“Ann Romney’s Inconvenient Facts”: Other Than tax Returns, “There’s Nothing We’re Hiding”
As a rule, family members of candidates shouldn’t be considered political players, but once those family members become campaign surrogates and enter the political sphere making partisan arguments, there’s nothing inappropriate about scrutinizing their comments.
Take Ann Romney’s latest defense of her husband’s secrecy, for example.
Ann Romney sat down with NBC’s Natalie Morales and when the subject turned to the still-hidden tax returns, the Republican became quite agitated. Romney insisted that her husband’s campaign has done “what’s legally required of us,” which is true, but fails to meet accepted norms, standards, and expectations.
She added, “There’s going to be no more tax releases given.” I assume that means outside of the 2011 returns Mitt Romney has promised to release, but has not yet disclosed, though Ann Romney didn’t elaborate.
She went on to say, “There’s nothing we’re hiding.” Except the tax returns, the tax rates paid, and the explanation for the Swiss bank account, the shell corporation in Bermuda, and the cash in the Cayman Islands. Other than hiding all of that, they’re not hiding anything.
And why will the Romneys refuse all additional calls for disclosure, even from Republicans? According to Ann Romney, it’s because Democrats might use the materials to make Mitt Romney look bad.
I continue to marvel at this deeply odd argument. As Dahlia Lithwick and Raymond Vasvari recently explained, “[Romney] isn’t actually claiming that his opponents will lie. He’s claiming he’s entitled to hide the truth because it could be used against him…. These are tax returns. Factual documents. No different than, say, a birth certificate. But the GOP’s argument that inconvenient facts can be withheld from public scrutiny simply because they can be used for mean purposes is a radical idea in a democracy.”
And yet, this radical idea is now the Romneys’ only talking point on the issue.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 15, 2012
“Unconnected To A Concern With The Truth”: Mitt Romney’s Implausible Bid For The High Road
Politics is tough, and most politicians—including President Obama—are willing to bend the truth to win an election. But there’s a difference between the small distortions of all campaigns, and the brazen dishonesty we’re seeing from Romney. In a 48-hour period, Mitt Romney has doubled-down on the false charge that Obama has ended work requirements for welfare, lied about the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cost savings, and kicked up a storm over comments made by Vice President Joe Biden. That last one is noteworthy for the sheer chutzpah of Romney’s complaint.
During an event in Danville, Virginia (pronounced Dan-vul) with African-American supporters of the president, Biden deployed somewhat unfortunate language in attacking Romney’s promised repeal of financial reform:
“Romney wants to let the — he said the first 100 days — he’s gonna let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street,” Biden said at an event in Danville, Va. “They gonna put y’all back in chains.”
“Unchain” was a reference to Paul Ryan’s promise to “unshackle” the economy by repealing financial regulations and health care reform. And while Biden’s message is clear, it’s probably wise to avoid an allusion to slavery when talking to an audience of black people. Even still, it’s not a huge deal.
Wrong.
Team Romney wasted no time in jumping on the vice president’s rhetoric. “Well, there’s going to be folks across the country that will try and take that as some kind of code word that is going to suggest that the Republicans are trying to be racial in their programs,” said former New Hampshire governor John Sununu. Yesterday evening, while campaigning in Ohio, Romney referenced Biden’s remarks, attacking the Obama campaign for its “divisive” campaign:
“This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like. President Obama knows better, promised better, and America deserves better,” Romney told a roaring crowd of about 5,000 supporters in Chillicothe. “His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then try to cobble together 51 percent of the pieces. If an American president wins that way, we all lose.”
Romney added, “Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”
It’s hard to take this seriously. As I said earlier, Romney began this week with two huge whoppers. In an ad called “Long History,” Romney repeats the charge that Obama has ended welfare’s work requirements, “On July 12th, Obama quietly ended work requirements for welfare. You wouldn’t have to work, and wouldn’t have to train for a job.” Romney used this line last week, and was promptly denounced for his mendacity, and not just from the usual collection of fact-checkers; both Ron Haskins (who built welfare reform) and Bill Clinton (who signed it) weighed in to dispute Romney’s claim, which Clinton called “not true.”
The most disgraceful thing about Romney’s welfare attack—which he continues to use—is that it’s an obvious ploy to associate Obama with “handouts.” Welfare is one of the most racialized issues in American politics, and Romney’s attacks are a clear callback to the “welfare queens” and “young bucks” that punctuated Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric. It’s only a little more subtle than Newt Gingrich’s declaration that Obama is a “food stamp” president, and serves a similar purpose: to erode Obama’s standing among white voters who reflexively oppose anything that might hand benefits to the “undeserving.”
