“In A Saner Era”: After Sept. 11 And Two Wars, There’s No Way For GOP To Defend Tax Cuts
Among the many ways the United States went berserk after the September 11 attacks, the least remarked upon, but most morally revealing, is what happened to Republican thinking about taxes during wartime.
Since that awful morning eleven years ago, the United States has been continually at war. But never before in our history has a political party made it a national priority to cut taxes for wealthy Americans at a time of war.
The obvious pattern has been the opposite — we’ve raised taxes to fund the extraordinary expenses war requires, as well as to make sure more fortunate Americans shoulder some of the burden as young soldiers, drawn mostly from middle and low income families, do the actual fighting.
But something snapped in the Republican mind after 9/11. We’ve now put a trillion dollars of war on our kids’ credit card, with Republicans leading the charge for tax cuts for the top the entire time.
In a saner era, the big 2001 Bush tax cutsenacted a few months before September 11 would have been immediately revisited, because we were now a nation at war.
In a saner era, it would have been unthinkable for a president to push for further tax cuts for the top in 2003, because by then we were a nation waging two wars. Instead, just two months after we invaded Iraq, Republicans, in a party line vote, enacted fresh tax cuts mostly benefiting high earners.
In a saner era, Republicans would never have held the debt limit hostage last year in order to get a deal that kept taxes low for the wealthiest Americans when we were still at war.
And in a saner era, a Republican presidential candidate worth $250 million who paid taxes at the rate of 13.9 percent on $20 million in income would never makefurther tax cuts for the top the centerpiece of his agenda when we still have nearly 80,000 troops in Afghanistan.
He’d see it as unseemly.
I’ve talked to friends who are military officers about this pattern and they find it grotesque. They live by a code of honor and an ethos of shared sacrifice that makes such choices seem obscene.
What were Republicans thinking? What is Mitt Romney thinking now? Only they know for sure, but what’s clear is that Republican leaders see no moral disconnect between the sacrifices borne by the tiny fraction of Americans who serve in the military (and their families), and repeated tax windfalls showered on a relative handful of well-to-do families at the same time.
Seen in this context, Romney’s failure to mention Afghanistan in his convention speech is even more troubling than we thought. It’s the supreme symbol of Republican compartmentalization. Instead of “Believe In America, ” the de facto GOP motto has become: “Let other people’s children fight our wars, funded by debt other people’s children can pay off later.”
Can anyone really defend this position? This isn’t what Republicans have stood for in the past. It’s the ultimate proof the GOP has gone off the rails.
The amazing thing is that Democrats almost never make the tax argument this way.
When I’ve done so on cable TV over the years, Republican guests react as if I’m from another planet. It’s so outside the well-worn grooves of the debate that they’re speechless for a moment. And then uncomfortable.
“Wait a minute,” I can hear them thinking, “he’s supposed to cry ‘fairness,’ and then I shout back ‘class warfare.’ What’s with this ‘nation at war’ business?”
Yet if the debate were framed around these realities, I think most Americans would react as my military friends do. They’d say it’s wrong. That we’ve lost our senses. That this isn’t how Americans behave. (Note to David Axelrod: This is a testable proposition).
That’s why President Obama should make this case forcefully during the debates. “We’ve been at war for over a decade, Mitt,” the president can say. “We’ve still got 80,000 troops in Afghanistan. Why have you and your party repeatedly made tax cuts for people like us your top priority at a time of war? We’ve never done that before in our history. Most Americans find it shameful.”
No answer that amounts to an evasion — “Well, even during a war, we need to grow the economy and give job creators incentives to expand” — will pass swing voters’ smell test.
Yet what other answer is there? Hammering this point could create the kind of eureka moment on which elections turn.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 10, 2012
“The Devil Is In The Details”: The Paradoxes Of Romney’s “Specificity Problem”
Every candidate confronts the question of how detailed they should be in their policy plans, and the basic calculation goes as follows: I want to seem substantive and serious, so it’s good to have detailed plans, but I don’t want the plans to be so detailed that they give my opponent something to use against me and allow voters to find things they don’t like. So usually they find some middling level of specificity, and tolerate whatever criticism they get from one end for not being detailed enough, and from the other end for specific ideas people don’t like. But rarely does the question of how specific you’re being become a story in and of itself.
