“Arithmetic For Billionaires”: Romney Is Rich, But Can He Add?
Mitt Romney is a very wealthy man with a proven capacity for avoiding taxes – but can he do simple arithmetic?
In the wake of the Democratic convention, the Republican candidate again promised to “cut the deficit and get us back on track to a balanced budget.” He even hinted that his own party bears some responsibility for ballooning federal deficits and debt. “We’re going to finally have to do something that Republicans have spoken about for a long time and for a while we didn’t do it. When we had the lead, we let people down,” he said the other day, presumably referring to the last Republican president, whose name must never be mentioned, and the Congressional leadership during that administration.
And “for a while” presumably refers to the past 30 years or so.
Romney also says that he watched none of the speeches at the Democratic convention. He obviously missed the one that might have helped him figure out exactly what his party has been doing wrong. “I hear Bill Clinton spoke for like, 50 minutes?” he snarked at a public appearance on Friday. Yes, the former president spoke for just over 49 minutes – and he articulated a message that could enlighten Romney. Clinton’s lesson might be titled “Arithmetic for Billionaires.” He could start with an accurate assessment of the origins of the national debt level currently carried by the U.S. Treasury. As Clinton noted, the federal debt roughly quadrupled during the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration, from just under a trillion dollars to four trillion.
When Clinton became president, that debt was rising rapidly with annual deficits of $400 billion. His first budget raised taxes, almost entirely on the wealthiest taxpayers, by restoring a top bracket of 39.5 percent. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for that 1993 budget, with many of them predicting that raising taxes on the rich would result in economic catastrophe. They were wrong, of course.
The economy boomed, incomes rose at every level, millions began to climb out of poverty, and the rich became richer too (although many of them never forgave Clinton for demanding that they pay up for the festivities of the Reagan era). Clinton booked four balanced budgets and began to pay down the national debt. The debt would have been paid down entirely, preparing the nation far better for the crash that we ultimately faced, had that unnamed Republican not succeeded Clinton with reckless tax cuts and extremely expensive wars.
By the time President Nameless left office, the nation was deeply in debt and on the brink of a catastrophe that wasn’t merely rhetorical. Now along comes Romney, with his sidekick Paul Ryan, telling voters that they will cut the deficit and balance the budget. Yet as Clinton noted, they propose still another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest households – including their own and those of their most generous supporters – that would cost the Treasury at least $5 trillion. And they insist on increasing the defense budget by hundreds of billions, too.
What Clinton asked is how the Republican nominees propose to pay for those lavish favors to themselves and their friends. Doing the arithmetic himself, he came up with three possible answers: They will raise taxes on the middle class by taking away mortgage, charitable and other deductions, so that billionaires can have another tax break. They will cut federal spending so deeply that infrastructure, education, science, technology, and health care will be ruined for the future. Or they will do nothing, and explode the debt, just as their predecessors have done repeatedly over the past three decades.
Whether in their own 40-minute addresses to their party convention or elsewhere, neither Romney nor Ryan has offered a plausible solution to Clinton’s arithmetic problem. They talk about spending cuts and tax reform, but without any specifics. The footnote to their budget claim says only, as Clinton put it: “See me about that after the election.” Clearly the Republicans intend to push off difficult questions about their budgeting, just as Romney intends to push through without releasing his tax returns. But those evasions may prove very difficult to sustain through the four upcoming debates.
Sometime before November 6, someone will ask Romney and Ryan to do the arithmetic.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, September 8, 2012
“The Case Of The Missing Ex-Presidents”: GOP Repudiate’s It’s Past For Sins Against Republicanism
Tom Toles’s typically terrific editorial cartoon in today’s Post highlights a fundamental difference between today’s Democratic and Republican parties: The Democrats welcome their former presidents to their conventions; the Republicans don’t. The reason isn’t just that Bill Clinton is the best campaign speaker since World War II and George W. Bush is far less rhetorically compelling. It’s also that the Democrats are comfortable with their past while today’s Republicans repudiate theirs.