The same idea (and goal) underlies Romney’s attacks on the Medicare savings in the Affordable Care Act—“The money you paid for guaranteed health care is now going to a massive government program, that’s not for you.” With the backdrop of a white senior, the message of this ad is plain to see: Obama is giving your tax dollars to minorities.
(Since this is bound to inspire protest from readers, I will point you in the direction of research detailing the tight connection between racial attitudes and support for government programs.)
This is why it’s hard to stomach Romney’s complaints about “anger” and “divisiveness”; they come less than two days after he has renewed his attempt to split white voters from Obama with tired tropes about the undeserving poor. And when you look at the whole of his general-election campaign—which includes regular attacks on Obama’s fictional “apology tour,” and routine lies about his job-creation record—there’s no way in which Romney is in a position to take the high road.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously defined “bullshit” as a statement made without regard to its truth value. Whether it’s true or false is irrelevant—the point is to persuade. “[B]ullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true.”
If this doesn’t describe Mitt Romney, I’m not sure what does.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August 15, 2012
“Ryan’s America”: Here’s How Much It Would Hurt To Be Poor Under Paul Ryan’s Budget
There are many different ways to talk about Paul Ryan’s Roadmap, but maybe the most useful is to imagine how his budget affects your budget.
How much more money would you keep under his broad tax plan? How much more would you have to save to pay for health care?
And for the low-income, whom—as we’ll see—bear the brunt of Ryan’s cuts: How alone would they be in Ryan’s America?
But let’s start with a bit of basic arithmetic.
There are two ways that the government’s budget can affect yours. Clearly, one is taxes. More than 80 percent of government revenues comes from individuals’ wages and income. (The rest comes from corporate taxes and things like excise taxes on gasoline, which also affects our budgets, but less directly.)
Two is spending. Although most of us might think of government as providing public goods like airports and security, $3 out of every $5 Washington spends is basically insurance—a transfer to those who are old, sick, and poor. Social Security writes checks equal to 20% of government outlays. Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP account for another 20%. Safety net programs and benefits for veterans and federal retirees account for another 20%.
So, a full accounting of how Ryan’s budget would affect your budget must consider how much he would cut our taxes and how much he would cut our transfers.
TAXES. Ryan cuts income tax rates and abolishes investment taxes to reduce government revenues by about $450 billion* per year over the next ten years. (That’s after he makes permanent the Bush/Obama tax cuts.)
We don’t know exactly how Ryan’s tax cuts would break down by family income level, but the Tax Policy Center has published an estimate based on the Ryan-inspired budget passed by the House of Representatives this year. The upshot is that the federal income tax code—the one highly-progressive part of our tax system—would become significantly less progressive. Taxes would barely change (or even rise) on the low-income Americans, and the top 1% would see a windfall from the elimination of taxes on most of their investment income.
“Those making $1 million or more would enjoy an average tax cut of $265,000 and see their after-tax income increase by 12.5 percent,” TPC found. “By contrast, half of those making between $20,000 and $30,000 would get no tax cut at all.”**
SPENDING. Ryan is most famous for his Medicare plan, but if his budget became law at midnight tomorrow, the most dramatic changes over the next ten years would be everything but Medicare. That’s because Ryan’s long-term plan to move Medicare from a defined-benefit fee-for-service system (where government is your insurance) to a defined-contribution system (where government writes you a check to help you pay somebody else for insurance) is truly a long-term plan. It wouldn’t begin to take effect until the early 2020s. The typical family might prepare for a more modest Medicare by putting more money away. They might leave more of their salaries in a savings account. They might invest in the stock market, with the understanding that any gains wouldn’t be taxed. They might use their modest income gains to buy a house, with the intention to sell at a tax-free gain later.
Ryan slashes deeply, but he spares defense and Social Security, which, together, account for 40% of the budget. That means his $4 trillion in cuts come mostly out of health care spending, income security spending, and basic government duties. By 2023, Ryan would spend 16 percent less than Obama on income security programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps. He would spend a quarter less on transportation, and 13 percent less per veteran, according to Brad Plumer.
Medicaid spending would be shaved by about a third, and the Urban Institute calculated that a similar proposal would force the states to drop between 14 million and 27 million people from Medicaid by 2021 (note: that’s an extreme prediction). It’s not clear exactly what programs would be cut, or by exactly how much. What is clear is that everything within the bundle of government responsibility—from subsidizing science research to subsidizing education to keeping up national parks and law enforcement—would come under pressure for cuts to make room for the massive and regressive cuts to taxes.
