“Out Of Egypt, Into The Red Sea”: Romney’s Cowardly Speech On The Deficit
Another day, another economic speech by Mitt Romney. Romney is constantly trying to refocus the campaign on the economy. After being sidetracked by President Obama’s announcement that he supports gay marriage speech last week, and Romney’s appeal to the religious right at Liberty University on Saturday, Romney is once again on the attack against Obama’s economic record. Romney’s Tuesday afternoon speech in Des Moines, Iowa, was nominally focused on deficit reduction.
There are plenty of reasons to worry about the rate of job growth in the short term and federal debt accumulation in the long term, but unfortunately Romney’s proposals would make both problems worse. Rather than offer specific investments or incentives to hire now and plausible plans to reduce the deficit later, when the economy is strong enough to withstand spending cuts, Romney offers the same austerity measures that have crippled the recovery in much of Europe.
It’s worse than just that. If Romney specified which tax loopholes he would close and spending he would cut, at least we’d get deficit reduction, if nothing else. It would also allow for an honest debate about the American people’s priorities on taxes, spending and deficit reduction. But he stubbornly refuses, out of cowardice. Specific cuts could trigger opposition, so Romney offers only bromides.
Romney compared the rising federal debt to a “prairie fire” sweeping the nation. “The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party. And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire,” said Romney. “He has spent more and borrowed more.”
While technically true, this is a bit misleading. Obama inherited an imbalance between spending and revenue because of tax cuts and wars started by George W. Bush and congressional Republicans. Much of the increase in the deficit since Obama took office can be attributed to increases in mandatory spending such as food stamps and decreases in tax revenue that were caused by the recession he also inherited, rather than any of his policies. While Obama did sign some new spending bills, he also signed the Affordable Care Act, which would reduce the deficit. Romney pledges to repeal the ACA and complains that it cut spending on Medicare.
“The time has come for a president, a leader, who will lead. I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno,” Romney promised. But how? Romney does not say. He wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, then cut taxes an additional 20 percent and raise spending on defense. All of this increases the deficit.
To pay for all of this and then reduce the deficit from current levels would require drastic cuts in domestic programs. But Romney knows that the American people like the idea of cutting domestic spending more than they like cutting actual programs they rely upon. So he avoids offering any specifics. “Move programs to states or to the private sector where they can be run more efficiently and where we can do a better job helping the people who need our help,” said Romney. “Shut down programs that aren’t working. And streamline everything that’s left.” None of this really means anything. No one is for programs that aren’t working or inefficiencies. Unless you say which programs you believe are not working, or which inefficiencies you will remove, you aren’t really saying anything at all. Romney says he will lead on this issue, but he offers no leadership at all.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 15, 2012
“Right Wing Social Engineering”: What Romney’s Medicare Plan Actually Does
DC journos have spent much of the 2012 election trying to answer the question of how exactly a President Romney would govern. On one side, there are the skeptics who never bought into Romney’s rhetoric during the Republican nomination. They argue Romney is, at heart, still a moderate northeastern governor, a businessman unsuited for the extremism that has come to dominate his party. Others are equally convinced that Romney must be taken at face value. Sure he might have positioned himself in the middle while he governed a state dominated by Democrats, but he has spent the past five years running for president full-time, aligning himself with every right-wing whim over the course of his two campaigns. He’s the Republican who sought the endorsement of Ted Nugent, discarded a gay spokesman, and calls corporations people. Lest we forget, it was Romney who was poised to run as the right-wing challenger to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in 2008 before Mike Huckabee swooped in to steal the evangelical vote.
The best measure to get at the real Romney is to read his actual proposals and ignore the standard posturing at campaign stops or TV interviews. These are the documents directed primarily at the obsessive political class, barely noticed by your average voter, thus freeing Romney to be closer to his true self. They’re probably the most important piece of evidence for any politician before an election. As Jonathan Bernstein has convincingly argued, presidential pledges should be taken at face value, as newly elected presidents are almost always constrained by the commitments they made during the campaign.
When weighed by this measure, Romney is undoubtably aligned with the far right-wing vision of his policy, particularly on budgetary and fiscal matters. He’s advocated not only for the extension of the Bush tax cuts, but has suggested even further reductions in the U.S. tax rate that would heavily benefit the wealthy. He’s endorsed the Paul Ryan budget wholesale, an Ayn Randian vision of the limited government that even Newt Gingrich termed “right wing social engineering” when it was initially introduced.
