“This Isn’t The Debate Republicans Want To Have”: Republicans Befuddled By Obama Plan To Cut Middle-Class Taxes
Even President Obama’s most fervent opponents must acknowledge that he’s getting quite good at putting them on the defensive. Facing a Republican Congress and with only two years remaining in his presidency, he seems to come up with a new idea every couple of weeks to drive them up a wall. So he certainly wasn’t going to let the State of the Union address go by without using the opportunity — days of pre- and post-speech commentary, plus an audience in the tens of millions — to its utmost.
At Tuesday’s speech, Obama will announce a series of proposals meant to aid middle class and poor Americans and address inequality, most particularly an increase in the child care credit and a $500 tax credit for working couples (here’s the White House’s fact sheet on the proposals). To pay for it, investment and inheritance taxes on the wealthy would be increased and some loopholes that small numbers of the super-rich (like one Willard Romney) exploit will be closed. While the SOTU is often the occasion for dramatic announcements that are soon forgotten, this one lands in the center a debate that is looking like it will shape the upcoming presidential race. Naturally, Republicans are not pleased.
But if you listen carefully to what they’re saying, you’ll notice that they are barely mentioning the proposals for middle-class tax breaks which are supposed to be the whole purpose of this initiative; instead, all their focus is on the increases America’s noble job creators would have to endure in order to pay for it.
“Slapping American small businesses, savers and investors with more tax hikes only negates the benefits of the tax policies that have been successful in helping to expand the economy, promote savings, and create jobs,” said Orrin Hatch. “More Washington tax hikes and spending is the same, old top-down approach we’ve come to expect from President Obama that hasn’t worked,” said John Boehner’s spokesperson. “This is not a serious proposal,” said Paul Ryan’s flak. “We lift families up and grow the economy with a simpler, flatter tax code, not big tax increases to pay for more Washington spending.” For the record, a “flatter” tax system means either the poor paying more or the rich paying less, though Republicans never say which they prefer.
Marco Rubio was on the same page. “Raising taxes on people that are successful is not going to make people that are struggling more successful,” he said on Face the Nation. “The good news about free enterprise is that everyone can succeed without punishing anyone.” That was about as close as any Republican came to actually talking about the tax cuts Obama is proposing (though this National Review editorial does discuss them, by arguing that it’s an attack on motherhood). That’s probably because Republicans been in favor of ideas like them in the recent past.
While Obama does want to provide new funds to make community college free to anyone who wants it, most of his proposals in this round use the tax code to help people of modest means, which is exactly what Republicans usually suggest when they’re forced to come up with an idea to help the poor or middle class. Since they believe that government programs to help ordinary people are useless almost by definition, the only way to give anyone a hand is with a tax cut. And yes, the hand they usually extend is toward the wealthy, whose burdens are so crushing that justice demands that lawmakers not rest until they can be afforded relief. But tax cuts are so magical they can help anyone, which is why Republicans been in favor of expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child care tax credit before.
But paying for it by increasing investment and inheritance taxes on the wealthy, like Obama is proposing? Not on your life.
One thing’s for sure: as the economy improves, both parties are now being forced to address the underlying issues of stagnant wages and inequality that have been an anchor around ordinary people’s lives for the last few decades. It’s fair to say this isn’t the debate Republicans want to have, and it’s easy to mock them for their insistence that they’re really the party with something to offer the middle class and the poor. But it’s a lot more productive to just take them at their word and see what they actually propose to do.
So Mitt Romney says he has cast off his previous contempt for those of modest means and now wants to focus his 2016 presidential campaign on the issue of poverty? All right — what are his ideas? If they’re actually worthwhile, he should get whatever credit he’s due. If it’s more trickle-down policies and stern lectures about bootstrap-pulling, then we’ll know nothing has changed.
