Romney For Sale: Mitt Hosts $10K “Policy Roundtables”
Giving a preview of how he would govern as president, Mitt Romney hosted a series of “policy roundtables” with top dollar donors Thursday at the JW Marriott hotel in Washington, DC. Once again demonstrating that he is much more concerned with helping the very rich than the very poor, the panels were open to all interested parties — who were willing and able to raise $10,000for his campaign, each.
The roundtable topics included education, energy, financial institutions and markets, defense/homeland security/foreign policy, health care, and infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, the panels were chaired and hosted by a few prominent Republican politicians and several wealthy investors and industry insiders. They roundtable leaders and industry finance chairs included:
– L.E. Simmons (energy), who has has “guided the investment of over $1.6 billion in private equity capital used to build energy service and equipment companies.”
– Patrick Durkin, managing director of Barclay’s Capital and a top Romney lobbyist-bundler.
– Richard Breeden, a hedge fund manager and a former SEC chairman under President George H. W. Bush.
– Tom Farrell, president and CEO of Dominion Power.
– Former Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO) (infrastructure), now a “distinguished fellow” at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
– Former HHS Secretary and ex-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt (R), now head of a “health care intelligence business.”
If the number $10,000 seems familiar, perhaps it was because he offered to make a bet with then-primary opponent Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) for that amount in a disagreement over his previous positions on federal health insurance mandates. Now, Romney is asking the wealthiest 1 percent to make a similar-sized bet on him. And, according to one of the event’s co-chairs, the event raised $1.5 million for Romney’s campaign.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, February 11, 2012
“Money And Morals”: The GOP’s Attempt To Divert The Inequality Conversation
Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.
So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.
But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.
To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.
But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?
Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.
Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?
Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.
Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.
For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.
One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.
Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.
So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 9, 2012
“A Huge Benefit For The Rich”: Warren Buffett Is Right
The revelation that Mitt Romney received an income of $21 million in 2010 and paid just 13.9 percent of that in federal income taxes has highlighted an enormous problem in our tax code. Income from investments (or income that is manipulated to appear to come from investments) is taxed at lower rates than income from work. And this is a huge benefit for the rich.
Technically, the breaks that Romney enjoys are available to anyone with investment income, but the vast majority of this type of income goes to the rich. We recently calculated that about a third of taxpayers with incomes exceeding $10 million get the majority of their income from investments and consequently pay an average effective tax rate of 15.3 percent.
We then looked at taxpayers with incomes between $60,000 and $65,000 and found that just over 2 percent get the majority of their incomes from investments. In fact, over 90 percent of the $60,000-$65,000 group get less than a tenth of their income from investments, and consequently pay an average effective tax rate of 21.3 percent. That’s a higher effective tax rate than those multimillionaires who get most of their income from investments.
How do multimillionaires justify their low effective tax rates? Many, like Warren Buffett, admit that there is no justification at all, and have asked the president and Congress to reform the tax code. Buffett finds it offensive that he pays federal taxes at a lower effective rate than his secretary does.
Others argue that special breaks for investment income are necessary to encourage investment. This is absurd, given that people with money invest in order to profit and that is motivation enough. But this argument is even more absurd in the case of wealthy fund managers like Romney, who use a loophole to characterize even their income from work as investment income to enjoy the lower tax rates. (This is the loophole for “carried interest.”)
Still others, including Romney himself, argue that much of their income represents corporate profits that have already been subject to the corporate income tax of 35 percent before they were paid out as stock dividends. This is nonsense. At least a third of Romney’s income took the form of “carried interest,” which is actually compensation for his work in managing other people’s money, and this is certainly not corporate profits.
Even in the unlikely event that all of the rest of Romney’s income did come from corporate stock dividends or gains on the sales of those stocks, there’s no reason to think that the corporations involved paid 35 percent of their profits in corporate income taxes. We recently studied most of the Fortune 500 corporations that have been profitable for each of the last three years and found that their average effective tax rate over the three-year period was just 18.5 percent. Thirty of these companies paid nothing at all.
Warren Buffett is right. People like him, and Mitt Romney, should pay more to support the society that made their fabulous fortunes possible.
By: Scott Wamhoff, Legislative Director of Citizens for Tax Justice, Published in U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2012
The Problem With The Republican Party Is Not Newt Gingrich Or Mitt Romney
The Republicans chose Mitch Daniels to rebut President Obama’s State of the Union speech. They chose Bush’s budget director to talk about the economy. The guy who inherited the Clinton budget surplus and transformed it into the largest budget deficit in American history. If you want to understand how clueless and out of touch the Republican Party has become, all you have to do is start with their having chosen Mitch Daniels to rebut President Obama’s State of the Union speech.
