“Mitt’s Moochers”: The Dangerous Lie His Funders Love To Hear
Mitt Romney got some unwanted attention early this year when he flatly stated, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” When challenged on this remark he assured Americans that the safety net for the very poor was a given, safe from any budget and tax code tinkering in Washington. This was a sinister explanation since Romney’s tax and spending plan — or as much of it as can be deciphered — calls for further tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of social services that he claimed were safe.
Now, we see that it’s not just the “very poor” who don’t merit Romney’s “concern.” At the now-infamous $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in Florida, Romney wrote off the concerns of the 47 percent of Americans who don’t owe federal income taxes, saying that half of Americans are “dependent on government,” “believe that they are the victims,” and have the gall to “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
That 47 percent includes families and individuals with low incomes — about 23 percent of taxpayers, according to the Tax Policy Center. It also includes those for whom tax credits for children and working families have eliminated tax burdens — about 7 percent. It also includes seniors who have left the workforce — about 10 percent. Over half of the 47 percent pay federal payroll taxes. All are subject to state and local taxes, many of which, like sales taxes, are more regressive than federal taxes. (And if we ever see more Romney tax returns, we may find some years when the Romney’s were in that entitled 47 percent.)
As conservative writer Reihan Salam points out in the National Review, policies like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit — responsible for much of this tax relief for working families — were conservative ideas meant to reduce the “dependency” that Romney so reviles, by “encourag[ing] people get on the first rungs of the jobs ladder, and to become less dependent over time.”
Romney was telling the well-heeled guests at this fundraising dinner that these people — middle-class parents, low-income workers, the unemployed, the elderly — aren’t interested in working hard despite the fact that most of them report to the IRS each year that they work quite a lot. This isn’t just tin-eared politics. Like Romney’s comments on the “very poor,” it represents a profound misunderstanding of how Americans’ lives work and how his policies would affect those lives.
But even talking about the “47 percent versus the 53 percent” belies the fact that nobody in America is free from at least some government “dependency.” We all rely on roads, hospitals, schools, firefighters, police officers, and our military — even Mitt Romney and his $50,000-a-plate friends. Romney himself has relied on the government’s safety net for businesses, securing a federal bailout for Bain & Company. Nobody succeeds without some help from a stable, functional government. That’s what President Obama was saying when his “you didn’t build that” comments were taken out of context.
Romney was clearly telling his funders a fantasy story that they love to hear. But that story is a lie, and we shouldn’t accept it from someone who could become a president representing 100 percent of the American people.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Hufffington Post Blog, September 19, 2012
“The Real Awful Mitt Romney”: The Epitome Of Jawdroppingly Stupid Arrogant Privilege
If you thought Mitt Romney had a rotten summer—failing to project a more appealing image of himself and his policies, failing to pin the country’s economic woes on the president, failing to get even the tiniest bounce from his convention—the home stretch is shaping up even worse. Fast on the heels of his aggressively wrong-headed response to the embassy attack in Libya (which gets terrible reviews from most Americans), Mother Jones today released a bombshell video of Romney speaking way too candidly to a small group of well-heeled campaign contributors.
This is must-see footage—and even if you don’t want to see it, you won’t be able to help it over the next few days. These are words that will haunt Romney for the rest of the campaign—and the rest of his political career. He jokes that he’d have a better chance of being elected if he were of Mexican lineage; he insults Obama voters (and 47 percent of the country) in the most stereotypical and racially-tinged terms possible; he brags about sharing campaign consultants with Bibi Netanyahu; and he insists that Americans are, basically, too empty-headed to care about policy specifics. And this is only the first batch of videos to come; God only knows what else he might have let loose with.
We can’t sum it up better than David Corn, who got this “get” for MoJo: “With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open. He displayed a high degree of disgust for nearly half of his fellow citizens, lumping all Obama voters into a mass of shiftless moochers who don’t contribute much, if anything, to society, and he indicated that he viewed the election as a battle between strivers (such as himself and the donors before him) and parasitic free-riders who lack character, fortitude, and initiative. … These were sentiments not to be shared with the voters; it was inside information, available only to the select few who had paid for the privilege of experiencing the real Romney.”
Romney’s comments will inevitably be likened to Barack Obama’s infamous slur (also recorded in a private donor meeting) about white Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion. Both expressed the kind of disdain for their fellow Americans that no candidate should allow to escape his or her lips. But in terms of political impact, this is sure to play much worse. For one thing, that was April 2008, and this is mid-September 2012—leaving the candidate little time to recover. Another essential difference: Obama was well-liked and admired by the vast majority of Americans when he had his bigoted slip of the lip; Romney is already overwhelmingly disliked, even by many who plan to vote for him. Obama’s comments surprised people; Romney’s comments confirm what people already suspected about him. He comes across as the epitome of arrogant privilege.
There is no way that this glimpse into the “real Romney” won’t turn off a large majority of the country—including plenty of the same people of privilege he was speaking to in that room. Even if they agree with the candidate secretly, they will have some serious second thoughts: How could anyone running for president, for pete’s sake, be so breathtakingly, jaw-droppingly stupid as to utter such things aloud?
By: Bob Moser, The American Prospect, September 17, 2012
“Arithmetic For Billionaires”: Romney Is Rich, But Can He Add?
Mitt Romney is a very wealthy man with a proven capacity for avoiding taxes – but can he do simple arithmetic?
