“Hedging His Words”: Mitt Romney Isn’t Proposing A $5 Trillion Tax Break, It’s A $10 Trillion Tax Break
Part of Mitt Romney’s strategy in the first debate Wednesday night in Denver was to play fact-checker with false facts — also known as “lies.”
After the president said that he was proposing a $5 trillion tax break, Romney responded, “I don’t have a $5 trillion cut. I don’t have a tax cut of the scale that you’re talking about.”
He was partially correct. He isn’t proposing a $5 trillion tax break — his tax cut proposals equal more than $10 trillion over the next 10 years, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.
Romney’s new tax breaks would cost about $500 billion a year. This is on top of extending the Bush tax breaks, which would cost just over $5 trillion.
The president probably didn’t point out the full cost of the Bush tax breaks because he proposes to keep the tax breaks for the middle class at a cost of about $4 trillion. But these taxes have always been temporary and are supposed to expire. Romney is proposing making them permanent along with more cuts for a total of $10 trillion in tax breaks, as we are in the middle of a so-called debt crisis.
Romney also claimed that he is not proposing new tax breaks for the rich. “…I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people. High-income people are doing just fine in this economy,” he said. “They’ll do fine whether you’re president or I am.”
Notice the key word there? “Share.”
Romney simply cannot claim that he isn’t going to reduce taxes for the richest Americans — he’s just promising that his cuts won’t benefit the rich disproportionally, just as George W. Bush falsely did in 2000.
In addition to the Bush tax breaks he promises to continue, Governor Romney wants to cut the estate tax, which only the richest Americans pay, to zero. His tax breaks will almost certainly cut the taxes the richest pay — despite his promises to remove reductions.
“An analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice found that even if millionaires were forced to give up all the tax expenditures that Romney has put on the table, his tax plan would still give a tax break of at least $250,000 on average for individuals making over $1 million,” the organization wrote in its “Debate Debrief.” “That is, he simply cannot back up his assertion that he is ‘not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high- income people.’ And if he really is going to make up the revenues we’ll lose to his rate cuts, taxes would have to go up for other taxpayers.”
Romney has gone out his way to hide the specifics of his tax plan and is carefully hedging his words to make specious claims.
But let’s be clear about the facts. Mitt Romney is proposing a $10 trillion tax break. And he is clearly promising to cut the amount of taxes the richest Americans pay.
The fact that he has to do everything he can to hide this proves what a failure right-wing trickle-down economics have been.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 5, 2012
“A Stark Election Choice”: Study Measures Mitt Romney’s Plan To Screw The Poor And Sick
The largest and clearest point of distinction in the presidential race is universal access to health insurance. If President Obama wins reelection, his law to provide access to the uninsured will go forward. If Mitt Romney is elected, it will be gutted, and Medicaid — the bare-bones coverage plan for the most desperately poor and sick — will face enormous additional cuts.
Commonwealth Fund has released a report comparing the stark choice. Estimating conservatively, Romney’s plan — to the extent that the report was able to piece it together — would increase the uninsured population to about 72 million, while Obama’s would cut it to 26 million (his plan does not cover illegal immigrants.) Probably more telling is Romney’s official campaign reaction:
“Under ObamaCare, Americans have seen their insurance premiums increase, small businesses are facing massive tax increases, and seniors will have reduced access to Medicare services,” Ryan Williams, a Romney spokesman, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “The American people did not want this law, our country cannot afford this law, and when Mitt Romney becomes president he will repeal it and replace it with common-sense, patient-centered reforms that strengthen our health care system.”
Note that the statement is almost entirely an attack on Obamacare, with a brief clause at the end vaguely promising something good will take its place. But that something requires resources. Most people lacking insurance are either sick or have a sick family member or they’re poor. If you want to cover them, you need to cough up some money. Obamacare undertook the massive political heavy lift of providing those resources, and that’s what Romney attacks — he included higher taxes on “small businesses” (i.e., people making more than $250,000 a year) and “reduced access to Medicare services” (i.e., cuts in reimbursements to Medicare providers, as a trade-off for providing them with 30 million new paying customers.)