Republican insiders are freaked out over the possibility of Newt Gingrich becoming their presidential standard bearer. That’s the technical term: freaked out. And that they are so freaked out over that possibility at least speaks to their not having completely lost touch with reality. They have completely lost touch with the American people, but they haven’t completely lost touch with reality. Not completely. At least not yet. But in light of their support for the personification of so much that is so wrong and so unpopular in this country as alternative to Gingrich, their prospects for retaining at least a partial grip on reality are not good. And they did choose Mitch Daniels to rebut President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Which speaks for itself.
The Occupy movement is not overtly political, at least not in the traditional sense of that word. It does not adhere to any political party or any individual political movement, but it is symbiotic with many political movements, and its goals align very well with traditional Democratic Party populism. The Democratic Party has been adrift from its populist traditions, and in many ways that made the Occupy movement necessary, but many Democrats seem to be recognizing what is happening. They seem to be rediscovering the Democratic Party’s populist tradition. The Republican Party has no link at all to populism. The Republican Party, since at least the Reagan era, has been the party of the economic elite, waging neoliberal class warfare and then feigning outrage at what Republicans consider to be the class warfare of merely calling the Republican Party on its actually waging class warfare.
Since the Reagan era, the income gap has exploded, the wealthy have grown wealthier, the poor have grown poorer, the middle class has all but disappeared, and the nation has grown increasingly segregated by income. And while President Obama’s State of the Union speech emphasized the degree to which he understands the importance of the Occupy movement and how it has changed the economic conversation in this country, the Republicans chose Bush Budget Director Mitch Daniels to speak on their behalf, thus demonstrating that they remain utterly clueless about what has gone wrong with the economy, how people feel about what has gone wrong with the economy, and how anything about the economy will ever again go right. While President Obama’s State of the Union speech emphasized the degree to which he understands the importance of the Occupy movement by announcing the appointment of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to investigate the corporate crimes that neoliberal deregulation made inevitable, and that inevitably crashed the economy, the Republicans chose to demonstrate that they remain utterly clueless about what has gone wrong with the economy by having Bush Budget Director Mitch Daniels repeat the same stale failed Republican recipe of tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and the class warfare of feigning outrage at the alleged class warfare of calling for economic fairness and justice.
No one will openly admit it, but part of the Republican rationale for having Mitch Daniels rebut President Obama’s State of the Union speech was that he is the choice of many supposedly serious Republicans to make a late entry into the presidential race, or possibly to prevail at a brokered convention. There are actually some Republicans who understand that neither the gruesome Gingrich nor the unprincipled Romney is likely to catch political fire with the voting public. What these Republicans haven’t figured out is why. Because Republican insiders haven’t figured out that the American people are angry at and fed up with a stagnating economy and increasingly obscene income and wealth disparities. The American people don’t want handouts, but they do want a social safety net. But more than anything the American people just want a fair chance. They want to know that if they work hard and obey the laws, they will do better than maybe scraping by. They want to know that if they are taken advantage of by unscrupulous, greedy, politically connected corporations, there will be justice. They want their children and grandchildren to have at least the same, and preferably better, opportunities than they had. In the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the known history of the human race, those goals shouldn’t be considered excessive or but unrealistic fantasies, but to the Republicans those goals not only are unthinkable; they are class warfare.
The Republicans continue to promote policies that hurt people. The Republicans continue to promote policies that will only enrich the already rich while making life more difficult for everyone else. Not many still believe that if the Republicans and their wealthy friends and owners throw a lavish feast, enough crumbs will trickle down to the floor to nourish everyone else. But that’s all the Republicans have to offer. And even their usual means of convincing people to vote against their own best interests won’t work.
Under President Obama, accused terrorists have been caught and killed; one war has been drawn down, if not quite ended; and while not perfect, there is an obvious basic competency in foreign policy and national security. Republican fear-mongering fails. On the domestic front, the Republicans are finding it no longer works to exploit and exacerbate hatred and bigotry. So they turn to the economy. Because no one is happy with the economy. But the problem for the Republicans is that the public well understands who is to blame for the economy, and that someone is named Bush. And then the Republicans decide the perfect person to rebut President Obama’s State of the Union speech is Bush’s former budget director, Mitch Daniels.