You can argue — and many will — that it’s pointless for Obama to introduce significant policy proposals like this when he knows they couldn’t make it through the Republican Congress. But what alternative does he have? He could suggest only Republican ideas, but he wouldn’t be much of a Democratic president if he did that. Or he could offer nothing at all, and then everyone would criticize him for giving up on achieving anything in his last two years. If nothing else, putting these proposals forward can start a discussion that might bear legislative fruit later on. Major policy changes sometimes take years to accomplish, so it’s never too early to start. And if Republicans have better ideas, let’s hear them.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 19, 2015
“An Enormously Difficult Task”: Why Republicans Will Lose The Coming Argument Over The Economy
There may be 21 months remaining between now and the 2016 presidential election, but both Republicans and Democrats have come to an agreement on what the election should be about. They may use different terms to describe it — Democrats will talk about “inequality,” while Republicans will tout “opportunity” — but they’re both going to focus on the ways the economy isn’t doing right by Americans who aren’t rich.
In the name of pundit courage, I offer a prediction: Republicans are going to lose the argument. They’ve practically lost it already.
Let’s take a look at what we’ve learned just in the past couple of days. We all know that both sides are looking for new policy ideas they can present that will demonstrate their commitment to lifting up middle class and poorer Americans, so what’s on offer? Chris Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, has released a plan that includes giving every working American who makes less than six figures a $1,000 tax credit, gives people further tax credits if they save money, limits corporate tax deductions for CEO compensation, and pays for it with a financial transactions tax (presented as a Wall Street “high roller” fee). Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to cut Social Security disability payments.
OK, so that’s not entirely fair — Republicans are, in fact, talking about what they can do for less affluent Americans. For instance, Politico reports today that even Mitt Romney has decided that the three pillars of his 2016 campaign will be a “muscular” foreign policy, helping the poor, and supporting the middle class. Which sounds interesting, but at this point it constitutes nothing more than talking about how this is an issue he’s going to be talking about. You have to look pretty hard to find an actual idea Republicans have.
And while they’re figuring that out, it looks like Democrats are going to keep rolling out one policy proposal after another, whether it’s Van Hollen’s tax credit (which other Democrats are also going to be advocating), President Obama’s plan to make community college free, or upcoming pushes on issues like paid family leave and more inclusive overtime rules.
Republicans start out at a significant disadvantage in this debate for a number of reasons. First, they tend to talk about the economy from a level far removed from that of ordinary people. Enact policies like low taxes and light regulation on corporations, they say, and the result will be growth that ends up benefiting everyone. But now they’re acknowledging that they have to talk about middle class and even poor people, and offer them something more specific. That runs into their second problem, that because they believe in small government, unlike Democrats they aren’t likely to support policies that offer direct, immediate benefits.
The policies they do support, furthermore, will immediately be characterized by their opponents as being one of two types: attacks on the poor being deceptively offered as efforts to help them (like devolving responsibility for safety net programs to the states) or moves to help rich people being deceptively offered as a boon to the middle class (like most Republican tax cuts).
Republicans will, of course, say that these criticisms are unfair. But the default assumption voters have is that the GOP is the party of the rich. That means that in order to persuade them, Republicans can’t just come up with some reasonable policy ideas, they have to offer something twice as compelling as what Democrats are proposing. And when Democrats are saying something straightforward, like “Our plan is to give you a thousand bucks and pay for it by taxing Wall Street,” while Republicans are trying to explain how block grants would bring a more efficient allocation of benefits, it isn’t hard to see who’s going to win the argument. Just try to imagine how much work someone like Mitt Romney — he of Bain Capital and the “47 percent” — is going to have to do to convince voters that he’s really the one who’s on the side of the middle class.
If we look back at the recent history of presidential campaigns, we see that Republicans win the argument on the economy under three conditions. The first is when there’s a Democrat in the White House and the economy is terrible, as it was in 1980. The second is when there’s a Republican in the White House and the economy is doing well, as it was in 1984 or 1988. And the third is when the economy is doing so-so, but the election turns on an entirely different set of issues, as in 2004 — in other words, when there really isn’t much of a discussion on the economy.
