Romney’s Bad Math: What Specifics, “I’m Running For President For Pete’s Sake”
Speaking at a closed-press fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday night, Mitt Romney offered more details than he ever has to date on what he might do about federal spending and taxes. Luckily, some reporters standing outside overheard him. NBC reports:
“I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go,” Romney said. “Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later. But I’m not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we’ve got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states.”
Asked about the fate of the Department of Education in a potential Romney administration, the former governor suggested it would also face a dramatic restructuring.
“The Department of Education: I will either consolidate with another agency, or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller. I’m not going to get rid of it entirely,” Romney said, explaining that part of his reasoning behind preserving the agency was to maintain a federal role in pushing back against teachers’ unions. Romney added that he learned in his 1994 campaign for Senate that proposing to eliminate the agency was politically volatile.
Romney expounded on that lesson—that he shouldn’t publicly admit to his plans to leave society’s most vulnerable citizens without any federal support—in a March interview with told The Weekly Standard. “One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” said Romney. “So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.” In other words, Romney believes that if he tells the public what he might actually do in office they will dislike his plans and reject them. This is just as revealing as Romney’s infamous recollection that he told his gardener not to use illegal immigrants on his property because “I’m running for office for Pete’s sake.” Romney doesn’t want to wage an honest contest between his ideas and his opponent’s. His self-described preference is to try to win by telling the American they can have tax cuts without painful sacrifices on spending.
Publicly, Romney has proposed to make the Bush tax cuts permanent and to then cut taxes further. He also wants to increase defense spending. In total he would reduce federal tax revenues by $5 billion over the next ten years. The Committee for a Responsible Budget estimated that Romney would add $2.6 trillion to the deficit. He has promised to cut spending as well, but he has avoided mentioning credible specifics.
That’s bad enough. But what is even worse is that what he offers in private doesn’t add up either. It would be one thing if Romney had a secret plan to balance the budget with drastic spending cuts to major federal programs. While it would be dishonorable of him to refuse to discuss that plan while running for president, at least you would know he has a plausible—if totally heartless—plan for governing once elected.
But he doesn’t. Instead the new details he offered were that he might eliminate the mortgage interest deduction on second homes and abolish the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The former idea is a good one, although I’ll believe that President Romney and Congress have the will to stand up to powerful lobbies such as the real estate and construction industries when I see it happen. It would not, however, generate nearly enough revenue to make up for Romney’s massive tax cuts. Perhaps because Romney himself owns three homes he thinks owning a second home is a fairly common middle class practice. In fact, only 6 percent of Americans have a second home. Eliminating the entire mortgage tax deduction would save about $215 billion by 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office, so eliminating it only on second homes would save just a fraction of that. If you want to be generous and assume that a lot of the owners of second homes also have third and fourth homes, and that they take out mortgages to buy those homes, you could guess that Romney’s proposal might save something like 10 percent of that total, or a whopping $21.5 billion in total between now and 2021. By contrast, letting the Bush tax cuts expire only on families making more than $250,000 per year would have saved $40 billion in 2011 alone.
While HUD makes for an appealing target for destruction among rich Republicans because it is the only cabinet department dedicated to addressing poverty, it is not actually a very large agency compared to, say, the Pentagon. Its entire budget for fiscal year 2012 is $47.2 billion dollars. (The Department of Defense budget this year is $645.7 billion.) The vast majority of HUD spending falls into one of two appropriation streams: construction of public housing ($19.2 billion) and Section 8 housing vouchers ($17.2 billion). Romney did not specify whether he would eliminate those programs, or just abolish the department that houses them and redistribute their responsibilities. Assuming Romney doesn’t, or can’t, actually get rid of the federal government’s two main programs to prevent homelessness, he won’t get very much savings by closing HUD and its important, but smaller, programs such as Community Development Block Grants. As I report in a forthcoming feature for Next American City, under President Obama HUD has been dramatically helpful to cities with very small amounts of money through programs such as the Sustainable Communities Initiative. I’ve asked the Romney campaign to clarify whether Romney wants to eliminate all federal housing subsidies and, if so, whether he has any plan to combat the dramatic rise in homelessness and severe poverty that would surely result. Having not received a response, my guess is that his honest answer would be that he has no idea what exactly he proposes to cut. And he certainly hasn’t bothered to come up with an alternative affordable housing agenda.