Mitt Romney has arrived at that moment, when his unwillingness to reveal exactly what he wants to do in a variety of policy areas is becoming a story in its own right. Here’s Steve Kornacki writing about it in Salon. Here’s The Wall Street Journal editorial page criticizing him for not being specific. Here’s aTPM report on other conservatives scolding Romney for his vagueness. Here’san L.A. Times editorial asking for specifics on Romney’s tax plan (which we’ll get to in a moment. Here’s an NPR story about the specificity question. And President Obama is picking up the issue and using it as an attack, which helps propel the story forward.
It’s one thing to be vague because you think getting bogged down in a discussion of details will distract from your broader message, but it’s another thing to be vague because a discussion of details will reveal that you’re promising things you can’t possibly deliver. And Romney’s real problem, as Matt Yglesias pointed out, isn’t that he’s being completely vague but that he’s been specific in some parts of what he’s proposed but vague in others. He says he wants to cut all income tax rates 20 percent (specific!) and that when he does it, not only will wealthy people not pay any less (specific!) but that the whole thing will be revenue-neutral (specific!). If he had just said “I want to cut income tax rates, and we’ll look for deductions to eliminate and try to do it in a way that won’t increase the deficit,” I doubt this would be an issue. But because he offered some specifics but refuses to say how he’ll make his proposals add up—by explaining which deductions and loopholes he wants to eliminate to pay for the rate cuts, or even suggesting a single deduction or loophole he’d eliminate—he has backed himself into a corner.
And once he starts getting asked questions about it, he sounds incredibly squirrelly. When David Gregory pressed Romney for the specifics of his tax plan, Romney said, “Well, the—the specifics are these which is those principles I described are the heart of my policy.” That’s right, the principles are the specifics. Which is like you saying, “Here’s a chicken salad sandwich,” and when I say, “No, this is just two pieces of bread,” you reply, “Well, the bread isthe chicken salad.”
It’s important to remember that Mitt’s lack of specificity isn’t anything new, and it isn’t just about taxes. Months ago, I was complaining that though he had built his entire campaign on the idea that his private sector experience gave him a unique understanding of the economy that would enable him to create millions of jobs (“I understand how the economy works!” he says a dozen times every day), not only had he not offered a single policy proposal that was any different from what every Republican has been proposing for decades, he wasn’t even capable of saying what exactly he learned in the private sector. (When pressed, he did manage to explain that businesses have to pay for energy, so if energy were cheaper, they’d make more money. Truly revelatory.)
This is one of the paradoxes of Mitt Romney. He’s famously detail-oriented, thinking in PowerPoint presentations and capable of saying, “Here are twelve things we can do” and rattling off every one. His running mate is supposedly the wonkiest wonk in the GOP. Yet he’s put himself in a position where not only does he not want to get into the details of what he would do as president, he can’t. What is he supposed to do now that he finds himself in this position? On the loophole question he could come up with a piddling loophole or two that he’d eliminate, then face questions about how inadequate it is. Or he could say, “I’ll get rid of the mortgage interest deduction” and make everyone freak out. So my guess is he’ll hunker down and hope that in a couple of days this all goes away, just like the question of his tax returns did.
That was really the same problem in a different form: he wanted to look open and transparent, but he didn’t actually want people to see the tax forms. So he stood firm, and eventually the controversy ran its course and now nobody asks him about it anymore. Going through that process, however, reinforced the image of him as a plutocrat hiding something from the voters. This specificity question will eventually go away too, but by the time that happens he may have sustained real damage.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 11, 2012
“Michele Bachmann In Danger”: The Voters May Just Pray Her Away
Despite her national fan base and a massive war chest, Rep. Michele Bachmann may be in more danger than most suspect, with a new poll showing her lead diminished to just 2 points. Independent voters have swung against her by nearly 20 points in just two months, from a 4 percent advantage to a 15 point disadvantage. The internal poll, conducted by Democratic pollsters Greenberg Quinlan Rosner at the behest of Democrat Jim Graves’ campaign and shared with Salon, shows that Bachmann’s favorability rating has tumbled since their last survey in mid-June, and finds Graves gaining ground with independents as his name recognition grows.