Clinton and Jimmy Carter have been fixtures at Democratic conventions since their presidencies ended, though Carter, whose presidency Democrats, like most Americans, don’t remember all that fondly, is usually trotted out nowhere near prime time. You have to go back all the way to Lyndon Johnson to find a Democratic ex-president who wasn’t included in convention proceedings: In 1972 (the only convention that occurred while Johnson was out of office and still alive), the debates over the Vietnam War, like the war itself, were still raging, and Johnson’s appearance would have proved hugely divisive at the convention that nominated George McGovern.
But what sins against Republicanism did today’s two Republican ex-presidents, George H.W. Bush and his son George W., commit? Both were mainstream Republicans of their times. Papa Bush presided over the death of Soviet Communism, and even if he wasn’t really responsible for its demise, you’d think that would be worth at least an appearance. But then, Papa Bush also raised taxes, which appears to have cast him into an ideological wasteland for today’s anti-tax Republicans.
As for the son, he promoted and signed into law massive tax cuts for the rich and did nothing to rein in the banks even as they did everything they could to magnify the risk they posed to themselves and everybody else. In other words, he followed Republican economic doctrine to the letter. He chose to wage a war of choice in Iraq, a war also sought by his party’s neo-conservatives. You might think that the fact that each of these policies ended in disaster would be reason enough for the Republicans not to invite W., but for the fact that these are still the policies that the party embraces (tax cuts for the rich, repeal of Dodd-Frank and attacking Obama for not doing more in Syria).
Bush’s banishing looks more like a case of ideological deviation than real-world catastrophe. He supported a path to legalization for illegal immigrants. He expanded Medicare to include a prescription drug benefit. (Obamacare, which the Republicans universally vow to repeal, provided more funding for that benefit.)
In other words, what’s wrong with the Bushes is the same thing that was wrong with Senators Richard Lugar and Robert Bennett, longtime party stalwarts whose routine bids for renomination were denied by Republican primary and caucus voters: they haven’t kept up with the party’s race to the right. The GOP base has banished the previous generation of Republican leaders for their lack of revolutionary zeal.
The tea partyization of the GOP has a lot in common with a sustained revolution, such as, to cite the paradigmatic example, that in France, where the Marats and Dantons, yesterday’s leaders, were cast aside for and by the even more zealous Robespierre and his ilk. The Republicans are Jacobins, and Jacobins don’t invite their old presidents back. When you’ve moved as far to the extremes as today’s GOP, even your own former leaders are the ancien regime.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 6, 2012
“Inevitable Desperation”: The Ugliness Of The Republican Death Spiral
Democrats should not be complacent. The 2012 elections are not yet won, and we soon will find out just how much half a billion dollars of Koch and Rove Super PAC money can buy. But things are looking good, particularly for President Obama. But Democrats still need to work as hard as if they were behind, right up through election day. And Democrats need to hold on to the Senate and win back the House. Unlike Republicans, Democrats can’t buy elections. Unlike certain prominent Republicans, Democrats actually know they can’t buy dignity and class.
When the radical judicial activists who comprise the extremist majority on the current Supreme Court went well beyond the questions raised in Citizens United, to legislate from the bench an end to campaign finance reforms, the purpose was obvious. These same justices had either ruled on or come to the Court as a result of the equally radical Bush v. Gore decision, and in both cases the real intention was to undermine democracy, to protect a power elite that needs such cynical and sinister machinations in order to maintain its death grip on political power. Do not be surprised if these extremists make further moves before the election, because laws specifically designed by Republicans to prevent legally registered Democrats from voting have been overturned by lower courts, and these perversions of the very concept of “justices” are running out of means by which they and their allies can prevent democracy from breaking out.