Republicans are not terribly interested in making serious domestic policy proposals or even dealing with social issues at all. For example, House Republicans have decided that their zeal to keep taxes low on millionaires and even billionaires must be paid for by squeezing food stamp recipients. As Politico’s David Rogers reports, “An average family of four faces an 11 percent cut in monthly benefits after Sept. 1, and even more important is the tighter enforcement of rules demanding that households exhaust most of their savings before qualifying for help.” If they succeed, it will save $3 billion per year.
Republicans, including Romney, are fond of saying that they idolize Ronald Reagan and wish to govern as he did. And they would, with lower taxes, higher deficits, greater inequality and less help for the most needy.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, April16, 2012
“There He Goes Again”: Mitt Romney’s ‘92 Percent’ Lie
And they say Mitt Romney can’t be trusted! Why, the man is as consistent as the sun coming up in the morning.
Mitt Romney can always be counted upon—for intellectual dishonesty.
In the latest example of his egregious lack of intellectual integrity, Romney—desperate to reverse the GOP’s catastrophic loss of popularity among women voters—invented a fictitious Obama administration “war on women” and then claimed as proof the disproportionate job losses suffered by women during the second wave of the recession.
Romney’s misrepresentation of labor-force trends was hardly surprising; we’ve come to expect misleading and untruthful statements from a candidate infamous for denying he ever said things he did say and insisting he didn’t do things he did do.
“The real war on women has been waged by the policies of the Obama administration,” Romney claimed on This Week. “Did you know that of all the jobs lost during the Obama years, 92.3 percent of them are women?”
It’s enough to make you wish that Ronald Reagan were still around to shake his head sorrowfully and say, “There he goes again.”
In the absence of Reagan and his famous line, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner dutifully made the rounds yesterday, trying to explain what was wrong with Romney’s charge. “It’s a ridiculous argument,” Geithner said, noting that the first round of job losses affected mostly men, particularly in construction and manufacturing, while subsequent budget cuts by state and local governments eliminated many jobs held primarily by women, many of them teachers.
The Obama administration was far from alone in rejecting Romney’s claims; virtually every independent analysis dismissed them as “mostly false,” as the nonpartisan fact-check site Politifact put it.
But Romney’s accusations were worse than false; they were the political equivalent of that old joke about the guy who begs the judge for mercy, saying he shouldn’t be convicted of murder because he’s an orphan—while neglecting to mention that he’s an orphan because he killed his parents.
As any debater knows, making your case is about the facts you include, but it’s also about the facts you leave out. And when it comes to the nation’s economic woes, the facts that Romney leaves out include the culpability of Republican policies and office holders for the dismal state of the labor market—particularly when it comes to women.
First of all, most of the catastrophic job losses affecting men actually occurred while President Bush was still in office. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men lost 5,355,000 jobs between December 2007 and June 2009, whereas women lost less than half that number—“only” 2,124,000 jobs.
But after that devastating first hit, men’s job losses slowed, whereas women’s accelerated. Between January 2009 and March 2012, men lost 57,000 jobs, but women lost 683,000 jobs. Of those 683,000 jobs, 64 percent were in government, and 36 percent were in the private sector.
And it was Republican office holders at the state and local level, not Democrats at the federal level, who were responsible for a disproportionate share of those losses. According to a study by the Roosevelt Institute, 11 states that went Republican in 2010 accounted for more than 40 percent of all state- and local-government job losses.
But Romney’s claim that President Obama has destroyed women’s jobs leaves out that part, just as it omits any acknowledgment of the terrifying fiscal mess that Obama inherited from a disastrous Republican administration when he came into office.
Although Romney’s specious statistics were designed to scare women into thinking that the Obama administration has somehow vaporized huge numbers of women’s jobs while leaving men virtually unscathed, that’s hardly the reality. Of all the jobs lost since 2007, only 39.7 percent were held by women; more than 60 percent were held by men. The recession has been terrible for everyone, and it hit women’s jobs somewhat later than it hit men’s jobs, but it’s not as if anyone escaped unscathed.
Mitt Romney surely knows this—and yet his attack on Obama might just as easily have been leveled by someone who was completely clueless about labor-force trends, the structural reasons that explain how they happen, and what they mean.
No one who’s followed the presidential campaign, let alone Romney’s political career, could possibly be surprised that he distorted the facts; he’s an old hand at that stuff. But what’s really startling is how stupid his analysis was.
