“Disdain For Workers”: Of The Wealthy, By The Wealthy, And For The Wealthy
By now everyone knows how Mitt Romney, speaking to donors in Boca Raton, washed his hands of almost half the country — the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes — declaring, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” By now, also, many people are aware that the great bulk of the 47 percent are hardly moochers; most are working families who pay payroll taxes, and elderly or disabled Americans make up a majority of the rest.
But here’s the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no.
For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.
Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.
Lest you think that this was just a personal slip, consider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips. This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.
And when Mr. Romney waxed rhapsodic about the opportunities America offered to immigrants, he declared that they came in pursuit of “freedom to build a business.” What about those who came here not to found businesses, but simply to make an honest living? Not worth mentioning.
Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.”
What really needs cutting, the right believes, are taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, dividends, and very high salaries — that is, taxes that fall on investors and executives, not ordinary workers. This despite the fact that people who derive their income from investments, not wages — people like, say, Willard Mitt Romney — already pay remarkably little in taxes.
Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.
In the eyes of those who share this vision, the wealthy deserve special treatment, and not just in the form of low taxes. They must also receive respect, indeed deference, at all times. That’s why even the slightest hint from the president that the rich might not be all that — that, say, some bankers may have behaved badly, or that even “job creators” depend on government-built infrastructure — elicits frantic cries that Mr. Obama is a socialist.
Now, such sentiments aren’t new; “Atlas Shrugged” was, after all, published in 1957. In the past, however, even Republican politicians who privately shared the elite’s contempt for the masses knew enough to keep it to themselves and managed to fake some appreciation for ordinary workers. At this point, however, the party’s contempt for the working class is apparently too complete, too pervasive to hide.
The point is that what people are now calling the Boca Moment wasn’t some trivial gaffe. It was a window into the true attitudes of what has become a party of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, a party that considers the rest of us unworthy of even a pretense of respect.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 20, 2012
“Redistribution Fallacy”: Desperate Times Make Desperate Measures Appealing
Desperate times make desperate measures appealing. The Romney campaign and its allies, sensing lasting damage from their candidate’s dismissal of 47 percent of the voters, including swaths of likely Republican votes, has decided use this as a teaching moment. Exhibit A is a 1998 video of Barack Obama that is worth a look. The Romney campaign has focused on the part where Obama says, “I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.” (The context in which he makes that conclusion is interesting because it shows, unlike Romney, a consistent philosophy that believes government, despite its considerable flaws, can be a catalyst for opportunity.)
Some Republicans believe the way to defeat Obama is to convince people that he is a socialist, in contrast to Romney, who believes in free enterprise and individual initiative. Ezra Klein has already pointed out the fallacy here: Romney believes in redistribution himself through his support of food stamps and other social programs. But while Mr. Klein comes at redistribution from top to bottom, I would come from the opposite direction: Mitt Romney supports the massive wealth transfer that has been enabled by government policies — most notably the tax code — and that has been accelerating over the past three decades and has always grown more under Republican administrations. Indeed, Romney’s economic plan is based on further tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
Barack Obama wants this debate, and my impression is he will win it. He can whipsaw Romney from bottom to top. “Which redistribution programs do you want to get rid of, Mr. Romney? Social security, Medicare, aid to veterans? Many of those people are in your 47%. And how many more tax cuts do you think the wealthy need? How low should their tax rates go? You talk about half the population as if they are just dependents, and you talk about the wealthy as needing more support, but I never hear you talking about what I think this race is all about: the middle class.”
By: Carter Eskew, The Insiders, The Washington Post, September 20, 2012
“Wishing On A Star”: The Debates Won’t Save Mitt Romney
If you’re a Romney partisan, and you’ve seen Barack Obama move ahead in the polls over the last couple of weeks, you may be saying to yourself, “Maybe the debates can save him.” After all, the four debates (three presidential, one VP) are the the only planned events between now and election day. Though you never know what kind of unexpected events might occur, tens of millions of voters will be watching. And so many times in the past, the race has been transformed by a dramatic debate moment.