The 2016 election doesn’t look (at the moment anyway) like any of those three. Unless there’s a dramatic change, the economy will be doing well in broad terms like growth and job creation, but voters will want to hear what the parties are going to propose to improve wages, working conditions, and the fortunes of the middle class and those struggling to join it. Winning that argument will be an enormously difficult task for the GOP, and they aren’t off to a promising start.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 13, 2015
“Who Cares About Ideology?”: Why Jeb Bush Is Taking Big Risk In Pandering To Conservative Primary Voters
It’s never too early to start questioning the assumptions that guide presidential campaign coverage, whether they concern what candidates do and why they do it, what impact their decisions have, or how voters actually view the whole sordid extravaganza. And there are plenty of those just waiting to be unpacked and cast aside.
Today Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist writing for the New York Times, has what looks like some good news for Jeb Bush. She looks back at weekly polling data from 2012, and declares that if Mitt Romney moved to the right to win the primaries, the public seems not to have noticed. This might suggest that Bush — who has a couple of issue positions that conservative voters don’t like — is free to pander in the primaries to his heart’s content, without worrying about whether it might hurt him in the general election.
But I fear that Vavreck may be forgetting about a myth far more important than the one she’s trying to debunk. Before I explain, here’s the heart of her argument:
Because we have data every week, we can assess changes in average placements of the candidates over the course of the primaries and the general election. The data show that people’s views about the candidates’ ideologies didn’t move over the course of 2012. The lines are essentially flat.
For example, most people started and ended the election year believing, on average, that Mr. Romney was conservative, but not too much so. Any shifting, message-adjusting or pandering that Mr. Romney did during the primaries in 2012 did not hurt him in the general election by making him seem more conservative than he was earlier in the year, and it’s not at all clear it helped him in the primaries either. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, started the election year twice as far away from voters, on average, than Mr. Romney was and got farther away over the course of the year….
These three pieces of evidence — that Mr. Romney was thought to be no less conservative before the primaries than during or after them, that his average rating didn’t shift much at all during the entire year, and that he was ideologically closer to most voters than Mr. Obama — bust the myth that Republicans lost the 2012 election because of ideological shifts in the primaries.
This would appear to tell us that that Romney suffered not at all from his often comical attempts to pander to the Republican base in the primaries, and therefore such pandering poses no danger for Jeb Bush. But is that really true? To believe it, we’d have to believe that this poll question — asking voters to place a candidate on an ideological scale — captures the pandering phenomenon.
But there’s reason to believe it doesn’t. First of all, it’s possible that the pandering registered with many voters as something more like “Mitt Romney is running around telling people what they want to hear,” rather than “Mitt Romney is more conservative than he used to be.” It’s absolutely vital to remember that most Americans are not like those of us who care deeply about politics. Because politics isn’t something they think too much about, they don’t necessarily have a firm grip on even some of the most basic distinctions between the parties. Many don’t even know what it means for one candidate to be a “liberal” and another to be a “conservative.”
That may sound like an elitist thing to say, but it’s true. The National Election Studies has been asking respondents for many years which is the more conservative party. In recent years about two-thirds have been able to provide the right answer, which is actually an improvement over the 1980′s and 1990′s, when barely half could tell you. Think about that for a moment: a full third of Americans don’t know which is the “conservative” party.
It’s also vital to remember that when you look at all of them together, the public always perceives the Democratic presidential candidate to be farther to the left than the Republican candidate is to the right when they’re forced to answer the question. This is a phenomenon driven almost entirely by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, who tend to describe the Democratic candidate as an extreme liberal, almost irrespective of who he actually is. The more partisan loyalties harden, the clearer the effect becomes. Here’s an excerpt from a 2003 article I wrote in my former life as an academic, citing NES data:
Republicans always perceive the Democratic candidate as much more liberal than Democrats and independents perceive him to be. Bill Clinton is the clearest case: while Democrats and independents placed him at about the same ideological position as most other Democratic candidates, in 1996 strong Republicans thought Bill Clinton was more liberal than previous strong Republicans had found Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and even George McGovern.
