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A “Bell Hop For The Wealthy”: Rick Santorum’s Dubious Working-Class Creds

The latest polls show a Huntsman surge, and Santorum tanking in NH, so Santorum’s 15 minutes may be up sooner than later. But we shouldn’t let this political moment pass without a comment on the ‘Santorum as working-class hero’ snowjob.

Google Santorum +”working-class,” and you’ll pull up headlines like “Santorum fits working class bill,” “Like Rocky Balboa, Rick Santorum is a working class hero” and “Santorum: The Blue-collar Candidate – The former senator touts his working-class roots” etc. The conservative echo chamber is parroting the meme with impressive message discipline. Top conservative pundits, including Brooks, Will and Krauthammer have jumped on the Santorum as working-class hero bandwagon.

It’s not hard to understand why. One of the largest swing constituencies, the white working-class has trended toward the GOP in recent elections. According to Wall St. Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel

…Barack Obama did better than John Kerry or Al Gore with these voters, though even he earned just 43% of their vote…That was Mr. Obama’s high point. In 2010 a record 63% of this bloc voted for the GOP. And there are signs that, whether out of calculation or desperation, Team Obama may be abandoning them altogether–instead looking for 2012 victory in a progressive coalition of educated, socially liberal voters, combined with poorer ethnic voters, in particular Hispanics.The white working class will make up as much as 55% of the vote in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Front-runner Mitt Romney knows it, as does Mr. Santorum. Their fight in New Hampshire and beyond will increasingly be over who can earn more points with this group. Their styles are very different, if equally damaging to the conservative growth message.

Santorum is making a hard-sell pitch for the blue collar vote, as Strassel reports:

Mr. Santorum surged in Iowa as the “I’m One of You” candidate. On the stump, and in his victory speech in Iowa, he’s highlighted his working-class roots. He kicked off his campaign near the Pennsylvania coal mines where his grandfather worked, and he talks frequently of struggling steel towns…He’s the frugal guy, the man of faith, the person who understands the financial worries of average Americans. He’s directly contrasting his own blue-collar bona fides with those of the more privileged Mr. Romney.

In reality, however, Santorum’s working-class creds are awfully thin. His father was a clinical psychologist and his mother was an administrative nurse — clearly more of an upper middle-class upbringing than a blue collar culture. Yeah, he had a grandfather who was a miner, but it’s not like he grew up in a mining family as the GOP meme-propagators would have us believe.

Worse, much of his career in public office has been dedicated to serving as an eager bell-hop for the wealthy. More recently, as the Washington Post reported,

Santorum earned $1.3 million in 2010 and the first half of 2011, according to his most recent financial disclosure form. The largest chunk of his employment earnings — $332,000 — came from his work as a consultant for groups advocating and lobbying for industry interests. That included $142,500 to help advise a Pennsylvania natural gas firm, Consol Energy, and $65,000 to consult with lobby firm American Continental Group, and its insurance services client.

And, as Marcus Stern and Kristina Cooke recently reported for Reuters,

As a senator, Santorum went further, playing a key role in an effort by Republicans in Congress to dictate the hiring practices, and hence the political loyalties, of Washington’s deep-pocketed lobbying firms and trade associations, which had previously been bipartisan.Dubbed “the K Street Project” for the Washington street that houses most of these groups, the initiative was launched in 1989 by lobbyist Grover Norquist, whose sole aim, he said, was to encourage lobbying firms to “hire people who agree with your worldview, not hire for access.”

…Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal government watchdog group, named Santorum among three “most corrupt” senators in 2005 and 2006, accusing him of “using his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit those who have made contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee.”

Santorum has won some blue collar support by promoting his message of “industrial renewal,” and supporting protectionist measures, as John Nichols reports in The Nation. But, as Nichols, says, “There is no reason to overplay Santorum’s commitments. He is an economic conservative who would side more often with Wall Street than Main Street.”

In 2002, for example, Senator Santorum received a 15 percent rating from the AFL-CIO. Not many Senators had a lower score.

Republican strategists are so desperate for a candidate who can relate to the blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” that casting an arch conservative, silk-stocking lawyer like Santorum as a working class hero seems a reasonable stretch. If Santorum does recover from his latest poll dive, it shouldn’t be too hard for Dems to expose his policy agenda as more anti-worker than not.

