Why Mitt Likes To Say “I Like”: Destroying The Things He Supposedly Likes
I’m not sure if I like the way Mitt Romney likes things. As the newly empathic candidate was promising to kill Big Bird at Wednesday’s debate, did you notice how he backed into it?
“I like PBS,” Romney started out. “I love Big Bird. I actually like you [to moderator Jim Lehrer] too. But I’m not going to—I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That’s number one.”
“Like” is a decaffeinated form of “love” when Mitt uses it, but it’s also a mild protest, a plea for understanding. He usually lays a slight stress on the word, as if he’s revealing some vaguely surprising truth—“You may see me as an unfeeling, uncaring, bottom-line guy, but let me tell you, I enjoy life. I like things.” This man, who is so buttoned-up he can’t be honest about what he’s running on—like whether or not he’d cut taxes for the rich or cover pre-existing conditions in his health plan—uses like to establish his personal bona fides. I’m like you, he’s saying, I have “likes.”
Of course, it helps that like is such a flexible word, meaning “similar,” “approve” and just acting as a rhetorical placeholder, like, well, whatever. Mitt does like (indeed, he requires) a certain flexibility about what he means when he uses words. And because some of his most awkward moments during the campaign have hung from his “I like” tic, you have to wonder what he’s really saying:
“I like grits,” he said, “Strange things are happening to me.”
“I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There’s something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dot the parts of Michigan…”
At Wednesday’s debate, we learned a few more of Mitt’s most likable things:
“And by the way, I like coal.”
“I like the way we did it in Massachusetts. I like the fact that in my state, we had Republicans and Democrats come together and work together.”
“Now, I like green energy as well…”
And it’s true, all those things are meant to be slightly surprising, particularly when listed by a man at a podium who’s running for president, and worthy of the faint stress he lays upon the word. He’s often pandering, as any politician will. But I also think Mitt is working hard to redefine the word. The most famous example is, of course:
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” And as PBS, Big Bird, and surely now even Jim Lehrer know, every man destroys the thing he likes.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, October 7, 2012
“Caught In A Bind”: Taxes Are Certain, But What About Mitt Romney’s Cuts?
Republican Mitt Romney started his campaign calling for big tax cuts, but now he has changed course. He’s warning middle-class families not to raise their hopes too high.
Romney couldn’t have been more emphatic than he was last November at a candidates’ debate in Michigan.
“What I want to do is help the people who’ve been hurt the most, and that’s the middle class,” he said. “And so what I do is focus a substantial tax break on middle-income Americans.”
He put a middle-class tax cut at the top of his priority list: a 20 percent reduction in tax rates across the board.
“Right now, let’s get the job done first that has to be done immediately. Let’s lower the tax rates on middle-income Americans,” he said.
Then, at a debate in Tampa this January, Romney got a little more specific.
“The real question people are gonna ask is, who’s going to help the American people at a time when folks are having real tough times? And that’s why I’ve put forward a plan to eliminate the tax on savings for middle-income Americans,” he said. “Anyone making under $200,000 a year, I would eliminate the tax on interest, dividends and capital gains.”
Shaking Up Tax Plans
But then came Romney’s victory in the primaries, and a new set of goals to meet.
“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes,” campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said on CNN. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
Romney shook up his plans on the tax cuts. He still wanted to lower the tax rates, but now he was more emphatic about the need for tax changes to be revenue-neutral.
In September, he had words of caution for the crowd that filled the gym at a suburban Ohio high school.
“By the way, don’t be expecting a huge cut in taxes, because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions,” he said.
In other words, your tax rate might be lower, but your taxable income might be higher. He elaborated in the Wednesday night debate with President Obama.
“I will not, under any circumstances, raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families,” he said.
But he avoided details. He said he would work with Congress, and he quickly moved to talk about another goal: lowering the tax rate for small-business people.
“If we lower that rate, they will be able to hire more people. For me, this is about jobs,” he said.
Will The Tax Cut Stick?
As the campaign goes on, Romney gives the tax cuts more and more to do: Help the middle class, produce more jobs, keep the same amount of money flowing into the government, and more.
At the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, research fellow Michael Strain says Romney has plenty of tax variables he can adjust.
“There are a lot of different levers to pull here. You have the marginal tax rates, you have the amount of income that’s subject to taxation, you have the amount of income that you can deduct from your gross income to calculate your taxable income,” Strain says.
Is a middle-class tax cut possible with everything else? Strain thinks it is.
“In order to do that, you would have to have a specific plan. And we haven’t seen that from Gov. Romney yet,” he says.
