“In The Interest Of The Rich”: Romney’s Radical Theory Of Fairness
So, to recap Mitt Romney’s new stump speech, he thinks Americans should vote on whether they’re financially better off than they were in 2008 — which is to say, they should blame President Obama for the effects of the Great Recession. He accuses Obama of attempting to run the campaign instead on “diversions, distractions, and distortions.”
What does Romney mean by that? He means that Obama wants Americans to base their vote on who has their interest at heart. Obama argues, and I would agree, that Romney’s agenda advances the narrow interests of the richest Americans at the expense of the broader interest. And of course, this is a fundamental ideological divide between the two candidates and their parties. Democrats want to maintain (and slightly expand) the government’s role in redistributing income from the best-off Americans to the most vulnerable. Republicans consider that sort of redistribution essentially illegitimate. What Romney calls a distraction is actually the most important issue of the election.
That isn’t to say he ignores it completely. Romney’s speech does contain one somewhat oblique passage in which he attempts to turn the fairness issue back against Obama. His argument is revealing. Here’s how Romney puts it:
I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. …
This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.
In the America I see, character and choices matter. And education, hard work, and living within our means are valued and rewarded. And poverty will be defeated, not with a government check, but with respect and achievement that is taught by parents, learned in school, and practiced in the workplace.
Romney has to couch the implications of his argument carefully, but the underlying logic is perfectly clear. He believes that fairness is defined by market outcomes. If Romney earns a thousand times as much as a nurse in Topeka, it is solely because his character, education, or hard work entitle him to that. To the extent that unfairness exists, it is solely the doing of government: clean energy, laws permitting union dues, overpaid government employees, and so on. Aside from unfairness imposed by government, poverty is attributable to the bad choices or deficient character or upbringing of poor people.
Now I doubt that Romney actually believes the full implications of this, even though many Republicans certainly do. But it is striking that Romney’s formulation makes no allowance for the role of government in alleviating unfairness created by the marketplace. To be sure, he is just making a campaign speech, but every speech by Obama invariably has passages lauding the marketplace and wealth. Here’s Obama yesterday:
In America, we admire success. We aspire to it. I want everybody here to do great, be rich, go out and start a business. That’s wonderful.
Now, campaign rhetoric is campaign rhetoric, but in this case it reflects an underlying reality. Obama wants the government to do a bit more to reduce inequality, but he is not proposing to change the United States’ place as the most unequal advanced economy on Earth. His opponent has adopted the position that any interference with the natural level of inequality created by the market is illegitimate. He may not want to take that philosophy to its absolute limit, but he is running on a program that would go very far toward implementing it.
The desire by Democrats to center the campaign on this basic philosophical choice is not a distraction, nor is it an attack on wealth. It’s an attempt to highlight what the election is actually about.
By: Jonathan Chait, The Daily Beast, April 25, 2012
“Are You That Stupid?”: Vote For Romney, He Loves America
On Tuesday, Mitt Romney gave a speech billed as his big general-election pitch. It was a perfectly serviceable piece of work: competently written and competently delivered. But it didn’t contain an ounce of actual policy. If this speech was all you knew of Mitt Romney — if it was your one guide to his presidential campaign — you’d sum his message up as, “vote for me: I think America is great.”
Don’t believe me? The full speech is here. The first nine paragraphs are biography. The next eight are attack lines on President Obama (“It’s still about the economy …and we’re not stupid”). Then we get into Romney’s vision.
“I have a very different vision for America, and of our future,” Romney said. “It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. Because there are so many enterprises that are succeeding, the competition for hard-working, educated and skilled employees is intense, and so wages and salaries rise.”
Sign me up! So how is Romney going to make sure so many enterprises are succeeding that competition for workers drives wages and salaries skyward? Well, here’s the very next paragraph: “I see an America with a growing middle class, with rising standards of living. I see children even more successful than their parents – some successful even beyond their wildest dreams – and others congratulating them for their achievement, not attacking them for it.”
And then: “In the America I see, character and choices matter. And education, hard work, and living within our means are valued and rewarded. And poverty will be defeated, not with a government check, but with respect and achievement that is taught by parents, learned in school, and practiced in the workplace.”
So on, and so forth. Romney never makes the turn to how he would achieve this America. Believing in it is apparently enough. The end result isn’t so much a preview of how Romney would govern the country as a game of “I Spy: America the Beautiful” edition.