One of the key elements of the Ryan/Romney overlapping vision is how the government should handle the exploding costs of Medicare. The New York Times delved into Romney’s proposals in contrast with Obama’s in an article Tuesday. The piece unfortunately falls into the pitfalls of equivocating newspaper journalism, weighing both plans largely by the attacks poised by the opponent rather than independent descriptions of what each candidate is suggesting. Romney’s plan is introduced as “ending Medicare as we know it” in Obama’s words, while the article introduces the Affordable Care Act as such:
The president’s 2010 health care law, Mr. Romney says, “could lead to the rationing or denial of care for seniors,” as it will squeeze nearly a half-trillion dollars from the growth of Medicare over 10 years while putting the program’s future “in the hands of 15 unelected bureaucrats.”
Either side of the political divide can agree that Medicare is on a perilous path. Health care expenditures as a whole are eating up an increasingly large share of the country’s GDP, and the number of Medicare enrollees is set to jump as the Baby Boomers start to retire. The government has projected that by 2024 the Medicare fund will no longer be able to match the full cost of expected benefits.
This concern is one of the primary reasons Obama pushed health care reform early in his administration. Alongside the measures that make it easier for low and middle income Americans to purchase health insurance, the Affordable Care Act takes a first stab at tackling the looming problem. The bill included a variety of measures to incentivize cheaper, more effective health care to bring down costs throughout the health care market, along with a medical advisory board that will suggest best practices to keep the tab lower on Medicare.
Meanwhile, Romney and Ryan’s strategy is to largely ignore the general growing cost of health care, instead focusing on Medicare itself. They would turn Medicare into a premium support plan—essentially a voucher program that would shift the burden of health spending off the government ledger by forcing future retirees to spend far more of their own funds on health services. These vouchers would initially meet the value of buying insurance on the private market, but they would soon fall behind the actual cost for consumers if the general price of health care continues to rise unabated.
Romney has not yet released a proposal with all of the details, but it is safe to assume that his premium support plan would largely follow the model set forth by Ryan. Under that plan—which has already passed the Republican controlled House before it was blocked by Democrats in the Senate—all Medicare enrollees who enter the program beginning in 2023 would have to enter the voucher program, and, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has highlighted, by 2050 Medicare expenditures would be 35 to 42 percent lower for each participant, primarily by shifting the cost burden onto enrollees rather than lowering the overall cost of the care they consume.
Yes, Medicare expenditures would be lowered—but on enrollees’ dime.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, May 15, 2012
“Idelogical Extremism”: Former Republican Senator Hagel Says Reagan Would Not Identify With Modern GOP
Last week, former Sen. John Danforth (R-MO) told ThinkProgress that his party was becoming “increasingly inconsequential” and “intolerant” following the defeat of veteran Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN). Now, former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has also taken aim at his party for its ideological extremism.
Hagel — who served two terms in the Senate, between 1997 and 2009 — told Foreign Policy magazine on Friday that the Republican Party “is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before.” He observed:
Reagan wouldn’t identify with this party. There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today that scares people. Intolerance is a very dangerous thing in a society because it always leads to a tragic ending. Ronald Reagan was never driven by ideology. He was a conservative but he was a practical conservative. He wanted limited government but he used government and he used it many times. And he would work with the other party. …
Now the Republican Party is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before. You’ve got a Republican Party that is having difficulty facing up to the fact that if you look at what happened during the first 8 years of the century, it was under Republican direction. …
The Republican Party is dealing with this schizophrenia. It was the Republican leadership that got us into this mess. If Nixon or Eisenhower were alive today, they would be run out of the party.
Hagel hopes the pendulum will eventually swing back to moderation for the GOP, but warned that it is unlikely to happen in this election, noting that “what latitude [Mitt] Romney has to shape the party as we go into the election is somewhat limited because of the primary he’s had to run.”
It again bears mentioning that like Lugar and Danforth, Hagel was himself a solid conservative in the Senate earning a lifetime 85 percent rating with the American Conservative Union. The fact that even solid conservatives like these men — or Reagan — are not conservative enough to fit in the modern Republican Party is an indication of just how far right the GOP has drifted.
