“Setting Up The Big Gamble”: Paul Ryan And Mitt Romney’s Long Game
The Republican campaign has been relentlessly focused on the goal of making voters hold President Obama responsible for the aftereffects of the 2008 global economic crisis. (See, for instance, these ads on “the Obama economy.”) But the party intends to use its power, should it win election, not to focus on decreasing short-term unemployment but on implementing a dramatic long-term restructuring of the scope of government. Mike Allen reports that Mitt Romney, in meetings with campaign donors, is tying himself more tightly to the Paul Ryan plan.
Pull back for a moment and consider Ryan’s role within the party, which is really pivotal. For several months, Ryan has been imploring Republicans not only to support his plan but to embrace it. Why should they do so? Because, when they win, then they will be able to implement the full thing. At a high-profile speech at the sacred locale of the Reagan library yesterday, Ryan hammered home the theme again:
I believe boldness and clarity of the kind that Ronald Reagan displayed in 1980 offer us the greatest opportunity to create a winning coalition in 2012. We will not only win the next election, we have a unique opportunity to sweep and remake the political landscape. …
If we make the case effectively and win this November, then we will have the moral authority to enact the kind of fundamental reforms America has not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first year.
What Ryan is up to here, and what he’s been up to for more than two years, is this: He is trying to win an argument within the party that will occur after the 2012 election.
Should that happen, at least some of the more vulnerable Republicans will propose some measure of caution. They will believe the party won due to the poor state of the economy, not because of the Ryan plan (more accurately, even despite its embrace of the Ryan plan). Ryan wants to discredit that objection in advance.
The connecting thread of my last two print stories for the magazine — the first on the GOP’s almost panicked now-or-never focus on 2012, and the second on the rise of Paul Ryan — is that the Republicans, led by Ryan, have made a strategic decision that the economic crisis offers them an expiring window of opportunity to pass the agenda of their dreams. Should they win the election, it is vital that they use their majority immediately and to maximal effect. That’s why Ryan insisted on boxing the party in by getting his fellow Republicans to take dangerous votes on his budget in 2011 and again this year despite having no chance of signing into law under Obama. By making virtually all Republicans in Congress take the vote now, they will have a hard time claiming next year that voters don’t want such radical change.
I don’t think Ryan particularly cares whether Republicans actually win by running on his plan or merely can be persuaded that they have done so. He would probably be perfectly happy for Romney to win solely by focusing on the lingering effects of the economic crisis, as long as the party turns around and uses the win to pass his plan. The point is, Ryan has been setting up the big gamble for a long time — win the presidency, House, Senate trifecta in 2012 and pass his plan — and everything he’s doing is geared toward locking the rest of his party into it.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, May 24, 2012
“Openly And Dangerously Reckless”: Republicans Are Unfit To Govern
One of this biggest economic stories of the past week was this:
The 17-country eurozone risks falling into a “severe recession,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday, as it called on governments and Europe’s central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.
Just six months ago the OECD considered a 2 percent European contraction the worst-case scenario, but it now sees that as close to happening.
The report forecasts Europe falling further behind other countries, particularly the United States, whose economy is expected to grow 2.4 percent this year and 2.6 percent next.
Let me repeat: Europe’s economy is contracting, while the U.S. economy is growing. Europe’s economy is in imminent danger of contracting at the rate that just six months ago was considered the worst-case scenario, while the U.S. economy is expected to grow even more next year than this year. And just outside the Eurozone, this past week also saw England’s double-dip recession reported as even worsethan had been thought. In other words, as the world continues to attempt to dig itself out of the economic collapse that was caused by the banking meltdown, the United States is slowly recovering. Europe isn’t.
While Europe elected conservative governments at the worst possible moment, and then embraced the cruel stupidity that is economic austerity, the United States took a different path. The United States should have embraced a much more aggressive growth policy, but at least it didn’t slash and burn government spending the way Europe did. Europe’s economies and Europe’s people have been devastated by economic austerity while the tentative Obama stimulus package has stimulated tentative economic growth. Stimulus works, austerity doesn’t. Until the economy is fully back on its feet, more stimulus would be the best economic policy. Austerity would be the worst economic policy. So what do the Republicans want to do?