Except that’s actually not true. As John Sides lays out quite well, after all the sound and fury, debates almost never change the trajectory of the race. Of course, something never happens up until the moment that it happens, but there’s strong reason to believe that the debates will change nothing this year in particular. But before I get to that, here’s Sides:
Why are presidential debates so often inconsequential? After all, many voters do pay attention. Debates routinely attract the largest audience of any televised campaign event. And voters do learn new information, according to several academic studies. But this new information is not likely to change many minds. The debates occur late in the campaign, long after the vast majority of voters have arrived at a decision. Moreover, the debates tend to attract viewers who have an abiding interest in politics and are mostly party loyalists. Instead of the debates affecting who they will vote for, their party loyalty affects who they believe won the debates. For example, in a CNN poll after one of the 2008 debates, 85 percent of Democrats thought that Obama had won, but only 16 percent of Republicans agreed.
All those memorable gaffes—George H.W. looking at his watch, Michael Dukakis not pounding his lecturn at the suggestion of his wife’s rape and murder, Al Gore sighing—turn out not to have had any discernible impact on the race. What was almost certainly the most disastrous debate performance of all—Dan Quayle’s in 1988—did not, you may recall, prevent him from becoming Vice President.
And this year is even less likely to produce anything significant. As James Fallows explained, Mitt Romney is at his best when he can prepare carefully, and at his worst when he’s taken by surprise. Over the course of the 500 or so primary debates the Republicans held, he was clearly the most informed and serious-seeming of the GOP candidates. Of course, besting Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann in verbal combat doesn’t exactly make you the Ted Williams of debating, but there’s little doubt Romney will show himself to reasonably knowledgeable, for what it’s worth. His problem, though, is that it isn’t worth much. He doesn’t need to convince Americans he can recite a ten-point plan, he needs to convince them that within him beats the heart of an actual human, one who understands and cares about them. The chances of him doing that are pretty slim.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 20, 2012
“Talking To Themselves”: Republicans Are Barricaded Within A Self-Reinforcing Informational Bunker
Mitt Romney and his Republican allies thought they had a way to diffuse the fallout from his now-legendary secretly-recorded fundraising video when somebody unearthed a tape of President Obama saying he favored “redistribution.” Sure, the tape is 14 years old. And sure, as Jamelle pointed out yesterday, pretty much everybody favors redistribution in some form, even Mitt Romney (if he didn’t, he’d be advocating removing all progressivity from the tax code). Romney is bringing it up whenever he can, as is Paul Ryan, and the Obama tape has been shown on Fox News approximately three million times in the last 24 hours. Are they a little desperate? Of course. But the fact that they think such a thing will have even the remotest impact on what people think of Barack Obama shows that they are existing within an ideological cocoon that makes it almost impossible for them to figure out what they’re doing wrong.
It isn’t just that the tape is 14 years old (and man, has Obama aged in that time), or that what he’s saying is pretty innocuous. It’s that they think there’s any statement of Obama’s that they can unearth that will change how voters think of him. As though some significant number of voters are going to say, “I’ve been watching this guy on television every day for the last four years, but this 14-year-old videotape that contains the word “redistribution” has finally made me realize that he’s a dangerous socialist. I was undecided before, but now you’ve got my vote, Mitt.”
A couple of years ago, bloggers had a discussion about “epistemic closure,” the tendency of many on the right to barricade themselves within a self-reinforcing informational bunker. The danger is that you wind up with a skewed view not only of the facts but of what other people believe as well. This can be deadly for a campaign, whose goal, after all, is to persuade people, some of whom don’t already see the world as they do. And it sure seems like Romney and his people are falling prey to it. The temptation is strong, because everyone who works on the campaign is a partisan who was probably getting much of their information from partisan news sources before they got there.