In the wake of the Democratic convention, the Republican candidate again promised to “cut the deficit and get us back on track to a balanced budget.” He even hinted that his own party bears some responsibility for ballooning federal deficits and debt. “We’re going to finally have to do something that Republicans have spoken about for a long time and for a while we didn’t do it. When we had the lead, we let people down,” he said the other day, presumably referring to the last Republican president, whose name must never be mentioned, and the Congressional leadership during that administration.
And “for a while” presumably refers to the past 30 years or so.
Romney also says that he watched none of the speeches at the Democratic convention. He obviously missed the one that might have helped him figure out exactly what his party has been doing wrong. “I hear Bill Clinton spoke for like, 50 minutes?” he snarked at a public appearance on Friday. Yes, the former president spoke for just over 49 minutes – and he articulated a message that could enlighten Romney. Clinton’s lesson might be titled “Arithmetic for Billionaires.” He could start with an accurate assessment of the origins of the national debt level currently carried by the U.S. Treasury. As Clinton noted, the federal debt roughly quadrupled during the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration, from just under a trillion dollars to four trillion.
When Clinton became president, that debt was rising rapidly with annual deficits of $400 billion. His first budget raised taxes, almost entirely on the wealthiest taxpayers, by restoring a top bracket of 39.5 percent. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for that 1993 budget, with many of them predicting that raising taxes on the rich would result in economic catastrophe. They were wrong, of course.
The economy boomed, incomes rose at every level, millions began to climb out of poverty, and the rich became richer too (although many of them never forgave Clinton for demanding that they pay up for the festivities of the Reagan era). Clinton booked four balanced budgets and began to pay down the national debt. The debt would have been paid down entirely, preparing the nation far better for the crash that we ultimately faced, had that unnamed Republican not succeeded Clinton with reckless tax cuts and extremely expensive wars.
By the time President Nameless left office, the nation was deeply in debt and on the brink of a catastrophe that wasn’t merely rhetorical. Now along comes Romney, with his sidekick Paul Ryan, telling voters that they will cut the deficit and balance the budget. Yet as Clinton noted, they propose still another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest households – including their own and those of their most generous supporters – that would cost the Treasury at least $5 trillion. And they insist on increasing the defense budget by hundreds of billions, too.
What Clinton asked is how the Republican nominees propose to pay for those lavish favors to themselves and their friends. Doing the arithmetic himself, he came up with three possible answers: They will raise taxes on the middle class by taking away mortgage, charitable and other deductions, so that billionaires can have another tax break. They will cut federal spending so deeply that infrastructure, education, science, technology, and health care will be ruined for the future. Or they will do nothing, and explode the debt, just as their predecessors have done repeatedly over the past three decades.
Whether in their own 40-minute addresses to their party convention or elsewhere, neither Romney nor Ryan has offered a plausible solution to Clinton’s arithmetic problem. They talk about spending cuts and tax reform, but without any specifics. The footnote to their budget claim says only, as Clinton put it: “See me about that after the election.” Clearly the Republicans intend to push off difficult questions about their budgeting, just as Romney intends to push through without releasing his tax returns. But those evasions may prove very difficult to sustain through the four upcoming debates.
Sometime before November 6, someone will ask Romney and Ryan to do the arithmetic.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, September 8, 2012
“Making Medicaid Matter”: The Real-World Impact For Today’s Struggling Americans
Much of the 2012 policy debate, such as it is, has focused on Medicare, and with good reason — the Romney-Ryan plan to replace the Medicare system with a voucher plan is important and worth scrutinizing in detail.
But in his convention speech last night, Bill Clinton not only stressed Medicare, he also delivered a forceful reminder about the importance of Medicaid and what would happen to the program under Republican rule:
“Now, folks, this is serious, because it gets worse. And you won’t be laughing when I finish telling you this: they also want to block-grant Medicaid, and cut it by a third over the coming 10 years.
“Of course, that’s going to really hurt a lot of poor kids. But that’s not all. A lot of folks don’t know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid.
“It’s going to end [Medicaid] as we know it. And a lot of that money is also spent to help people with disabilities, including a lot of middle-class families whose kids have Down’s Syndrome or autism or other severe conditions.
And honestly, let’s think about it, if that happens, I don’t know what those families are going to do. So I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do everything I can to see that it doesn’t happen. We can’t let it happen.”
The future of Medicare is obviously important and should be a central issue in the presidential race, but as Matt Yglesias noted, “Medicaid is the one where much more is at stake on the ballot.”
Why? Because the Romney-Ryan plan, with a position they’re not at all bashful about, would block-grant Medicaid, leaving states with fewer resources, and leaving the poor and disabled in even more jeopardy.
Remember, unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a partnership between federal and state governments. The program undermines state budgets in a big way during economic downturns — more people begin to rely on the program and states, which can’t run deficits, struggle badly with the finances — and the moment a Romney-Ryan administration gives states the flexibility to do so, Republicans governors will start improving their finances by taking health care from the most vulnerable, who don’t exactly have lobbyists looking out for them.
What’s more, as Clinton reminded us, for all of Romney’s talk about leaving seniors’ benefits intact, the moment the GOP guts Medicaid, plenty of elderly Americans will feel the effects.
There’s no shortage of policy differences between the two major-party campaigns, but this is one of the more dramatic areas of disagreement, especially as it relates to the real-world impact of struggling Americans. Medicaid deserves to be an important part of the national debate, and kudos to Clinton for giving the issue the spotlight.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 6, 2012
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