That’s obviously not a judgment based in some kind of rational assessment of what a candidate stands for. More recently, you can see the phenomenon in this Gallup poll from the 2012 primaries. Democrats, Republicans, and independents all rated the Republican candidates about the same on an ideological scale, but Republicans saw Barack Obama as being far, far more liberal than Democrats or independents saw him. That ends up pulling the candidate’s overall rating toward the perception of Republicans. So when Vavreck tells us that Barack Obama was perceived as farther from voters ideologically than Mitt Romney was, she’s actually describing an old phenomenon that tells us little about what actually happened in 2012.
What’s the lesson here if you’re Jeb Bush — or, for that matter, some other Republican who feels the need to genuflect before conservative primary voters? It isn’t that pandering will have no cost. Wherever they put Mitt Romney on an ideological scale, voters rated him as less honest and trustworthy than Barack Obama, and his performance in the primaries probably had something to do with that. The lesson is probably that “ideology,” at least as political junkies understand it, is something that doesn’t matter all that much to most voters.
They aren’t going to say, “Well, I thought he was a 2.4 on the ideology scale, but I’ve concluded that he’s actually a 3.1, so I’m voting against him.” If Jeb Bush can pander and shift about ideologically while still convincing voters he’s a man of principle who can be trusted — no easy task — then if nothing else he’ll have one less thing to worry about. But if he can’t, then he’s much more likely to wind up like Mitt Romney.
- By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 2, 2015
“Economic Facts Get In The Way”: For Republicans, Pretending That ‘Up Is Down’ Won’t Cut It
Uh-oh. Now that the economy is doing well, what are Republicans – especially those running for president – going to complain about? And what are Democrats willing to celebrate?
Last week’s announcement that the economy grew at a 5 percent rate in the third quarter of 2014 – following 4.6 percent second-quarter growth – was the clearest and least debatable indication to date that sustained recovery is no longer a promise, it’s a fact.
Remember how Mitt Romney painted President Obama as an economic naïf, presented himself as the consummate job-creator and promised to reduce unemployment to 6 percent by the end of his first term? Obama beat him by two full years: The jobless rate stands at 5.8 percent, which isn’t quite full unemployment but represents a stunning turnaround.
Since the day Obama took office, the U.S. economy has created well over 5 million jobs; if you measure from the low point of the Great Recession, as the administration prefers, the number approaches 10 million. It is true that the percentage of Americans participating in the workforce has declined, but this has to do with long-term demographic and social trends beyond any president’s control.
Middle-class incomes have been flat, despite a recent uptick in wages. But gasoline prices have plummeted to an average of $2.29 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA. This translates into more disposable income for consumers; as far as the economy is concerned, it’s as if everyone got a raise.
The stock market, meanwhile, is at an all-time high, with the Dow soaring above 18,000. This is terrific for Wall Street and the 1 percenters, but it also fattens the pension funds and retirement accounts of the middle class.
All this happy economic news presents political problems – mostly for Republicans but to some extent Democrats as well.
For Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio and other potential GOP presidential contenders, the first question is whether to deny the obvious, accept it grudgingly or somehow embrace it.
For years, a central tenet of the Republican argument has been that on economic issues, Obama is either an incompetent or a socialist. It should have been clear from the beginning that he is neither, given the fact that he rescued an economy that was on the brink of tipping into depression – and did it in a way that was friendly to Wall Street’s interests. But the GOP rarely lets the facts get in the way of a good story, so attacks on Obama’s economic stewardship have persisted.