Note from James Vega:

Using exactly the same, utterly and shamelessly idiotic “grandfather’s history plus general geographical area” theory of social class, Mitt Romney can claim to be “the authentic descendent and representative of Mexican-American autoworkers” – his grandfather lived in Chihuahua, Mexico most of his life and Romney himself grew up “in the shadows of the automobile factories of Detroit”

Newt, on the other hand, can polish his credentials in the African-American community by claiming to be “a scholar of African society whose congressional district was a short distance from Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement”.

By: J. P. Green, The Democratic Strategist, January 9, 2012

January 10, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

GOP Class Warfare: Make The Middle Class Pay

For viewers of Saturday night’s Republican presidential candidate debate, drawing distinctions between the leading candidates wasn’t hard. We may disagree on whether these men are presidential caliber, but as cartoon caricatures, they’re deliciously unique. Rick Santorum’s sexual obsessions, Rick Perry’s Texas war-mongering, Newt Gingrich’s ego, and Mitt Romney’s profound commitment to flip-flop, any time, anywhere, are all drawn in big, bright, Day-Glo colors. (Ron Paul is, of course, Ron Paul.)

But on one topic they are as alike as genetically modified peas in a pod. In an era in which Americans are paying historically low taxes and the government faces huge budget deficits, they are all fervently determined to give the richest Americans another huge tax break.

The Citizens for Tax Justice have crunched the numbers, and they are remarkable.

The cost of the tax plans proposed by Republican presidential candidates would range from $6.6 trillion to $18 trillion over a decade. The share of tax cuts going to the richest one percent of Americans under these plans would range from over a third to almost half. The average tax cuts received by the richest one percent would be up to 270 times as large as the average tax cut received by middle-income Americans.

The figures  are staggering. Here’s a quick breakdown of how the richest one percent of Americans would stand to benefit under the different plans.

  • Newt Gingrich: An average tax cut of $391,330
  • Rick Perry: An average tax cut of $272,730
  • Mitt Romney: An average tax cut of $126,450
  • Rick Santorum: An average tax cut of $217,500

Ron Paul’s tax plan isn’t detailed enough to make the same analysis, but he has proposed repealing the federal income tax altogether, which, ideologically speaking, makes him a clear fellow traveler with the rest of his colleagues.

The CTJ report makes a little bit too much of the relative size of the tax cuts enjoyed by the richest Americans compared to the rest of us (for example, under Gingrich’s plan the middle fifth of Americans would get a $1,990 tax cut, a mere pittance compared to the $391,300 delivered to the rich.) In a proportional system, the numbers are always going to be much bigger for the richest Americans, whether we’re measuring hikes or cuts. But the report is right on the money when it points out who ends up really paying for the cuts. Affording the huge tax cuts plans proposed by the leading Republican presidential contenders will require massive cuts to government programs that primarily benefit the lower and middle classes.

Even the meager tax cuts that would go to low-income and middle-income taxpayers under these plans would almost surely be offset by the huge cuts in public services that would become necessary as a result.

GOP lawmakers in Washington are already calling for ending Medicare as guaranteed health insurance for seniors and reducing Social Security benefits, and these tax plans would make necessary even more draconian reductions in the types of public services that middle-income Americans depend on.

Rich Santorum told debate watchers Saturday night that he’d prefer it we just abolished the term “middle class” from the popular lexicon. Dividing up Americans according to their income levels just serves Obama’s “class warfare” agenda, claimed Santorum.

But it’s impossible to look at the tax plans proposed by Gingrich, Romney, et al. and not understand how class warfare really works in the United States today. The rich get a huge windfall — and the rest of us are supposed to pay for it.

 

By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, January 9, 2012

January 10, 2012 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, Taxes | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Mitt Romney’s Tax Plan: Very Progressive By 15th Century Standards

The Tax Policy Center has completed an analysis of the distributional effects of Mitt Romney’s tax plan, and as might be expected it’s quite good for you if you’re raking in the big bucks, and not particularly helpful if you’re not. For the bottom 80% of the income distribution, federal tax rates would drop between 0.6% and 3.4%. For the top 20%, they’d drop 5.9%; for the top 1%, they’d drop 8.6%. That means the regular-joe taxpayer at the middle of the distribution gets a cut of about $1,400, while a taxpayer in the top 1% gets a cut of $171,000. Kevin Drum cracks wise:

[C]onservatives are right to believe that Romney isn’t to be trusted. Sure, he lowers tax rates on millionaires by 9 percentage points, and you may think that’s a pretty sweet deal for the rich. But come on. Newt Gingrich would lower them by 24 percentage points. (No, that’s not a typo.) Rick Perry lowers them by 20 percentage points. Herman Cain lowers them by 15 points. Frankly, Romney is hardly even trying here.