So when Romney comes out and says triumphantly “I don’t believe in redistribution!” he probably thinks voters will respond with, “Me neither, Mitt! Screw those freeloaders! Viva job creators!” But the more likely response among people who aren’t already committed Republicans is that once again, this rich guy who disdains everyone who isn’t as rich as him is saying, “I got mine, Jack, and the rest of you can go to hell.” In other words, he’s not countering the attacks the Democrats are making on him, he’s reinforcing them.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 20, 2012
“Atop The Class Structure”: Does Boca Raton Mitt Romney Dislike America?
The most incisive reaction to Mitt Romney’s disparaging comments about 47 percent of us came from a conservative friend who e-mailed: “If I were you, I’d wonder why Romney hates America so much.”
A bit strong, perhaps. But the more you think about what Romney said, the more you wonder how he really feels about the country he wants to lead.
What kind of nation are we if nearly half of us are lazy, self-indulgent moochers who will never be persuaded to mend our ways? “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said, thus writing off a huge share of our citizenry.
From his perch high atop the class structure, Romney offered an analysis of political motivations that even Marxists would regard as excessively materialistic. He speaks as if hardworking parents who seek government help to provide health care for their kids are irresponsible, that students who get government aid to attend community colleges are not trying to “care for their lives.” Has he never spoken with busboys and waitresses, hospital workers and janitors who make too little to pay income taxes but work their hearts out to “take personal responsibility”?
In defending himself on Fox News on Tuesday, Romney only deepened his difficulty. “I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America,” he said.
Put aside that if President Obama wanted a “government-centered nation,” the stock market wouldn’t have doubled, making many in Romney’s Boca Raton, Fla., audience richer. In his impatience with those he accuses of casting themselves as “victims,” Romney misses the real story of government in the lives of most Americans. So often, we combine our own exertions with a little assistance along the way — the GI Bill, student loans, Social Security survivors’ benefits, public education — to become self-sufficient and independent.
And Romney said not a word about all the redistribution upward in a tax code that favors investment over labor income. That’s why Romney pays federal taxes at a much lower rate than do many in middle class — and why, given his stress on the importance of paying income taxes, he might usefully release a few more of his own tax returns.
Romney’s comments, which were caught in a video obtained and published online by Mother Jones magazine, have been widely compared to Obama’s private 2008 comment about working-class people who “cling to guns or religion.” I disliked that line, and as a churchgoing supporter of gun control, I always bristle at the too-easy conflation some liberals make of “God” and “guns.” But Obama’s defenders have been correct in noting that he got a big thing right that Romney got wrong: Most of Obama’s observations were empathetic toward blue-collar Americans who “feel so betrayed by government.” His whole point was the need to reach out to, not write off, a constituency that had not embraced him.
Many have already written wisely about how Romney’s original statement got the facts wrong, notably about how many Americans actually pay federal taxes and how a large share of those who don’t are retired.
But here’s the most important point Romney got wrong: Among the wealthy nations, it’s difficult to find one where people work harder than the United States. In a 2005 New Yorker article (written before the downturn), James Surowiecki noted that, compared with Europeans, “more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.” Yes, the riches enjoyed by the folks at that Boca Raton fundraiser were made possible in significant part by the strenuous efforts of proud, self-sufficient people, including many in the 47 percent.
Romney misses something else about America: We do believe in a certain amount of “redistribution” toward those in need. We have always rejected what one of our leaders called a “destructive mind-set,” which he defined as “the idea that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved,” an approach with “no nobler purpose than ‘Leave us alone.’ ”
That would be George W. Bush in 1999, as my colleague Michael Gerson reminded us the other day. Bush added: “Yet this is not who we are as Americans. We have always found our better selves in sympathy and generosity, both in our lives and in our laws. . . . Our national character shines in our compassion.”
Yes, it does, even if the Boca Raton Mitt Romney seems not to appreciate that about us, either.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 19, 2012
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