Mitt Romney would have let the auto industry go bankrupt. Mitt Romney thinks unemployment insurance is a disaster. Mitt Romney wants to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. Mitt Romney wants to cut benefits on just about everyone who needs them in order to finance even more tax cuts for the extremely wealthy— people such as Mitt Romney. In other words, Mitt Romney wants to impose austerity on pretty much everyone other than the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney. In fact, Mitt Romney’s economic program is so unfair, and it so favors the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney, that he doesn’t even want us to know its details. And that gets to the core of why Mitt Romney is unfit to govern.
The problem with Mitt Romney is not only that he doesn’t want us to know the details of his economic agenda, which suggests that it’s even worse than what we do know, and what we do know is bad enough, but Mitt Romney also doesn’t want us to know any details about Mitt Romney. Breaking with the tradition that voters should know as much as is possible about presidential candidates, Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns. What is he hiding? Breaking with the tradition that voters should have at least some idea about a presidential candidate’s positions on major issues, Mitt Romney has flip-flopped so many times on so many issues that even one of his top campaign advisors openly admitted that Romney’s stands can be erased and rewritten without notice. Does he even have any principles or values, or is that he doesn’t want us to know what they are? What is he hiding? Mitt Romney has taken so many stands on so many issues that even he can’t remember where he is supposed to stand on them on any given day. Maybe what Mitt Romney is hiding is that there is no Mitt Romney at all.
For their part, Republican congressional leaders want to repeal the Obama health care law, which would explode the national debt. Republican congressional leaders offer nothing to replace the Obama health care law. House Republicans voted to end Medicare. House Republicans want to decimate health care spending. House Republicans want to take away a million Pell Grants. House Republicans want to punish low income Americans. House Republicans want to punish senior citizens. House Republicans want to punish women. House Republicans want to drive even more Americans from some semblance of food security into poverty. The House Republican budget leader wants to drive even more children into poverty. Whatever they may say they want to do, the agenda of congressional Republicans would be devastating for tens of millions of Americans.
Unfortunately, being wrong— even stupidly wrong— is not in itself proof of unfitness to govern. As the Bush-Cheney team proved, it is in fact now a prerequisite for any Republican aspiring to national office. But the destructive policy agenda of congressional Republicans is not even remotely the worst of it, because in order to impose these policies they have resorted to tactics that are nothing more than political extortion, and government cannot function by extortion. It cannot function when hard fought agreements are blithely broken for the purpose of further extortion. And that’s what the Republicans now are about. They operate like criminal thugs and they cannot be trusted to keep their word. And it’s not merely a game of daring high stakes brinksmanship, for merely playing the game is itself dangerously destructive.
When the Republicans last summer broke bipartisan precedent by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States in order to force the sorts of budget cuts that have shattered the economies of Europe, they agreed to a deal that itself will damage the recovery, but by forcing that deal they also triggered the first ever downgrade in our national credit rating. The Standard & Poor’s downgrade was problematic in itself, but S&P was very carefully explicit in its rationale:
The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.
That brinksmanship was wholly the fault of the Republicans. Under both Democratic and Republican presidents, and with both Democratic and Republican Congresses, no one previously had been so petty and unhinged as to play chicken with the debt ceiling. The Republicans last year broke all precedent. Ownership of the consequences is theirs alone. And beyond revealing how dangerous they are even to have attempted political extortion by holding the debt ceiling hostage, the specifics of the Republican approach to the national debt also was specifically mentioned.
Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
Both the Republican policy and the means of imposing the Republican policy were specifically cited. As our own Hunter explained:
Parsing the S&P statement from a partisan standpoint, there are a few things to note. As cited above, the Bush tax cuts appear to be the only non-entitlement-related government policy specifically called out by S&P in their rationale for downgrade, and “Republicans in Congress” were specifically called out for “continu[ing] to resist any measure that would raise revenues.” It seems S&P comes down squarely on the side of believing revenues doneed to be increased, though it pointedly shies away from suggesting any numbers.Couple this with their plain and prominent citation of debt ceiling hostage-taking as a prime reason for the downgrade, and it would be difficult to argue any position other than that S&P is blaming recent GOP actions directly for their downgrade decision
All of which would be bad enough. All of which would by itself reveal how dangerous it is to allow such people any means of asserting any level of control over the making of economic policy. But now House Speaker John Boehner wants to play the whole game over again:
In the meeting—a day after a high-profile speech by Boehner in which he called for spending cuts paired with any future debt-ceiling hikes—the speaker told the president that “I’m not going to allow a debt ceiling increase without doing something serious about the debt,” according to the Ohio Republican’s aides.