I’m not a pollster. I don’t know if the American people want to hear about policy. Perhaps they prefer gauzy generalities. Perhaps they’re more interested in what candidates think of America than what they want to do for America. But if this is what the general election is going to be like, then it’s not going to be a clash of visions. It’s going to be a clash of adjectives. And in that case, it really will be the economy, stupid, as the American people will have nothing in particular to vote for.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post Wonkblog, April 24, 2012
“Five Contests, Lots Of Media, Zero Drama”: The Great Republican Primary Pretense
It has all the trappings of a big election night: five primaries, live television coverage, pundits telling us what it all means.
But what if it doesn’t mean squat?
Let’s face it: The GOP presidential race ended weeks ago. You know it, I know it, and every working journalist knows it. Maybe not Newt, but most other sentient beings. If this were a boxing match, the refs would have stopped it long ago.
So why cover contests with about as much excitement as a Politburo election?
There was a time, of course, when this particular Tuesday loomed large on the calendar. Could Rick Santorum win his home state of Pennsylvania? But then Santorum dropped out, leaving Mitt Romney a clear path to the prize.
So those of us who cover politics are left with thin gruel indeed: What would Romney’s margins be in what proved to be a five-state sweep? Would there be a protest vote? How does Mitt do in key counties he’ll need in the fall?
If there was a frisson of drama, it came when Gingrich spoke after Romney was projected to win Delaware. There was some press buzz that Newt, who spent time there, might stay in the race if he carried the tiny state, even though that would have made absolutely no difference in the inevitable outcome. (Nice going, gang, Newt was buried by 30 points.) And Santorum indeed lost Pennsylvania, but then again, he is no longer an active candidate.
Fox and CNN carried Romney’s speech; MSNBC blew it off, with Ed Schultz attacking Sean Hannity instead.
Piers Morgan tried hard to prod Santorum into endorsing Romney, but Rick wouldn’t quite go there, saying the two were going to meet first. So real news was averted once again.
We can’t just call off the remaining primaries: all those congressional and local candidates need to be nominated. And even at the presidential level, the voting often determines which delegates go to the conventions. But that’s inside baseball. We already know the final score.
The cable coverage has been somewhat restrained compared to, say, the night of the Iowa caucuses. In the 8 p.m. hour, Fox stayed with a taped Bill O’Reilly show. Schultz didn’t pause during an interview, even as MSNBC threw up a breaking-news banner projecting Romney the winner in Connecticut and Rhode Island. When I first saw John King hit CNN’s Magic Wall, he was counting how the candidates could get to 270. Mitt didn’t even bother to show up in any of the five states, spending the day instead in New Hampshire.
The truth is that journalists switched to general election mode even while the primaries were still competitive. As a Project for Excellence in Journalism study noted this week, the media essentially pronounced the race over after Romney won the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, even though Santorum would go on to win several more states.
This sort of thing has happened before. Jerry Brown won a couple of late primaries in 1992, after it was obvious that Bill Clinton would be the nominee, but nobody took it very seriously.
So perhaps the events of Tuesday were more of a time-out from the endless general election slog, a last look back at a crazy season stretching back to Donald Trump and Herman Cain. That is, until the crucial North Carolina primary on May 8.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, April 24, 2012
“Blind In Both Eyes”: Marco Rubio Thinks George W. Bush “Did A Fantastic Job”
It’s strange to hear an endorsement so ringing of an unpopular ex-president who failed in so many different ways.
George W. Bush’s tenure began with a catastrophic terrorist attack. It ended with a catastrophic financial crisis. In the interim, it was consumed mostly with fighting a costly war of choice. The invasion of Iraq was launched on false premises with inadequate planning; it was poorly managed for years on end; and even America’s fallback goal of a stable democracy in the Middle East wasn’t achieved. In fact, the invasion and occupation mostly just strengthened Iran’s position. Our enemies also benefited from the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
On the domestic front, President Bush signed an education reform bill that liberals and conservatives now agree was a mistake; he failed to reform Social Security, and rather than finding a way to save money on Medicare he added a costly prescription drug benefit to it even as he cut taxes. It’s no wonder that the deficit exploded during his spendthrift two terms in the White House. Bush’s faith based initiatives were a bust, as were his immigration reform efforts, and he signed into law campaign finance reform legislation he’d previously deemed unconstitutional. He created the instantly dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security and illegally spied on American citizens without warrants. His dubious appointments included Alberto Gonzalez and Harriet Miers, a Supreme Court choice so bad that his own base revolted. And he left office so unpopular that his party suffered a historic defeat; even four years later its presidential candidates did their utmost to avoid saying his name in speeches and debates.