By: Josh israel, Think Progress, May 14, 2012
“Creative Destruction Of Capitalism”: Mitt Romney Is No Economic Savior
Republicans say they’re eager for the presidential campaign to turn away from “distractions” and focus instead on the economy. Someone should warn them that if they’re not careful, they might get their wish.
It is true that voters’ unhappiness with high unemployment and slow growth poses a challenge for President Obama as he seeks reelection. But for Mitt Romney and the GOP to take advantage of this potential opening, they’ll have to do more than chant the word “economy” like a mantra. They have to make the case that their policies will work better than Obama’s.
And what might Romney’s proposed economic policies be? Why, they’re basically the same as those of George W. Bush, only worse.
Just as Obama owns the recession and the slow recovery, Bush owns the financial crisis that sent the slumping economy over a cliff. But for all his sins — the gratuitous tax cuts, the off-budget wars, the defiance of basic arithmetic — Bush at least demonstrated a certain empathy for Americans who struggle to make ends meet. One of his budget-busting initiatives, for example, was expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs without worrying about how this much-needed new benefit would be paid for.
It’s safe to predict that Romney would never make such a gesture out of compassion for the beleaguered middle class. To this day, he refuses to take back his criticism of Obama for bailing out General Motors and Chrysler — even though letting the companies fail would have meant the extinction of the U.S. auto industry and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
It is a measure of Romney’s ideological stubbornness that, even with Chrysler rebounding under new ownership and GM reporting record profits, he still insists that his view — let the companies go bankrupt so the “creative destruction” of capitalism could work its magic — was correct.
Romney is something of an expert on creative destruction, I guess, having orchestrated a good deal of it while running the private-equity firm Bain Capital. The Obama campaign recently released an ad about one of Bain’s less successful acquisitions, a small steel mill in Kansas City called GST Steel.
The company, which was more than 100 years old, failed after a decade under Bain’s ownership; GST’s 750 employees lost their jobs, pensions and health benefits. Bain, however, made money, investing $8 million in the company and taking out $4 million in profits and $4.5 million in management fees. The Romney campaign contends that GST, with its unionized workforce, could not compete with cheap foreign steel being dumped on the market. The Obama campaign alleges that Bain burdened GST with crushing debt while sucking the company’s coffers dry.
Is this the genius of free markets at work, or is it “vulture capitalism” run amok? Let’s have that argument. Please.
Let’s also have a long, detailed discussion of Romney’s economic plans versus Obama’s. Romney wants to make tax rates for the wealthy even lower than they are now; Obama wants a small increase for those making more than $1 million a year, whom he challenges to pay “their fair share.” Romney’s entire economic plan, basically, involves tax cuts and deregulation — in other words, a repeat of the Bush-era policies that led to the crisis.
Does Romney have any fresh ideas? Well, when he was governor of Massachusetts, he was smart enough to see that universal health coverage would not only improve the lives of the uninsured but also help rein in runaway medical costs. He found the solution in an innovative idea developed in Republican-leaning think tanks: an individual health insurance mandate.
It worked. In fact, it was Romney’s greatest policy success as a public official. But now he doesn’t talk about it much.
My guess is that Republicans won’t want to talk about the past or the future in much detail. They’d like to keep things blurry, so that we only see Romney in broad outline: a successful businessman who’ll put us back in business. For details, we’ll mail you the prospectus.
I can’t help but think of the “prosperity theology” movement, or scam, in which preachers persuade congregants that God’s will is for Christians to be rich — and that the way to become rich is to put lots of money in the collection plate. It’s not believable unless the preacher looks and acts the part. Maybe he lives in a mansion. Maybe his wife drives “a couple of Cadillacs.”
Actually, it’s not believable even then.
BY: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, May 14, 2012
“A Disagreeable Human Being”: Mitt Romney, The Unlikable Presidential Candidate
It’s been a long time since the country elected a man as personally unappealing as Mitt Romney. Will Americans overlook their deeply held conviction that he’s a jerk?
Very few votes are going to be cast on the basis of what Mitt Romney did or didn’t do to John Lauber in 1965. So that, per se, isn’t Romney’s problem. But this is: The story lands as another brick on pile of evidence amassing that he’s just a disagreeable human being. A few days ago I wrote about Barack Obama’s biggest problem, which is that despite all the many areas in which Americans rate him higher than Romney, the one on which they give Romney the edge happens to be pretty important: handling the economy. Now we get to Romney’s biggest problem. The likability factor. He ain’t got it. And he ain’t got much of a way to get it.