Romney’s budget is premised on denying the government enough resources to fund any kind of universal health insurance program. His promise to cut tax rates by 20 percent would reduce tax revenue well below current levels. But even if you accept Romney’s arithmetically impossible claim that he can cut tax rates by 20 percent and raise the same tax revenue as the tax code does right now (and without raising taxes on the middle class), merely holding revenue at current, Bush-set levels would make any kind of universal coverage impossible.
Both campaigns describe the election as a stark choice, and this is correct. It’s a choice between universal health coverage for legal citizens and preserving the Bush tax cuts.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, October 2, 2012
“No Greater Sin In Politics”: Mitt Romney’s Biggest Problem Is He Disrespects Most Americans
The reason that Mitt Romney’s condescending comments about the “47 percent” have done such damage to his candidacy is simple. As Republican consultant Alex Castellanos said in Tuesday’s Washington Post: “The only thing in politics that is worse than voters deciding they don’t like you is when voters decide you don’t like them.”
In politics there is no bigger sin than disrespecting voters. It is a sin that is rarely, if ever, forgiven. You can explain your policies and programs. You can argue until you’re blue in the face about how effective you are as a “manager.” It won’t matter.
People don’t want leaders who treat them with disrespect — who believe they are unable to “convince” them to take responsibility for their lives.
Respect is such a core element of voter decision-making because it addresses one of our primary self-interests as human beings. More than most anything else, people want to feel that they have meaning — that their lives make a difference. Meaning in life is our core motivator, and once you tell people that they are, in effect, meaningless pond scum, they are not so inclined to choose you as their leader.
Being disrespected is toxic in just about any human interaction. Nothing engenders more hurt or rage than the feeling that someone thinks you don’t matter. Ask the wife who feels that she is being treated like a piece of furniture by her husband. Ask the employee who can’t stand the high-handed attitude of his boss. Ask any high school kid what he or she fears the most — the disrespect of their classmates.
Great leaders inspire people. That’s just the opposite of communicating disrespect. Inspiration is not something you think, it’s something you feel. When you’re inspired, you feel empowered. You feel that you are part of something bigger than yourself and you can personally play a significant role in attaining that greater goal. When a leader inspires you, he or she does not make you feel that he is important. He makes you feel that you are important — that you matter. Disrespect communicates exactly the opposite.
In the 47 percent video, Mitt Romney did not imply that he disrespected half of the country. He said it directly. He said he didn’t care about “those people” because he could not convince them to take responsibility for their lives. What an arrogant, patronizing, disrespectful thing to say about half of the population.
And it was plain to see that this was not a gaffe. Romney wasn’t awkwardly searching for words. What you saw was the real Romney — the one that his campaign tries to hide — speaking to the home-boys and home-girls from the board rooms and the country club.
The tape by itself would have been bad enough. But its power was magnified because it was one in a long line of Romney comments that showed disrespect for everyday Americans. They have ranged from his contemptuous put-down of the cookies a local person had served him at a drop-by at their back yard, to his patronizing, “I love to fire people,” to his constant reference to “those people.”
And his disrespectful comments extended to his “blooper reel” foreign trip last summer, where he managed to disrespect the people of London and their competency to run the Olympics and the culture of every Palestinian.
Then again, it should not be surprising that disrespect should characterize the Romney foreign policy. He has surrounded himself with a neocon foreign policy team from the Bush years that specialized in showing disrespect for pretty much everyone else in the world. That worked out well.
The 47 percent tape simply served to confirm what most people were already feeling about Mitt Romney — and that’s why it is something that Mitt Romney will find it very hard to escape.
He will try hard in the debates to be respectful and empathetic to the voters. It won’t work, it’s not who he is.
When the Washington Post asked them last month the person they would rather have as the captain of a ship in a storm, the voters were about evenly divided between Obama and Romney. Now they choose Obama 52 percent to 40 percent.
That’s partially because the conventions gave voters a chance to think about where each candidate would lead the country, and which one they believe has the vision and skill to effectively solve the country’s problems.
But it’s also because many voters have become convinced that if Romney were the captain, he might have so little respect for them that he would throw them overboard.
Disrespect correlates very highly with another key parameter that affects voter behavior — the perception of whether a candidate is “on your side.” Of course, it is entirely possible for someone not to be “on your side” and respect you all the same. That happens all the time in sports (or as Romney would say, “sport”). Two teams have conflicting goals and do battle to win, but show the deepest respect for each other’s skill. The same thing happens over negotiating tables in business everyday.