Along similar lines, and because I’ve been reading about this stuff lately, I’d like to point out that in the long historical context the tax rates Mr Romney is proposing are still extremely progressive. In fact, up until at least the 15th century or so, tax rates in the Western world were generally higher for poor people than they were for rich people. In early Renaissance Florence, as Tim Parks explains in his highly readable “Medici Money“, almost all state revenues were raised from excise taxes on consumption, while the holdings of the wealthy were exempt from almost any form of routine taxation. This state of affairs persisted until 1427, when the cost of hiring mercenaries to protect the city from the Duke of Milan, the French, and basically everyone else in the free-for-all of Italian politics rose so high that they had to introduce a universal tax called the catasto. This exempted about a third of the poorest households, while everyone over a certain level of income had to pay a flat tax of 0.5% on their wealth—a wildly progressive move in its day.

Meanwhile in Flanders, as John Munro writes in “The Usury Doctrine and Urban Public Finances in Late-Medieval Flanders (1220-1550): Rentes (Annuities), Excise Taxes, and Income Transfers from the Poor to the Rich“, state finance came to rely increasingly on issuing annuities paying an annual income. This was because the Catholic church’s rulings on usury made it increasingly difficult for sovereigns to borrow at interest. The Pope said it was okay to issue the annuities as long as the taxes used to pay them came from the produce of the land, safely removing them from the unnatural auto-reproduction of money implied in usury. That meant, again, that taxation mainly consisted of excise taxes on consumption, and “the obvious significance of this form of public-finance related taxation was that it was essentially very regressive, in representing a far greater burden on the poor than on the middle classes, let alone the rich.” Since most people who could buy and hold state annuities were rich, it was a pretty direct transfer of wealth from the poor to rentiers.

So, again, while it’s true that Mr Romney’s tax plans represent a large net transfer from the poor to the rich if you start from the baseline of current tax law, they’re actually pretty progressive if you’re willing to start from a pre-modern baseline.

 

By: Democracy in America, published in The Economist, January 6, 2012

January 8, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bordering On Dishonesty: Mitt Romney On Bain, Barack And Jobs

America’s recovery from recession has been so slow that it mostly doesn’t seem like a recovery at all, especially on the jobs front. So, in a better world, President Obama would face a challenger offering a serious critique of his job-creation policies, and proposing a serious alternative.

Instead, he’ll almost surely face Mitt Romney.

Mr. Romney claims that Mr. Obama has been a job destroyer, while he was a job-creating businessman. For example, he told Fox News: “This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is two million jobs that he lost as president.” He went on to declare, of his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

But his claims about the Obama record border on dishonesty, and his claims about his own record are well across that border.

Start with the Obama record. It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office. But the president inherited an economy in free fall, and can’t be held responsible for job losses during his first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect. So how much of that Obama job loss took place in, say, the first half of 2009?

The answer is: more than all of it. The economy lost 3.1 million jobs between January 2009 and June 2009 and has since gained 1.2 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s nothing like Mr. Romney’s portrait of job destruction.

Incidentally, the previous administration’s claims of job growth always started not from Inauguration Day but from August 2003, when Bush-era employment hit its low point. By that standard, Mr. Obama could say that he has created 2.5 million jobs since February 2010.

So Mr. Romney’s claims about the Obama job record aren’t literally false, but they are deeply misleading. Still, the real fun comes when we look at what Mr. Romney says about himself. Where does that claim of creating 100,000 jobs come from?

Well, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post got an answer from the Romney campaign. It’s the sum of job gains at three companies that Mr. Romney “helped to start or grow”: Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino’s.

Mr. Kessler immediately pointed out two problems with this tally. It’s “based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain,” and it “does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved.” Either problem, by itself, makes nonsense of the whole claim.

On the point about using current employment, consider Staples, which has more than twice as many stores now as it did back in 1999, when Mr. Romney left Bain. Can he claim credit for everything good that has happened to the company in the past 12 years? In particular, can he claim credit for the company’s successful shift from focusing on price to focusing on customer service (“That was easy”), which took place long after he had left the business world?

Then there’s the bit about looking only at Bain-connected companies that added jobs, ignoring those that reduced their work forces or went out of business. Hey, if pluses count but minuses don’t, everyone who spends a day playing the slot machines comes out way ahead!

In any case, it makes no sense to look at changes in one company’s work force and say that this measures job creation for America as a whole.