Historical question: When is the last time the clearly less likeable candidate beat the clearly more likeable one for the White House? The answer is, a long time. I put the question to Gallup, which didn’t have historical numbers at hand. But doing some noodling around on my own suggests that you have to go back to 1968 to find such a result.
In 2004, George W. Bush generally led the likeable category. Pew emailed me some numbers—they had Bush leading John Kerry on likeability by 47 to 36 percent in September 2004. Interestingly, Kerry caught up and even went ahead after the first debate. But even so, voters judged both very likeable—70 percent for Kerry, and 65 percent for Bush. In 2000, Bush usually topped Al Gore, but not by massive margins. An October 2000 poll gave Bush an 11-point margin. Pew had a nine-point margin for Bush around the same time.
Before then, numbers get a little harder to come by. But crusty old Bob Dole was surely not considered more likeable than Bill Clinton in 1996. The 1992 Clinton-George H.W. Bush matchup was probably close. But just think back over the elections. The “wooden” Michael Dukakis in 1988 wasn’t exactly radiating intense bonhomie. Ronald Reagan was extremely likeable on a personal level to most people. Jimmy Carter had that big smile in 1976. Et cetera. As I say, I would imagine that it’s 1968, when the surly Dick beat the Happy Warrior, although by just a half million votes out of more than 70 million cast. But even Nixon was probably not clearly less likeable than Humphrey. After all, he’d been the vice president, he’d been on the national stage for nearly 20 years; the man definitely had his backers.
Romney, though? This is the biggest washout of modern times, folks. Gallup just this week put the likeability ratings at Obama 60, Romney 31. It’s not that Obama’s number is unusually high. Look back at those Kerry-Bush numbers. Americans are an open-hearted lot, at least presumptively, so they want to like the guy who’s going be the president. But they Do. Not. Like. Mitt. Romney.
It would be more interesting for all of us if there were some great mystery here, but there isn’t. He reeks of privilege. Every time he says something off the cuff he says something obnoxious. Corporations are people, pal. I like firing people. Where on earth did you get those Godforsaken cookies?
He also—and this actually is interesting, because it’s something our normal public discourse does not like to admit or allow for—is way too rich. We’re constantly told that Americans don’t have any class envy, and compared to some European nations they don’t. But even Americans have limits. A few million, even $50 million; okay. But a quarter billion dollars? A house with an elevator . . . for the cars? It also matters to people how the money was made. It’s okay to be worth a gajillion dollars if you’re Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and have made everyone’s lives more interesting and cooler. But what’s Mitt Romney done? Helped give us Domino’s Pizza.
Even so, Romney might still pass muster, but he has no grasp of the one crucial reality of class in America: you can be filthy rich as long as you don’t look or act like it. Gates doesn’t comb his hair, much. Jobs wore sneakers. Romney just looks too pressed. Even when he’s wearing those jeans. You can look at Romney on television and practically sense how he smells—of costly ablutions whose brand names the rest of us probably don’t even know. And he acts relentlessly rich.
And this brings us back to the Cranbrook School incident. We might have learned from The Washington Post this week that Romney gallantly interceded on poor Lauber’s behalf. Or even, maybe, that he did the awful deed, but a few years later he got in touch with Lauber to say, “Gee, old scout, went a bit overboard there.” Or even that he acknowledged to one of his confederates that he regretted the incident. In other words, we might have learned something that showed he knows he behaved like an asshole. But all we learned is that he behaved like an asshole and is now pretending to forget it. A jerk is one thing. But a jerk who takes no responsibility for his jerkitude is pretty much the definition of an unlikeable person.
No human being is one dimensional. I’m sure there are plenty of people in the world for whom Mitt has performed kindnesses. I expect we’ll be getting to know every single one of them in these next few months, too, in heavily filtered television ads in which the men wear proletarian flannel and the women’s St. John blazers are kept safely in the closet. All I can say is they’d better be more likeable than their candidate—for his sake. In the meantime, there’s something very reassuring about this country reposing in those numbers, that the black guy with the weird name who’s been called everything under the sun is twice as likeable as the rich white guy. This is the America that drives the wingers crazy, but that the rest of us—the majority—live in, and love.
BY: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 13, 2012
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