The Republican National Convention was such a moiling morass of mendacity that even the usually cautious arbiters of national discourse in the traditional media couldn’t help but notice. Paul Ryan’s speech to the Convention was a catalogue of lies. Clint Eastwood’s bizarre performance included his deluded hallucination of President Obama as a man who tells people to shut up, which clearly is nothing remotely akin to the president’s actual personality or behavior, and in fact was a clear projection of the unprecedented disrespect with which the president has been treated by the Republicans themselves. And then came Mitt Romney, with yet another catalogue of lies.
The Romney-Ryan campaign is built almost entirely of lies. We expect some degree of dishonestry in politics, but it usually takes the form of fudging around the edges. With Romney and Ryan it is the very basis of their campaign. The primary theme of the Republican attacks on President Obama is based on a quote taken deliberately out of context. And perhaps even worse, that theme not only is based on a lie about President Obama, it is based on lies about Romney himself. He did not build Bain by means of honest hard work and enterprising spirit, he built it with government subsidies. He did not rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics by using the principles of free market capitalism, he rescued it by using crony capitalist government subsidies. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney built a health care system he now wants people to forget, and he ranked only 47th in the nation in job growth.
As Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research pointed out, Republican criticism of President Obama for the condition of the economy is akin to criticizing firefighters for the condition of a house right after the firefighters had stopped it from burning down. When President Obama took office, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month. When President Obama took office, the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 8.9 percent. The economy was burning down. Then the firefighters arrived. The Obama stimulus created some 3,300,000 jobs. Under President Obama’s stewardship, the economy has recovered all private sector job losses. The only justifiable criticism of the stimulus is that it wasn’t large enough to have sparked a full recovery, but that’s not the Republican criticism.
Republicans continue to oppose stimulus spending. Republicans oppose any potential stimulus by the Federal Reserve. In other words, Dean Baker’s analogy didn’t go far enough. It’s not just that the Republicans are criticizing the firefighters for the condition of the house right after the firefighters saved it from burning down, it’s also that the Republicans lit the firein the first place, tried to stop the firefighters from getting to the house, and now aretrying to stop the construction workers from getting to the work of rebuilding it, while themselves planning to add more fuel and light another match.
Mitt Romney has never built anything on his own. He has used government subsidies and money given to him by his wealthy family— the latter an option he apparently is too oblivious even to realize is not available to everyone. He criticizes President Obama for disparaging private enterprise, even though President Obama did no such thing, and then he claims credit for having made lots and lots of money after having lots and lots of money handed to him for nothing, which he doesn’t acknowledge because he apparently believes he was entitled to it by the mere fact of his existence. But Romney is just one among many failed Republican candidates, his triumph in the Republican primaries but more proof that while money can’t buy class, it can buy a Republican presidential nomination. His opposition was a dystopian carnival of human degradation, and if anyone ever wondered why Republicans refuse to accept the scientific proof of evolution it now is clear that it is because evolution has passed the Republicans by. The Republican National Convention featured many of the supposed rising Republican stars of the future, who only succeeded in collectively demonstrating that any ostensible Republican future is but a fantasy of a mythological past from which most sentient beings long since have awakened to consciousness.
The Republicans have no future. From climate change to national security to the economy to social justice and human rights, the list of issues on which the Democrats and public opinion are moving forward while the Republicans are stagnating if not attempting to move backward is endless. They can’t win on the issues. They can’t win on their freak show personalities. They can’t win using the principles of democracy and republic. The only hope for the Republicans is to lie, cheat and steal, and they are attempting exactly that. And to a party that now is habitually and congenitally opposed to basic scientific realities, lies aren’t incidental to their political strategies, they are in fact the basis of their world view. To a party that is openly bigoted against the diverse demographics that the rest of the nation not only celebrates but has become, voter suppression and the undermining of democracy isn’t but a political means to an ends, it is the inevitable desperation of the soon-to-be extinct. Their last and only hope is that they can buy a last election or two, and encode into law, and legislate from the bench into the Constitution an end to democracy itself.