Suppose, for example, that your chain of office-supply stores gains market share at the expense of rivals. You employ more people; your rivals employ fewer. What’s the overall effect on U.S. employment? One thing’s for sure: it’s a lot less than the number of workers your company added.

Better yet, suppose that you expand in part not by beating your competitors, but by buying them. Now their employees are your employees. Have you created jobs?

The point is that Mr. Romney’s claims about being a job creator would be nonsense even if he were being honest about the numbers, which he isn’t.

At this point, some readers may ask whether it isn’t equally wrong to say that Mr. Romney destroyed jobs. Yes, it is. The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.

When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.

And that reality is, of course, what all the blather and misdirection about job-creating businessmen and job-destroying Democrats is meant to obscure.

 

By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, Jobs | , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Champion Of The Already Powerful: Mitt Romney’s Brand Of Extremism

Mitt Romney’s close call at the Iowa caucuses Tuesday will doubtless contribute to speculation that he is too “moderate” to appeal to Republican primary voters. While Romney has a complicated relationship with his new party-line stances on social issues, I’d argue that his new positions and his Olympian flip flops that he had to make to get there are only part of his problem. Romney isn’t too moderate for Republican voters — at this time in our country he’s simply the wrong kind of extreme.

The 2012 election will ultimately be a referendum on the kind of economic policies Americans want — ones that work for working people or ones that are designed by and for a privileged few. The Bush-instigated recession has compounded the unprecedented disparity between the richest few Americans and the millions who are struggling just to get by. President Obama’s efforts to put Americans back to work have been met at every turn by a Republican Congress unwilling to stimulate the nation’s economy and stabilize the nation’s finances, inexplicably eager to give a tax hike to working families but unwilling to let Bush’s damaging tax cuts for the wealthy expire. All the Republican frontrunners are offering similar reprises of Bush’s disastrous economic policies. But only one comes across immediately and undeniably as an extreme corporatist.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee hit Romney’s extremism problem on the head when he said the candidate “looks like the guy who fired you.” Most didn’t get to see his face at the time, but Mitt Romney has plenty of experience firing people from a distance, sending thousands of jobs overseas while raking in fat paychecks at Bain Capital that continue today years after his retirement. No wonder he hasn’t been able to shake the image of himself as a corporate fat-cat: he doesn’t just want to give corporations and the wealthy major tax cuts, he openly states that he thinks “corporations are people.”

And Romney’s out-of-touch image and pro-corporate extremism aren’t just turn-offs to progressives. A poll by The Hill this fall found that “55 percent of conservatives and 81 percent of centrists” see income inequality in America as a problem. A Bloomberg–Washington Post poll found that a majority of Republicans think the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes to help bring down the budget deficit. Corporate extremism at odds with the priorities of the base is the norm among the GOP presidential candidates — but only Romney embodies it.

Unfortunately, Romney’s near-miss with Santorum will help him frame himself a mainstream, electable candidate just conservative enough to make it through the Republican primary gauntlet. Santorum is the perfect foil: a right-wing ideologue so extreme he thinks states should be able to outlaw contraception, that homosexuality is akin to bestiality, that high obesity rates are an argument against food stamps, and that all married same-sex couples should have their unions annulled. But when it comes to policy, Romney’s positions on social issues are nearly indistinguishable from those of his crusading opponent. Romney has endorsed radical anti-choice “personhood amendments.” He rejects marriage equality and says he wouldn’t support a federal-level Employment Non-Discrimination Act. He opposes the DREAM Act. He’s even getting his legal policy advice from Robert Bork, a right-wing crusader so extreme the Senate wouldn’t confirm him to the Supreme Court.

Romney and Santorum would each be disastrous to America on both social and economic issues. But their near-tie in Iowa exposes a fault line that will be visible through the general election. So what’s the difference? While there is still a solid evangelical base that embraces the kind of social extremism offered by Santorum, American voters across the political spectrum are wary of the government-by-the-few embraced by the GOP and embodied by Romney.

Santorum is no less of an economic extremist than Romney, just as Romney is hardly less of a social extremist than Santorum. Every Republican candidate has called for trillions of dollars of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, for ending Medicare as we know it, and for a return to George W. Bush’s disastrous economic policies. But Romney — through his biography, demeanor and tin ear — has, with good reason, become personally associated with these policies that cater to the wealthy and privileged and ignore the middle class.

The 2012 election will come down to a very basic choice. Do we want a champion of the middle class in the White House or the champion of those who are already powerful? Do you want to hire the guy who fired you? Iowa Republicans this week started answering that question.

 

By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, January 5, 2012

January 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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