What does that budget mean for your budget? It rather depends where you fall on the income ladder. Romney is relieving the richest Americans from some of their duties to pay for the risk-protection of the poor, and he is asking some of the poorest Americans to accept less help from the government in exchange for … well, the virtue of independence from government. It is stark, but broadly accurate, to say that the less you benefit from Ryan’s tax cuts, the more you would potentially suffer from Ryan spending cuts. It is possible—and, in Ryan’s vision, duly hope for—that devolving responsibilities from the federal government to the states and the private sector will drive efficiencies. But, as the GOP likes to point out about the president, “hope is not a policy,” and it is definitely not an inevitability.
Remember when Romney said he’s “not concerned about the very poor” because there’s a safety net for them? Well, there wouldn’t be the same safety net after Ryan’s plan took root. Romney doesn’t have to embrace every detail of Ryan’s plan, and he won’t. But he has embraced the philosophy of Ryan’s vision: That true freedom means freedom from government dependency, and that the poor are somehow richer, in spirit or in literalness, if they take less money from the government. Ryan believes that his budget could unlock spectacular growth and increase lower-income wages. And it might! But most of what we know about the impact of technology, emerging markets, and off-shoring suggests that gaping income inequality is a side-effect of global capitalism more than an outcome of progressive government.
This budget would have a very predictable outcome: It would make poor families poorer, and more exposed to the risks of medical or financial calamity, all under the banner of “Responsibility And Freedom.” Ryan is free to march under his banner. But don’t ask me to call it responsible.
By: Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, August 14, 2012
“Mitt Romney’s Terrible Laugh”: He Knows What He’s Saying Is Utter Baloney And He Knows That We Know
Some public figures get defined by a single image, or a single statement (“Ask not what your country can do for you”; “I am not a crook”). Others have a characteristic linguistic tic or hand gesture that through repetition come to embody them; think of Ronald Reagan’s head shake, George W. Bush’s shoulder-shimmy, or that closed-fist-with-thumb-on-top thing Bill Clinton used to do.
For Mitt Romney, it’s the laugh. I’m sure that at times Romney laughs with genuine mirth, but you know the laugh I’m talking about. It’s the one he delivers when he gets asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, or is confronted with a demand to explain a flip-flop or a lie. It’s the phoniest laugh in the world, the one New York Times reporter Ashley Parker wrote “sounds like someone stating the sounds of laughter, a staccato ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.'” Everything Mitt Romney is as a candidate is distilled within that laugh—his insincerity, his ambition, his awkwardness, and above all his fear. When Mitt laughs that way, he is not amused. He is terrified. Because he knows that what he’s saying is utter baloney, and he knows that we know it.
So he pretends to find it hilarious that an interviewer wants him to explain why, say, Romneycare was great for Massachusetts but the nearly identical Obamacare is a Stalinist horror for America. Perhaps it is the pain of enacting this facsimile of delight so many times that has hardened Mitt’s heart and allowed him to run what has become a campaign of truly singular dishonesty. But whatever moral calculation underlies the decisions he makes, this is the place we have arrived: There may have never been a more dishonest presidential candidate than Mitt Romney.
I say “may,” because measuring dishonesty with any precision is an extraordinarily difficult challenge, perhaps an impossible one. But by almost any standard of mendacity we could devise—the sheer quantity of lies, the shamelessness with which they are offered, the centrality of those lies to the candidate’s case to the voters—Romney has made enormous strides to outdo his predecessors.
It started before he even began his campaign, when Romney wrote an entire book premised on a lie about Barack Obama. Romney’s pre-campaign book, called No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, was built on the idea that Barack Obama makes a habit of apologizing for America, and Mitt Romney would do no such thing. “Never before in American history,” Romney wrote, “has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined.” The actual number of times Barack Obama has gone before a foreign audience to apologize for American misdeeds is zero, as has been extensively documented. Undaunted, Romney began his campaign by repeating the lie of the Obama “apology tour” hundreds of times, before audiences all across the land.
And that was just the beginning. If you have the better portion of a day, you could wade through the lengthy catalogue of deceptions blogger Steve Benen has assembled under the heading “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity.” Periodically, Benen puts together 20 or so Romney falsehoods for a post; his latest installment is the 29th in the series.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Some of things Romney says are clearly, factually false and seem to come out of no place other than the “this is the kind of thing a socialist like Obama would do” corner of Romney’s imagination, as when he claimed that Obama raised corporate tax rates (nope), or alleged that “President Obama is shrinking our military and hollowing out our national defense” (the military budget has increased every year Obama has been in office). Others are bizarrely false, as when he has said multiple times that the Obama administration hasn’t signed any new trade agreements (since Obama took office we have new trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia). Others sound like they just popped into his head and felt true, even though they’re utterly wrong (“We are the only people on the earth that put our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem”). Some things he says are technically matters of interpretation, but are so absurd that no honest person could say them, as when he claims that under Obama, “we’re only inches away from no longer being a free economy.” Others are seductively specific, yet completely made up (“Obamacare also means that for up to 20 million Americans, they will lose the insurance they currently have, the insurance that they like and they want to keep”).