That is the record Marco Rubio deems fantastic.
As he put it:
George W. Bush, in my opinion, did a fantastic job as president over eight years, facing a set of circumstances during those eight years that are different from the circumstances that a President Romney would face.
Partisan loyalty sure does make people say ill-conceived things.
“Knuckleheaded Assumptions”: Bad Science Around “Job-Killing Regulations”
It is a seemingly immutable law of modern Republican rhetoric that the word “regulation” can never appear unadorned by the essential adjective: “job-killing.”
As in nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney, after winning the Illinois primary: “Day by day, job-killing regulation by job-killing regulation, bureaucrat by bureaucrat, this president is crushing the dream.”
Or House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) denouncing “the president’s job-killing regulatory agenda” last month after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new limits on coal-fired power plants.
Or Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who said during her presidential campaign that the EPA should be renamed the “Job-Killing Organization of America.”
Hating regulation is an old argument, but the phrase is a relatively new trope. A Nexis search of articles from U.S. newspapers and news services shows that the words “job-killing regulations” appeared just a handful of times in 2007 — but several hundred times in 2011.
This inflated rhetoric is often accompanied by bad science — or, perhaps more precisely, inherently inexact science badly used. Opponents of a particular regulation tout inflated projections of the regulatory body count, more often than not financed by the affected industry. Ditto, by the way, for those on the other side.
For example, when the EPA last year issued rules to limit mercury and other power-plant emissions, the industry-backed American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity estimated the regulations would trigger the loss of 1.44 million jobs.
At the same time, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst concluded that the rules would instead create 1.46 million jobs through retrofitting old plants and switching to new sources of renewable energy.
The EPA itself came up with much more modest predictions — that the rules would create about 50,000 one-time jobs and another 9,000 additional jobs annually. All in the broader context of a rule that the agency estimated would deliver annual net benefits of between $166 billion and $407 billion from cleaner air, including avoiding as many as 51,000 premature deaths annually.
Lesson One: If you plug your cherry-picked assumptions into your preferred model, it’s easy to obtain the desired result. Lesson Two: Jobs are only part of the larger picture.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law attempts to bring some economic rationality to the regulatory discourse — however quixotic that might be in the current political environment, not to mention in a presidential election year.
The report is titled “The Regulatory Red Herring: The Role of Job Impact Analyses in Environmental Policy Debates.” Yet somewhat surprisingly, Michael Livermore, the institute’s executive director, does not oppose factoring job impact into the cost-benefit analysis. Rather, he argues for adopting a more sophisticated approach than the prevalent knuckleheaded assumption — my words, not his — that increased regulation inevitably results in fewer jobs.
If an employer’s costs increase as the result of a regulation, Livermore notes, that is another way of saying that the employer has to hire workers to, say, install new technology while other employers hire workers to produce the new equipment.
In a healthy economy, the cost of layoffs should be transitory, as workers quickly find new jobs. In an economy like the current one, the impact of such layoffs may be more persistent — but any new jobs created may be more significant since, in a soft labor market, otherwise unemployed workers may be hired.
Can these cross-cutting impacts be accurately measured in a dynamic economy? Perhaps more important for the current discourse, is it possible to have the jobs and regulation discussion without ignoring the inherent limitations of economic modeling?
“The jobs impact analysis is important and we should do it, but the way it’s discussed now is completely wrong,” Livermore told me.
First, he said, “we talk about the jobs impact on the one hand and the other impacts (such as health and safety improvements) on the other hand, and they’re treated as apples and oranges.” Instead, he said, “we need to integrate the jobs impact into the broader costbenefit analysis.”
Second, Livermore said, is a failure among those doing the analyzing to disclose the assumptions and limitations of their models — and the willingness of politicians (and the media, for that matter) to treat the resulting figures as gospel rather than guesstimate.
“The real problem is the way they’re used in the political back and forth,” Livermore said. “They’re used as sledgehammers to beat up the other side.”
No surprise there. But a useful reminder at a time when the phrase job-killing has become mind-numbing.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 24, 2012
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