.” And sure enough, austerity programs actually led to Depression-level economic downturns across much of Europe.
Yet here comes Mitt Romney, declaring, in effect, “I am the confidence fairy!”
Is he? As it happens, Mr. Romney offered a testable proposition in his Boca remarks: “If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president’s going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy.” How’s that going? Not very well. Over the past month conventional wisdom has shifted from the view that the election could easily go either way to the view that Mr. Romney is very likely to lose; yet markets are up, not down, with major stock indexes hitting their highest levels since the economic downturn began.
It’s all kind of sad. Yet the truth is that it all fits together. Mr. Romney’s whole campaign has been based on the premise that he can become president simply by not being Barack Obama. Why shouldn’t he believe that he can fix the economy the same way?
But will he get a chance to put that theory to the test? At the moment, I’m not optimistic.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 23, 2012
“A Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy”: This Is Not Westminster; Congress Writes Laws, Not Presidents
Niall Ferguson responds to critics once again. Read it and make your own mind up. Here’s his summary:
My central critique of the President is not that the economy has under-performed, but that he has not been an effective leader of the executive branch. I go on to detail his well-documented difficulties in managing his team of economic advisers and his disastrous decision to leave it to his own party in Congress to define the terms of his stimulus, financial reform and healthcare reform. I also argue that he has consistently failed to address the crucial issue of long-term fiscal balance, with the result that the nation is now hurtling towards a fiscal cliff of tax hikes and drastic spending cuts.
Niall is surely aware that the Congress writes laws, not presidents. This is not Westminster. And Niall’s preferred top-down approach was indeed pursued by the Clintons in 1994. Healthcare reform failed that time spectacularly prcisely because it didn’t flatter Congress’ prerogatives; under Obama’s “failed” executive leadership, universal healthcare passed for the first time in history. It’s very close to Romneycare. Was that as big a mess as well?
The well-documented difficulties on economic policy come from Ron Suskind’s book, which was subject to strong pushback from the people it quoted. I’m sure there were divisions and fights in the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. But the results are pretty clear: the economy under Obama has performed much better than the British economy under Osborne, or Europe or Japan. The private sector has recovered at Reagan-like rates. It’s the slashing of public sector jobs that has kept employment so subdued – but far less subdued than anywhere else in the developed world. If this is executive mismanagement, more, please.
Then the notion that Obama “has consistently failed to address the crucial issue of long-term fiscal balance.” What, then, was the Bowles-Simpson Commission about? Ryan didn’t create it – he merely torpedoed it because it dared to raise revenues in order to cut the deficit! Obama actually created it and if the necessary majority in Congress had backed it, he would have gone a long way to sign it. Why not? It would give him credit for the biggest deal since 1993. And that’s precisely why the GOP – spearheaded by Ryan – killed it.
Yes, Obama deserves a shellacking for not owning Bowles-Simpson – in what was, in my view, the biggest error of his presidency. But I have no doubt he wanted and wants a Grand Bargain – and revealed how far he would go by cutting $700 billion from Medicare in the ACA (which Ryan is now exploiting on the campaign trail). But how do you get a grand bargain between the two parties when one party refuses to bargain on its central priority, no tax increases? Given Obama’s record of Medicare cuts (never before imposed by a Democratic president), it’s clear who the culprit is for the fiscal cliff: a Republican party that wanted the US to default rather than agree to even a tiny revenue increase, and that pledged in the primaries to refuse a budget deal that was 10-1 spending cuts to revenue increases.
As for the executive banch, the commander-in-chief role is part of the job. Niall doesn’t mention the extremely successful attack on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the end of torture, the killing of Osama bin Laden and capture of mounds of intelligence, or the fact that, unlike his predecessor, Obama has not presided over a major terror attack in this country or authorized grotesque torture that effectively destroyed America’s moral standing. As for Iraq, Niall says the exit was premature. It was negotiated by Bush. Maliki didn’t want us there any more. Niall thinks we should occupy a country with all the massive expense that entails – against its will? Seriously? And it’s Obama who is unserious on the debt?
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, August 21, 2012
“Trickle Up Economics”: Americans Favor Extending Tax Cuts For Those Making Under $250,000
I would hardly characterize President Barack Obama’s proposal as a “gambit.” The proposal has been a consistent theme with this administration, which recognizes that Americans want the president to focus on the issues that affect them most—how to create jobs, provide opportunities to advance, and secure a better future for their children.
On Monday, President Obama laid out a vision for the fiscal policies he will pursue to ensure for a better tomorrow—offering additional middle-class tax cuts while asking some to pay a little more. Some might call it risky or foolish to ask to raise taxes during an election, but I believe the American people are often ahead of politicians in understanding what is fair, what works, and want to be offered a choice. For the eight years of “Bushonomics,” those in the middle class got a clear picture of what didn’t work as they lost their jobs, their incomes shrunk, and their homes were devalued or lost while corporate profits rose and executive pay increased.
In the latest National Journal/United Technologies poll, 60 percent favored extending tax cuts for those making $250,000 and below. They understand that economic growth will not come from more failed trickle-down economic theories, but instead by responsibly balancing the need to cut spending, increase revenue, and make sound investments in our future, especially in areas like education, new market development, and infrastructure.
In contrast, Mitt Romney continues to offer ideas that advance little meaningful change and instead, a return to the failed policies from the past of cutting taxes for those who can most afford them, while exploding the deficit, increasing our future debt obligations, and leaving no means to invest in growth.
The president’s proposal, along with an offer to discuss real tax reform after the election, put Republicans back on the defensive and elevated the debate to a referendum for the American voter in November—49 percent of independents in a recent Washington Post poll said the president’s vision for the future is more important to them than what he did in his first term. By proactively controlling the debate and focusing the attention on the “do-nothing” Congress and Romney’s policies of the past, the president will continue to look like the true leader and that is a winning formula. Focusing on America’s future is Obama’s strength and greatest political weapon.
By: Penny Lee, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, July 11, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 