But what is truly notable is how often Romney has put a lie at the center of his campaign. It’s one thing to say something false in passing, perhaps when speaking extemporaneously. It’s something else to tell a lie, then repeat it again and again on the stump, then put it in a television ad broadcast across the country, then send your surrogates out to repeat it to every camera they can find.
As you’ve no doubt seen, few of Romney’s lies concern himself. He may gild a lily here and there about his record and his past, but the overwhelming portion of his deceptions are about Barack Obama—what he has said, what he has done, and what he believes (whenever you hear Romney say, “Barack Obama believes …” you can be certain he is about to say something ridiculously untrue). The new Romney attack on welfare—falsely claiming that the Obama is eliminating work requirements in the program—is only the latest, but it’s hardly the first. Before that it was “you didn’t build that,” which set a new standard in deceptive use of an out-of-context quote. Before that were a hundred smaller lies about taxes, health care, the economy, foreign policy, and nearly every other subject that could possibly come up. One wonders if at some level Romney thinks he hasn’t compromised his integrity if he only makes things up about his opponent.
This is Mitt Romney’s own sin, of course, but it’s also a failure of journalism. If reporters were really doing their jobs, they would be able to provide enough of a disincentive for lying that no candidate would feel free to mislead so brazenly and so often. They wouldn’t mince words or fall back on false balance, but would forthrightly say that Romney is lying when the facts make clear he is. And so they might provide some punishment that would actually make Romney think twice before the next time he approves an ad script that says things that aren’t true.
I doubt it’ll happen. But if reporters decide that they really need to be more direct about Romney’s mendacity, they may start confronting him about it, in some of the rare non-Fox interviews to which he consents. Should that time come, Romney will no doubt laugh. “Ha,” he’ll say. “Ha. Ha. Ha.”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 14, 2012
“Another Republican Insult”: Paul Ryan’s Dangerous Obsession With Ayn Rand
Honestly, grown men who swear by Ayn Rand might be locked up inside the house—and not the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan. I mean back home in Janesville, Wis., where your new stature as presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s running mate has raised a hullabaloo all the way up to Baraboo. The venerable Alan Greenspan should be put under honorary house arrest, too, for his lifelong disciple-like embrace of Rand’s ideas, which has cost the country more dearly than we shall ever know.
As chairman of the Federal Reserve during four presidencies, Greenspan displayed a laissez-faire ferocious faith in the free marketplace. This caused him to completely ignore signs of the economy going soft and awry on his watch. Remember when the dot com bubble burst?
The late Rand’s entrance into this presidential election, thanks to Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, is more serious than it seems. Sweet reason has a hard time with Rand glorifying selfishness as political doctrine. Now that “selfishness ethic” happens all the time, accompanied by vicious attacks on the federal government and people who work for it, in the Republican-run House. It’s not all the author’s fault, but Ryan’s devotion to Rand is yet another Republican insult and injury to classic American ideas of fairness, squareness, and civic-mindedness.
In fact, the Ryan-authored House Republican budget document, which cuts the heart out of our body politic, ripping social services and Medicare to shreds, is a pledge to the Rand coat of arms, standing against people who need a little help from other people. And in turn, Rand gives him a rationale for the intellectual poverty of his ideas.
I don’t know grown women mean enough to believe in Rand’s lunar-like worldview. Her “objectivism” is portrayed in glittering novels, including We The Living, Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead. Then again, she was not much interested in reaching women. Let’s be real: In life and work, this woman cared about having men in her thrall. She succeeded beyond what you might expect of a nice girl from St. Petersburg, born in 1905.
Trouble was, she got stuck in the Russian Revolution upheaval at an impressionable age. Scarred by communist collective ideals and the violence of change, she created the uber-capitalist myth of the strong man standing alone years after emigrating to the United States as a young woman. She also worked as a screenwriter.
Some would say Rand actually devolved from Social Darwinism. As despicable as her influence is, Greenspan can say he was caught up in a vanguard of his younger days, when the Soviet Union set off waves of alarrm and opposition to Communism as practiced by the ruthlesss Joseph Stalin.
But Ryan, 42, has lived his life on the right side of the tracks in the serene peace of Janesville, so why is he so sharp-edged with our social contract? So far, his mark on the 2012 race is allowing Rand to skip down two generations, from the octogenarian Greenspan to himself. Rand died in 1982, but hey, she lives on in a real way to this day.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, August 14, 2012
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