Overall, the poll shows Bachmann leading Graves 48-46 percent, within the margin of error. The race has moved significantly among independents, with a 20-point net shift toward Graves, from a 41-45 percent disadvantage in June to a 52-37 percent lead now. Among independents, Bachmann’s favorability rating has slipped 4 points while her unfavorability rating has jumped 7 points. Overall, she’s viewed mostly negatively. Among all voters, 40 percent give her a positive job rating, while a sizable 57 percent give her a negative one, with a plurality of 35 percent giving the most negative answer possible — “poor.”
Graves’ campaign manager (and son) Adam Graves told Salon that the numbers show his candidate is well positioned to beat Bachmann. “Obviously, we’re very excited about it. The first thing that’s notable is that obviously her recent comments, the stories that she’s created for herself, have really hurt her among folks in the middle,” he said. Bachmann, who had tried to keep a lower profile after aborting her presidential bid, grabbed headlines this summer for her implication that Muslims in the U.S. government may be secret agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.
As we argued last month, Graves has the best shot at beating Bachmann of any Democrat since the congresswoman was first elected in 2006, thanks in large part to the absence of a third-party candidate. In previous races, those candidates have captured as much as 10 percent of the vote, siphoning votes away from the challenger. While some observers were skeptical that much of that 10 percent would break toward a Democrat, the Graves campaign said the new poll shows clearly that that fear has not materialized, as independents are moving toward its candidate.
The poll also show that Graves’ name ID in the district has jumped 20 points, though he’s still largely unknown at 38 percent. Meanwhile, Bachmann is known by 99 percent of voters. That will make it harder for Bachmann to change people’s perceptions about her, while Graves should be able to influence people who do not yet have an opinion of him. “If every time we pick up 20 percent on voter ID, we pick up 20 percent of the independents, then by the time we’ve reached a place where we’re happy with 80 percent ID or whatever, we realize that we’re going to be in a position to win,” Adam Graves said. ”This race is neck-and-neck.”
There’s been no other public polling of the district, though it’s reasonable to assume that the Bachmann campaign has commissioned its own surveys. The fact that none have been released suggests that Bachmann’s numbers also do not bode well for her. Meanwhile, she underperformed in her Republican primary last month.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, September 10, 2012
“Spinning For Dollars”: Romney Campaign Has To Do All It Can To Obscure And Deny Reality
Convention season has been brutal for the Romney campaign. Romney has trailed Obama, not by a lot but significantly, for months; the RNC was supposed to bounce him into the lead. Instead, Romney didn’t get a bounce — but Obama did. It’s far from over, but at this point Obama is the clear favorite to win.
Those are the facts. So why is the Romney campaign spinning furiously in an attempt to deny them? Well, I have a theory; it’s obvious, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere. It’s about the money.
OK, it’s true that part of this may be the carryover from conservative epistemology more broadly, in which truth is what’s ideologically convenient, never mind the evidence. But there’s also a very rational reason to try to pretend that things are going better than they are.
Bear in mind that Romney’s one big advantage is a huge pile of cash. Much of this pile comes from committed right-wing zealots, like the Koch brothers. But a good chunk comes from business interests, Wall Street in particular, that historically try to buy influence with whoever they think will win. They like Romney better than Obama — he doesn’t look at them funny — but they’ve placed a very big bet on the Republicans this time compared with previous occasions, and they have to be feeling nervous.
If they come to the conclusion that they invested in a loser, they will try to cover their position by rushing a lot of cash to Obama in the final weeks of the campaign. And that will blunt the one big advantage Romney still has.
So the Romney campaign has to do all it can to obscure and deny reality, lest perceptions that their candidate is a lemon turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 10, 2012
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