The Republicans are dying. They may still have means to stave off their final end for a few election cycles, but demographics, evolution and history itself are working against them. Death throes are not pretty. Desperation can breed cruelty. The smaller the souls, the uglier and more destructive will be their final flailing flagellations.
By: Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos, September 9, 2012
“Slippery Fish In The Same Malodorous Kettle”: Mitch McConnell And The Obstructionist GOP Undermine The Economy
In the realm of political strategy, there are two mindsets on the question of attacking the opponent. One frets excessively about how the opponent will respond and how the media will write it up. The other, more aggressive mindset doesn’t worry too much about those things, on the principle that playing offense is almost always better than playing defense. I raise this with respect to the specific question of whether President Obama is going to make attacks on Republican obstructionism part of his arsenal over the next two months. His advisors seem to think that doing so would make Obama look weak. I emphatically disagree, and I think he’ll be dragged into doing it anyway, as he already was. Let’s review the tape.
On Wednesday night, Bill Clinton ripped into the congressional GOP: “[Obama] also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their No. 1 priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work. Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to keep President Obama on the job!” It was then that he delivered that line about the GOP’s message in Tampa: we made the mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so put us back in.
I was elated to hear that obstructionism had made it to the convention podium, and from its best and most authoritative speaker no less. I hoped this meant that it would become a theme. Let me pause in the chronology to say why. It’s simple. The vast majority of the people blame the president for the sputtering economy. After all, he’s the president. They elected him to fix things, so dammit, fix things. Most people’s political analysis doesn’t go beyond this. They think the president can just … do stuff.
Sometimes, the president can. It is certainly true that Obama had a little more than a year, from Al Franken’s swearing in in July 2009 (which gave the Democrats the magic 60 Senate seats) until September 2010 (when Congress recessed to hit the campaign trail) when he should have been able to do stuff. He did health care. But he, and they, didn’t do economy. The idea of stimulus had been so soiled by then that they didn’t have the votes even among Democrats—partly, to be sure, their own fault for mishandling the stimulus argument the first time around.
But for most of his term, especially on the economy, the Republicans blocked everything. Most people don’t understand that 41 votes in the Senate equal an effective majority because of their collective power to stop any action in its tracks, and most people never will. But the fact is that those 41, if they link arms and stand firm, have more power than the president. Indeed: That old chestnut “the president proposes, and Congress disposes” was originally appropriated from the age-old apothegm “man proposeth, but God disposeth.” Congress is God. At least on domestic policy. But try to tell an average American that in the age of the imperial presidency.
Back to the chronology. As I said, I expected to hear Biden and Obama pick up on Clinton’s attack. Neither did, at least in any meaningful way. Obama didn’t mention, for example, his 2011 jobs bill. Ezra Klein wrote yesterday that the Obama team appears to have decided “to refrain from reminding voters how bad things are and to resist using the campaign as an opportunity to continue pushing emergency measures that congressional Republicans implacably oppose.”
Well, I disagree, but OK, if that’s your decision, that’s your decision. But then, the day after the convention, after the poor jobs numbers came out, what did Obama talk about in New Hampshire? GOP opposition to his jobs bill! So which strategy is it?
Obama may not want to remind voters how bad things are, but they don’t need reminding. They know. And given that they know, the smart and aggressive thing to do is to call out the people who’ve been blocking attempts at progress. Reality is going to force him to do it anyway.
One of the Democrats’ biggest strategic mistakes of the last two years has been their unwillingness to say plainly and openly that Republicans don’t want to see jobs created as long as Obama is president. Chuck Schumer tried it a couple of summers ago. Other Democrats were just afraid to go there. The White House too. And this was even after Mitch McConnell more or less admitted it in public! It was a classic case of worrying about the how opposition would respond and how the media would cover it instead of just playing offense.