But nothing fires up the members of a football team more than the belief that the other side doesn’t respect them.
And nothing makes for a more inspiring story than when everyday people stand up to those who have disrespected them and refuse to be defeated. That’s exactly what is going to happen November 6th.
Bottom line: you can be a rich guy and win Ohio. But you can’t be a rich guy who disrespects the voters and win Ohio.
BY: Robert Creamer, The Blog, The Huffington Post, October 2, 2012
Giving Specifics Would “Take Me Too Long”: Paul Ryan Is Not In The Mood For Truth Telling
On Fox News Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan claimed that Americans don’t know enough about what a Romney-Ryan presidency would do, which explains the campaign’s current troubles. But when Chris Wallace pressed Ryan to discuss the specifics of the Romney-Ryan tax plan, the mathematics of which have confounded non-partisan experts, he refused even to say how much the tax cuts the ticket has proposed would cost.
Everyone expects Mitt Romney to bob and weave around basic questions he doesn’t want to answer. But Ryan makes such a show about telling hard truths. Turns out Ryan’s self-righteousness has mainly served to make it more insulting when he bobs and weaves himself.
“It would take me too long to go through all of the math,” Ryan explained Sunday morning. But Wallace wasn’t asking for “all” of the math, just basic numbers. As usual with the GOP ticket, the only specific figure Ryan wanted to discuss was how much he and Romney want to drop tax rates. Wallace repeatedly asked Ryan whether Romney’s proposed tax cuts would cost $5 trillion, a question meant to establish one side of the budget equation before moving to a discussion of how Romney would pay for the cuts. But Ryan repeatedly refused to go through the addition and subtraction, instead insisting that the numbers eventually come out in his favor — Romney’s proposed tax cuts would cost nothing, he said, because Romney would offset them by cutting loopholes, primarily for upper incomes.
But which loopholes, and where does Romney draw the line between middle- and upper-income Americans? Ryan had nothing too specific there, either. The best he could do was repeat the nice-sounding logic of the Romney-Ryan plan:
You can lower tax rates 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class for things like charitable deductions, home purchases, for health care. What we’re saying is people are going to get lower tax rates and therefore they will not send as much money to Washington.
Wallace went on to ask Ryan what Romney’s highest priority would be if the GOP ticket’s tax plan didn’t turn out to be revenue-neutral. Ryan answered that “keeping tax rates down” is “more important than anything.” Since Ryan kept insisting that he and Romney need not make a choice between tax cuts and, say, controlling the deficit, he probably didn’t mean for his statement to sound ominous. But since he merely said — and did not show — that Romney’s math could add up, ominous his statement was.
Wallace should have followed up with a question about how, even if Romney and Ryan managed to cut taxes and kept federal revenue where it is, they could then plausibly fix America’s long-term budget mess without additional money. Then again, Ryan didn’t seem to be in the mood for any hard truth-telling.
By: Steven Stromberg, The Washington Post, September 30, 2012
“Compassionless Conservatism”: A Gaffe Is When A Republican Tells The Truth
This Sunday, I attended a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival in which moderator Ta-Nehisi Coates started out with a question for the panelists: Does this campaign season matter? Are we learning anything about the candidates? I was in the audience, but my response would be: Yes, it matters, and we’re learning a great deal. But it’s mostly about what the Republican Party really thinks.
While this election season may appear gaffe-tastic, the most viral moments weren’t misspoken words. Rather, they reveal what’s deep in the conservative heart—opinions that many had warned existed for a long time (and had even appeared in real-life legislation) but have now been put into stark relief for the general public. This election season has been highly instructional about deep-seated beliefs on the right.
The latest and perhaps most viral—nabbing Mother Jones, which broke the story, over 8 million visitors—was Romney’s now-infamous hidden camera 47 percent comment. Here’s what he said:
There are 47 percent of the people…. who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax…. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Romney has stood by his comments, with his economic adviser swearing to “triple down” on them. And in fact the ideas he expresses are nothing new to the party. Worse, given the candidness of the moment, Romney expressed what can only be characterized as unabashed disdain for half of the country. It’s not just that he’s worried, as the conservatives who cling to the 47 percent figure explain, that this constituency won’t vote for tax cuts and instead will vote for higher social safety net payouts. He dismisses them entirely because he can “never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
What that sentiment leaves out, of course, is that while these Americans didn’t pay income taxes (thanks to many policies pushed into law by Republicans themselves), it doesn’t mean they don’t pay any taxes. Over 60 percent of them paid payroll taxes, which means that they also held jobs. Nearly everyone pays sales tax. Another 22 percent of this group was elderly. Add that up, and what he’s mostly talking about are the working poor and low-income older Americans. These are the people that Romney dismisses as taking no responsibility for their lives.