The numbers we’re seeing now, however, make these charges of incompetence and/or socialism untenable. Even the Affordable Care Act – which Republicans still claim to want to repeal – turned out not to be the job-killer that critics imagined. All it has done, aside from making it possible for millions of uninsured Americans to get coverage, is help hold down the cost of medical care, which is rising at its slowest rate in decades.
GOP candidates face a dilemma. To win in the primaries, where the influence of the far-right activist base is magnified, it may be necessary to continue the give-no-quarter attacks on Obama’s record, regardless of what the facts might say. But in the general election, against a capable Democratic candidate – someone like Hillary Clinton, if she decides to run – pretending that up is down won’t cut it.
Likewise, the Republican leadership in the House and now the Senate will confront a stark choice. Do they collaborate with Obama on issues such as tax reform, infrastructure and the minimum wage in an attempt to further boost the recovery? Or do they grumble on the sidelines, giving the impression they are rooting against the country’s success?
Democrats, too, have choices to make. The fall in gas prices is partly due to a huge increase in U.S. production of fossil fuels. “Drill, baby, drill” may have been a GOP slogan, but it became reality under the Obama administration. Is the party prepared to celebrate fracking? Will Democratic candidates trumpet the prospect of energy independence?
Likewise, Elizabeth Warren charges that the administration’s coziness with Wall Street helps ensure that the deck remains stacked against the middle class. Warren says she isn’t running for president but wants to influence the debate. She has. Clinton’s speeches have begun sounding more populist, in spite of her long-standing Wall Street ties.
You know the old saying about how there’s no arguing with success? Our politicians are about to prove it wrong.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 20, 2014
“Bushleaguer”: You Can Expect A Jeb Bush Presidency To Be A Lot Like His Brother’s On Climate Change, Only Worse
Evidently, Jeb Bush is no longer on speaking terms with his father and brother.
The former Florida governor and (God help us) would-be GOP presidential candidate still insists that there’s room for skepticism on the issue of climate change. As Grist’s Ben Adler observes:
…Bush [simply] doesn’t believe in [human-caused] climate change! In a 2011 interview with Fox News, Bush said, ‘It is not unanimous among scientists that [climate change] is disproportionately manmade. … What I think on the left I get a little tired of is the sanctimonious idea that somehow ‘science’ has decided all this so therefore you can’t have a view.’
…[Y]ou could expect a Jeb Bush presidency to be a lot like his brother’s on climate change, only worse. Bush is even starting out this campaign to the right of where Mitt Romney was on climate science at this point in the last cycle. In 2011, Romney was chastised by the right-wing media for accepting climate science, even though he didn’t propose to do anything about the problem. Rush Limbaugh said that stance meant ‘bye-bye nomination,’ but Romney still won it, in part by later disavowing climate science.
History shows us three things about Jeb Bush: He is no moderate, he is not too moderate to win the nomination, and the Republican primaries will drag him further rightward.
Neither George H. W. Bush nor George W. Bush governed as climate hawks during their administrations; the former had a radical climate-change denier, John Sununu, as his chief of staff for the first three years of his administration, while the latter infamously censored and edited climate science reports to appease the fossil fuel industry (the late whistleblower Rick Piltz exposed Bush’s machinations in 2005). Still, Bush 41 and Bush 43 at least publicly acknowledged that human-caused climate change was real and a potential problem.
By denying human-caused climate change, Jeb Bush is, in essence, calling his father and brother liars. Is this really the sort of message he wants to send to the public?
Jeb Bush insists that he is a pro-lifer; this is supposedly why he stuck his nose into the Terri Schiavo case years ago. However, his continued refusal to recognize the reality and risk of climate change—which will take lives if carbon pollution is not addressed—exposes him as a complete fraud and someone unworthy of even being a presidential candidate, much less President. I know she’s not perfect, but if a denialist demagogue like Jeb is her opponent on November 8, 2016, then I’m absolutely ready for Hillary.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 28, 2014
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