Others say he should just train his sights on Mitt Romney, but I think it’s much stronger to tie them all together. Paul Ryan’s presence on the ticket, and Romney’s endorsement of Ryan’s budget, places these slippery fish in the same malodorous kettle. And finally, there is value in simply being seen as fighting. Imagine if Obama called out Mitch McConnell personally for that infamous comment of his. The base would be in heaven, and voters in the middle would at least see him standing up for himself, not letting himself get kicked around. Yes, it would be incautious. I submit that the time is right for a little incaution.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 9, 2012
“Republicans, The Post-Truth Party”: GOP Think’s They Can Get Away With Lying Because They’re Sure They’ll Have Enough Money
The acceptance speeches by Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney at the GOP convention were only slightly more grounded in reality than Clint Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair. Ryan is infamous for his pack of lies, from the attempt to blame President Obama for the closing of a Wisconsin GM factory that began shutting down during the Bush presidency, to the fantasy that Ryan’s austerity agenda is about something other than gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to enrich Wall Street speculators and the insurance industry.
The acceptance speeches by Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney at the GOP convention were only slightly more grounded in reality than Clint Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair. Ryan is infamous for his pack of lies, from the attempt to blame President Obama for the closing of a Wisconsin GM factory that began shutting down during the Bush presidency, to the fantasy that Ryan’s austerity agenda is about something other than gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to enrich Wall Street speculators and the insurance industry.
Romney was just as bad, with a rambling rumination on how much he wished Barack Obama’s presidency had “succeeded.” Coming from the man who tried to scuttle Obama’s successful interventions to save GM and Chrysler, and who spent the rest of the president’s first term organizing a campaign to displace him, Romney’s line wasn’t remotely believable.
The Republican Party is not fretting about fact-checkers. Far from it; the GOP has now fully entered the netherworld of post-truth politics, from the wholesale denial of climate change to spreading fairy tales about Obama’s welfare policy (see Betsy Reed, page 4). Romney and Ryan know they’re going to need big lies to win. That’s pathetic, but it could work—especially if the mainstream media continue to evade their basic duty to call the GOP on these whoppers (see Eric Alterman, page 10).
This poses a real challenge for the Democrats, who can’t get bogged down in the minutiae of every Republican lie—there are just too many of them. Democrats must instead go big, and tackle the GOP agenda, which at its core is dedicated to a massive redistribution of power and income toward the 1 percent, who already have more of both than at any time in the past eighty years. The central lie of the Republican campaign is the claim that the wealthiest country in the world is so broke it cannot fund school lunch programs or Pell Grants, but not so broke that it would ask billionaires to pay taxes or put the Pentagon on a diet. The best way to unmask the GOP is not with charts and graphs. It must be done with economic straight talk. We must explain why Romney and Ryan are lying—because their agenda is so unpopular (as well as unworkable and dangerous to the nation’s recovery). And we must offer a vision for job creation, infrastructure investment and an uncompromising defense of the social safety net.
Democrats should not stop there. On the question of campaign finance reform, they’ve made a good start. Obama has joined more than 100 Congressional Democrats in suggesting a constitutional amendment to address the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. These and other Court decisions let corporations and wealthy individuals buy elections with campaign spending that follows no rules and respects no demand for transparency. Obama and the Democrats are hardly pure when it comes to campaign money. But the distinction between the GOP, which has embraced Citizens United, and a Democratic president who would overturn it could not be more stark.
The reason Republicans think they can get away with lying is that they’re sure they’ll have enough money—and enough Super PAC support—to outspend the truth. That’s a scary prospect, best countered with a blunt, unapologetic condemnation of the influence peddlers—and those like Paul Ryan who are most willing to be bought. Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with a similar circumstance in 1936 when, after a difficult first term, he sought re-election as the champion of the great mass of working and worried Americans. Facing the forces of the Wall Street speculators, big bankers and their amen corner in the media who were arrayed against him, FDR didn’t flinch: “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” he declared. Barack Obama should be equally blunt about the need to chase the money- changers from the political temple. And, unlike Paul Ryan, he’d be telling the truth.
By: The Editors, The Nation, September 5, 2012
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