Far from an outlier, Romney’s statement has a long, long history. As my colleague at the Roosevelt Institute Mark Schmitt pointed out last week, this narrative around the 47 percent was hatched in the lab of the American Enterprise Institute. It’s been spouted by the likes of Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Republican VP pick Paul Ryan himself. But Romney’s remarks revealed an even more deep-seated disdain for the working poor than is normally expressed. It’s not just about taxes; it’s a belief that those at the bottom are worth less of his attention and care than the rest of the country. So much for compassionate conservatism. Romney’s remarks revealed once and for all that there is a deep disrespect for working-class and low-income people struggling to get by thriving at the heart of the Republican Party.
And it sheds light on another comment of his that blew up not so long ago: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” At the time, the quote seemed a bit out of context, because Romney continued, “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” Yet in his hidden-camera moment, he makes it clear just how much he despises the safety net he says should catch the poor. He scoffs at those who require assistance for healthcare, food and housing, some of the most basic provisions that this country is supposed to ensure those who are at the bottom of the income scale. Yet another moment of clarity, made even clearer by his recent comments.
We’ve seen some other very telling moments from the Republican nominee this cycle. There was “Corporations are people, my friend,” an unabashed and straightforward articulation of the conservative ethos that fueled the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. Then there was the telling, fully five-second silence from Romney aides when asked whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Act, exposing discomfort with equal pay legislation.
But it’s not just the presidential candidate who has haphazardly revealed truths. Just last month, before we were talking about the 47 percent, we were talking about “legitimate” rape. Remember Todd Akin? Who could forget? On a random Sunday in the middle of August, Akin told a TV interviewer, “[F]rom what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Just like Romney, Akin refused to apologize for the meaning behind his words, explaining he merely meant to say “forcible rape,” not “legitimate rape.”
But this wasn’t the first time he—or the Republican Party—used the word “forcible” to categorize rapes that count and those that don’t. Akin co-sponsored the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act in early 2011, which would have tightened the definition of rape for abortions that are covered by the federal exception to only “forcible” ones. While some noticed this at the time, Akin’s remarks made it crystal clear to anyone half tuned in that the Republican Party thinks some rapes count and others don’t. In particular, if you weren’t roughed up when you were raped—if you were drugged, or date raped, or the victim of incest—you weren’t “really” raped.
There are other truths that surfaced about the conservative view of reproductive health. Primaries are often a process of learning, as more marginal candidates push the mainstream ones to address issues they normally wouldn’t. And right on cue, Rick Santorum made birth control, an issue many thought was settled, a debate point. Perhaps his views were made clearest by an interview with the Christian site Caffeinated Thoughts, in which he warned of “the dangers of contraception,” calling it “not okay.”
Shortly after, Irin Carmon summed up his position thus: “Rick Santorum is coming for your birth control.” In fact, conservative opposition to not just abortion, which continues to be a polarizing topic, but birth control, which does not, has been building for quite some time. But many have been in denial—Carmon herself got a wave of pushback for the title of her piece. And yet months later, contraception was once again in the news as the Catholic bishops came out swinging against the Obama administration’s decision to mandate co-pay-free coverage of contraception as part of the ACA. And we all remember what happened next—the fight devolved into Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut for talking about (her friend’s) contraception needs. The cat is out of the bag: the GOP thinks using contraception, which virtually every woman will do in her lifetime, makes you a dirty whore and doesn’t support increased access.
These awkwardly worded statements and admissions of belief in what candidates assumed were safe spaces are hugely important. It may seem ridiculous that a hidden camera video can fuel three weeks of the news cycle. But what Romney revealed was more than an ability to keep putting his foot in his mouth. Republicans, perhaps more than ever, have exposed long-held beliefs this campaign season. They’re just finally going viral.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, September 25, 2012
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