The Republicans assume people have very short attention spans. Maybe because so much of their base does. But the fact is that Mitch Daniels played an instrumental role in turning President Clinton’s record federal budget surplus into the largest ever federal deficit. Mitch Daniels disastrously underestimated the cost of Bush’s disastrous war on Iraq. Mitch Daniels helped Bush downgrade the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the years immediately before the Hurricane Katrina disaster. And with the American public increasingly focused on unemployment and income disparity, in his current job as governor of the state that once sent the execrable Dan Quayle to the U.S. Senate, Mitch Daniels is busy waging war on workers. Mitch Daniels played a key role in creating some the worst disasters created by any U.S. president ever, and yet when it comes time to rebut the State of the Union speech given by the president who is leading the tentative recovery from those disasters, it is to Mitch Daniels that the Republicans turn. Mitch Daniels played a key role in creating some the worst disasters ever created by any U.S. president, and yet when it comes time to find a candidate to run against the president who is leading the tentative recovery from those disasters, it is to Mitch Daniels that many supposedly serious Republicans would like to turn.
A lot of Republican insiders are frightened for their party’s future. They should be. But not for the reasons they think. Newt Gingrich is not what’s wrong with the Republican Party. Mitt Romney is not what’s wrong with the Republican Party. That New Gingrich and Mitt Romney are the leading candidates to carry the Republican Party’s standard against President Obama is not what’s wrong with the Republican Party. That Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are the leading candidates to carry the Republican Party’s standard against President Obama is but a symptom of what’s wrong with the Republican Party. The problem runs wider. The problem runs deeper. The problem is simple. The problem with the Republican Party is the Republican Party.
By: Lawrence Lewis, Daily Kos, January 29, 2012
Romney Failed To Disclose Swiss Bank Account Income
Mitt Romney‘s campaign is amending the financial disclosure forms he filed in 2007 and 2011 to acknowledge that a Romney trust held a Swiss bank account, a detail that had been missing from both reports.
“An amendment is being filed to address this minor discrepancy,” a campaign official told ABC News in an email Thursday in response to questions about the apparent omission.
The discovery that the Romneys had $3 million in an account with the Swiss bank UBS came only after the Republican presidential candidate released his tax returns for 2010 on Tuesday. The campaign had maintained that it was not necessary to disclose the Swiss account because Romney’s money manager, Brad Malt, had shuttered it in early 2010.
Several Republican election lawyers told ABC News Thursday that the account still needed to be disclosed because a Romney trust earned about $1,700 in income on the account during 2010. The campaign’s decision to amend the forms was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.
At the same time, questions from ABC News about undisclosed income that appeared on Newt Gingrich‘s tax return have led Gingrich to announce that he, too, will be amending his financial disclosure report. Gingrich’s returns showed he received $252,500 in wages from Gingrich Holdings Inc. in 2010, but those wages do not appear anywhere on his presidential disclosure report.
“An internal account review found the need to amend the reporting,” said a Gingrich campaign official. “It was done immediately.”
Romney also decided to amend the report from his 2007 run for president, a decision first reported by the New York Times. Those who track the finances of presidential candidates said they found the failures to disclose these key financial details distressing. Bill Allison, editorial director of the non-profit watchdog group the Sunlight Foundation, said the whole purpose of the disclosure reports is for candidates to provide an honest look at their finances to voters.
“Obviously, if you don’t give them the information before the vote, it defeats the whole purpose of disclosure,” Allison said.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of the non-partisan group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said she, too, was dismayed — noting that while in Congress, Gingrich had been called out for failing to include information on his disclosure reports.
“You’d think someone once sanctioned by the House of Representatives … would be a little more careful with his financial disclosure forms,” she said.
The discovery that Romney’s vast holdings included an account in Switzerland, a country long notorious for helping the very wealthy hide their assets, came during his release of his tax return earlier this week. Malt, who oversees Romney’s blind trusts, acknowledged during a conference call with reporters that he decided to shut down the Swiss account because he worried it could create a headache for Romney’s campaign. “It might or might not be consistent with Governor Romney’s political views,” he said. “The taxes were all fully paid … it just wasn’t worth it. And I closed the account.”
That suggests, Allison said, that the campaign had a motivation to exclude any evidence of the Swiss account from the candidate’s forms. The Romney campaign called the omission an oversight.
Allison noted that there is generally no penalty for a candidate who leaves something off a disclosure report, and then goes back to amend the report if the missing information is discovered.
“Nobody is going to get into trouble for this,” he said. “That is the problem with the disclosure system.”
By: Matthew Mosk and Brian Ross, The Blotter, ABC News, January 26, 2012
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