Romney keeps telling voters they should elect him because Obama broke the nation’s economy and he’s such a smart businessman he knows how to fix it.
But if his latest salvo is any indication of how well Romney understands the economy, Harvard Business School should demand that he give back his M.B.A.
By: Leslie Bennetts, The Daily Beast, April 16, 2012
From The “Book Of Mitt”: Nonworking Parent’s “Raise Indolent And Unproductive Kids”
For a guy who thinks being a mom is the hardest job in the world, and no one has worked harder than his wife, Mitt Romney sure has a funny attitude when it comes to other nonworking mothers who aren’t married to multimillionaires. As Mitt wrote in his book:
In some quarters, however, the American work ethic is waning. Some people devote themselves to find ways not to work.Some seem to take a perverse kind of pride in being slipshod or lackadaisical. In many cases, where our work culture has deteriorated, shortsighted government policies share a good part of the blame.Welfare without work erodes the spirit and the sense of self-worth of the recipient. And it conditions the children of nonworking parents to an indolent and unproductive life. Hardworking parents raise hardworking kids; we should recognize that the opposite is also true. The influence of the work habits of our parents and other adults around us as we grow up has lasting impact.
Not only does Mitt think poor mothers “need to go to work” so they’ll have “dignity,” and not only does he think that drug testing poor mothers is “an excellent idea,” but he also thinks that nonworking parents raise rotten children. Except, of course, for Ann Romney, the hardest working nonworking parent ever.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, April 16, 2012
“So Much For The Phony Outrage”: Ann Romney Says Rosen’s Attack Was A ‘Gift,’ ‘I Loved It’
While the Romney campaign’s outrage machine was cranking on all cylinders last week over CNN contributor Hilary Rosen’s comments on Ann Romney’s wealth, the victim of Rosen’s barb doesn’t seem too offended — in fact, she’s thrilled. At a closed-door fundraiser last night, Ann Romney revealed that she saw the jab as a political “gift,” NBC News’ Garrett Haake reports:
Mrs. Romney acknowledged Republicans’ deficit at present with female voters, and urged the women in attendance to talk to their friends, particularly about the economy. She also discussed the criticism she faced this week, and her pride in her role as a mother.
“It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it,” Mrs. Romney said.
In case the phoniness of the Romney campaign’s response to “Rosen-gate” wasn’t obvious enough already, Ann Romney’s glib political calculation should make it clear.
Behind closed doors, Rosen’s comments were a “gift.” In public, Ann and her allies were deeply offended by the slight from Rosen (who is on the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s board). “Now that does bother me,” Ann said in a Fox News interview responding to the jab. On a conference call organized by the Romney campaign, female Republican lawmakers tried to outdo each other in expressing their offense and outraged at Rosen’s comments.
Update:
Discussing Ann Romney’s comment this morning, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien remarked, “It made it sound like it was about strategy and not about ‘what a great opportunity’ to talk about my family. It was more like, ‘Wow, I was able to score political points on an issue that could help my husband win.’”
By: Alex Seitz-Ward, Think Progress, April 16, 2012
“Don’t Tell Anybody”: Romney Offers A Peek Behind The Policy Curtain
“I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go,” Romney said. “Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later. But I’m not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we’ve got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states.”
“I’m going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction,” he continued, adding that he would also support eliminating deductions for state income and property taxes.
Till now, Romney has been very specific about his intention to be very vague. Back in March, he told the conservative Weekly Standard, “one of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education…So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”
Sunday’s comments, however, were “overheard by reporters on a sidewalk below.” Romney thought he was speaking privately to a group of conservative donors. And so they offer, in theory, a look behind the curtain. The only problem is there’s not much there.
Romney’s tax plan — which extends all the Bush tax cuts and then cuts taxes even further — will cost the Treasury trillions of dollars in lost revenue. You can’t make that up by capping a few deductions for high-income taxpayers. And while it sounds very tough to talk about closing agencies, it doesn’t save you much money unless you’re also willing to cut the services they provide.
To make his numbers add up, Romney needs to close the largest and most popular deductions in the tax code and cut huge swaths of government social spending. And as of now, he’s not willing to talk about doing that. Not even in private.
By: Ezra Klein, Wonkblog, The Washington Post, April 16, 2012
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