Which has even his Republican Senate counterpart unenthused. Of course that same Republican Senate counterpart last year said that his single most important goal was to deny President Obama a second term in office. Despite two wars, international terrorism, a still staggering economy, rising poverty and homelessness, an impending climate crisis and a host of other issues on which one would think a national political leader would want to focus, the single greatest priority of the most powerful Republican in the Senate was to ensure electoral victory. And continued Republican efforts to sabotage the economyproved the man’s words.
The Republicans don’t want to solve the nation’s problems, they only want to gain and maintain political power. And in pursuit of that goal they are openly and dangerously reckless. And their new presidential standard-bearer not only wants to impose policies similar to those that continue to devastate Europe, he is a deliberately dishonest cipher, not only about where he stands on issues but even about whether or not he actually has any stands on issues. He doesn’t merely disinform, he openly mocks even the concept of informing.
Differences in policy are one thing, and history tends to reveal who was right and who was wrong. For example, the New Deal worked, while austerity doesn’t. And it’s perfectly fair for Republicans to continue to try to gut the New Deal while promoting more disastrous austerity. That’s politics, and if American voters want to swap the current slow but steadily improving economic recovery for the type of economic implosion and social upheaval now crushing Europe, they have every right to vote for the Republicans. They have every right to vote for whomever they want for whatever reasons or lack of reason they choose. But when Republicans shatter precedent by attempting political extortion that by itself endangers the full faith and credit of the United States, when they threaten to crash the economy if they don’t get their way, when they consider winning more important than responsible governing, when they consciously attempt to undermine the very concept of an informed electorate, that isn’t politics, it’s the deliberate destruction of politics. It makes mere thuggery appear relatively benign in comparison. It reveals the Republicans as not only ideologically and intellectually incompetent, but also as dangerously unstable of temperament.
With the modern Republican Party, the danger isn’t merely that they will succeed in imposing more disastrous policies, the danger is that even allowing them to have any influence at all on the process of making policy can and will be abused, with potentially disastrous consequences. Modern Republicans are not merely lousy at governing, they are unfit to govern.
By: Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos, May 27, 2012
“Failing The Test Of Courage, Integrity And Loyalty”: Romney Messes Up And Tells The Truth About Austerity
Romney has periodic breakdowns when asked questions about the economy because he sometimes forgets the need to lie. He forgets that he is supposed to treat austerity as the epitome of economic wisdom. When he responds quickly to questions about austerity he slips into default mode and speaks the truth – adopting austerity during the recovery from a Great Recession would (as in Europe) throw the nation back into recession or depression. The latest example is his May 23, 2012 interview with Mark Halperin in Time magazine.
“Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
Romney explains that austerity, during the recovery from a Great Recession, would cause catastrophic damage to our nation. The problem, of course, is that the Republican congressional leadership is committed to imposing austerity on the nation and Speaker Boehner has just threatened that Republicans will block the renewal of the debt ceiling in order to extort Democrats to agree to austerity – severe cuts to social programs. Romney knows this could “throw us into recession or depression” and says he would never follow such a policy.
Romney, however, has not opposed Boehner’s threat to use extortion to force austerity on the nation. Romney has the nomination sown up, but I predict that he will stand by and let Boehner try to throw us into a Great Depression rather than upset the Tea Party-wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, Romney will attack Democrats who have the political courage to defend our nation against his Party’s demands for austerity that would throw the nation into recession or depression. What does one call a politician who, solely to advance his personal political ambition, supports his Party’s efforts to coerce austerity even though he knows that the austerity would cause a national economic catastrophe and states that he, “of course,” would never adopt such self-destructive austerity if he were president? Romney is failing the tests of courage, integrity, and loyalty to our nation and people.
Later in the interview, Romney claims that federal budgetary deficits are “immoral.” But he has just explained that using austerity for the purported purpose of ending a deficit would cause a recession or depression. A recession or depression would make the deficit far larger. That means that Romney should be denouncing austerity as “immoral” (as well as suicidal) because it will not simply increase the deficit (which he claims to find “immoral” because of its impact on children) but also dramatically increase unemployment, poverty, child poverty and hunger, and harm their education by causing more teachers to lose their jobs and more school programs to be cut. Fewer children will be able to get college degrees. Austerity is the great enemy of children – it is the epitome of a self-destructive, immoral economic policy.
Listen for the sounds of silence from Romney in coming months. I predict that he will not act to protect our children or our economy from the suicidal and “immoral” austerity his Republican allies are trying to coerce the Democrats to inflict on our economy and our children.
By: William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives, May 25, 2012
“Life Is Too Short”: Typical American Worker Would Need 244 Years To Match CEO’s Annual Salary
The average CEO made $9.6 million in 2011, even as workers’ wages remained stagnant and unemployment hovered nationally around 8 percent. Chief Executive Officers are being paid at the highest-ever rate since the AP started tracking the figure in 2006, according to a new report from the news organization.
But while CEOs may be reaping the rewards of higher profits and a growing stock market, very little of that achievement spreads as far as the average worker — or even the company’s stockholders:
Profit at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index rose 16 percent last year, remarkable in an economy that grew more slowly than expected.
CEOs managed to sell more, and squeeze more profit from each sale, despite problems ranging from a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating to an economic slowdown in China and Europe’s neverending debt crisis.
Still, there wasn’t much immediate benefit for the shareholders. The S&P 500 ended the year unchanged from where it started. Including dividends, the index returned a slender 2 percent.
As the AP noted, “the typical American worker would have to labor for 244 years to make what the typical boss of a big public company makes in one.”
Growing CEO pay is contributing to the larger trend of increasing income inequality — CEO pay increased 127 times faster than the average worker pay over the last 30 years, and the average Fortune 500 CEO made 380 times what the average worker did last year. Fortune 500 companies made a record $824 billion in 2011.
By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, May 25, 2012
“The Governor Behind The Curtain”: Bain Capital Is Not Just Fair Game, It’s Beyond Fair Game
Obama supporters are seething and the RNC is dancing with delight in the aftermath of Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s nonsensical comparison of ads exposing Mitt Romney’s real record on job creation with racially tinged attacks on Barack Obama’s former pastor.
The RNC thinks that it caught the Dems with their pants down, inadvertently admitting that Romney’s work at Bain Capital should be off limits. But the indisputable fact is that Romney’s experience at Bain is completely fair game — Romney himself made that choice when he decided to present it as his chief qualification for the presidency. In fact, it’s beyond fair game: if this election is truly about jobs and the economy, then Bain is one of the only games in town.
Romney, attempting to shed his record as Massachusetts governor as fast as he can, has chosen to run almost exclusively on his record as a “job creator” at Bain. Pay no attention to the governor behind the curtain, whose state ranked 47th of 50 states in job creation during his term! In the process, he’s mixed up some of his “job creation” numbers and cherry-picked the facts he’s chosen to tell the American people. Romney keeps telling us his side of the Bain story. But are we to completely ignore the very real stories of factories shut down and American jobs lost? Let’s hear all sides of the story. Isn’t that what elections are all about?
And let’s also have an honest conversation about whether or not Romney’s success in making money for investors through his position at Bain qualifies him to be president. Venture capital and private equity have a role to play in our economy. But making money for investors doesn’t mean that you know how to make the economy work for all Americans. As President Obama pointed out yesterday, the goal of a private equity firm is to create wealth, not jobs — most often, to make as much money as possible for a few investors. The goal of a president needs to be an economy that works for everybody. That’s a critical difference.
Both candidates agree that this election is about the fundamental direction that our country will take for the next four years. We should embrace this. How about this simple concept: Let’s have that full debate about all aspects of the relevant experience of both candidates and let the voters decide.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, May 22, 2012
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