But at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, co-director William Gale says Romney is caught in a bind.
“He has made a set of proposals that are jointly impossible to fulfill. And so something has to give,” he says.
It may be that what’s giving — as Romney told the crowd in Ohio — is the middle-class tax cut.
By: Peter Overby, NPR, October 7, 2012
“Hedging His Words”: Mitt Romney Isn’t Proposing A $5 Trillion Tax Break, It’s A $10 Trillion Tax Break
Part of Mitt Romney’s strategy in the first debate Wednesday night in Denver was to play fact-checker with false facts — also known as “lies.”
After the president said that he was proposing a $5 trillion tax break, Romney responded, “I don’t have a $5 trillion cut. I don’t have a tax cut of the scale that you’re talking about.”
He was partially correct. He isn’t proposing a $5 trillion tax break — his tax cut proposals equal more than $10 trillion over the next 10 years, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.
Romney’s new tax breaks would cost about $500 billion a year. This is on top of extending the Bush tax breaks, which would cost just over $5 trillion.
The president probably didn’t point out the full cost of the Bush tax breaks because he proposes to keep the tax breaks for the middle class at a cost of about $4 trillion. But these taxes have always been temporary and are supposed to expire. Romney is proposing making them permanent along with more cuts for a total of $10 trillion in tax breaks, as we are in the middle of a so-called debt crisis.
Romney also claimed that he is not proposing new tax breaks for the rich. “…I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people. High-income people are doing just fine in this economy,” he said. “They’ll do fine whether you’re president or I am.”
Notice the key word there? “Share.”
Romney simply cannot claim that he isn’t going to reduce taxes for the richest Americans — he’s just promising that his cuts won’t benefit the rich disproportionally, just as George W. Bush falsely did in 2000.
In addition to the Bush tax breaks he promises to continue, Governor Romney wants to cut the estate tax, which only the richest Americans pay, to zero. His tax breaks will almost certainly cut the taxes the richest pay — despite his promises to remove reductions.
“An analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice found that even if millionaires were forced to give up all the tax expenditures that Romney has put on the table, his tax plan would still give a tax break of at least $250,000 on average for individuals making over $1 million,” the organization wrote in its “Debate Debrief.” “That is, he simply cannot back up his assertion that he is ‘not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high- income people.’ And if he really is going to make up the revenues we’ll lose to his rate cuts, taxes would have to go up for other taxpayers.”
Romney has gone out his way to hide the specifics of his tax plan and is carefully hedging his words to make specious claims.
But let’s be clear about the facts. Mitt Romney is proposing a $10 trillion tax break. And he is clearly promising to cut the amount of taxes the richest Americans pay.
The fact that he has to do everything he can to hide this proves what a failure right-wing trickle-down economics have been.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 5, 2012
“Romney’s Sick Joke”: An Attempt To Deceive Voters On His Healthcare Proposal
“No. 1,” declared Mitt Romney in Wednesday’s debate, “pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” No, they aren’t — as Mr. Romney’s own advisers have conceded in the past, and did again after the debate.
Was Mr. Romney lying? Well, either that or he was making what amounts to a sick joke. Either way, his attempt to deceive voters on this issue was the biggest of many misleading and/or dishonest claims he made over the course of that hour and a half. Yes, President Obama did a notably bad job of responding. But I’ll leave the theater criticism to others and talk instead about the issue that should be at the heart of this election.
So, about that sick joke: What Mr. Romney actually proposes is that Americans with pre-existing conditions who already have health coverage be allowed to keep that coverage even if they lose their job — as long as they keep paying the premiums. As it happens, this is already the law of the land. But it’s not what anyone in real life means by having a health plan that covers pre-existing conditions, because it applies only to those who manage to land a job with health insurance in the first place (and are able to maintain their payments despite losing that job). Did I mention that the number of jobs that come with health insurance has been steadily declining over the past decade?
What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.
How many Americans would be left out in the cold under Mr. Romney’s plan? One answer is 89 million. According to the nonpartisan Commonwealth Foundation, that’s the number of Americans who lack the “continuous coverage” that would make them eligible for health insurance under Mr. Romney’s empty promises. By the way, that’s more than a third of the U.S. population under 65 years old.
Another answer is 45 million, the estimated number of people who would have health insurance if Mr. Obama were re-elected, but would lose it if Mr. Romney were to win.
That estimate reflects two factors. First, Mr. Romney proposes repealing the Affordable Care Act, which means doing away with all the ways in which that law would help tens of millions of Americans who either have pre-existing conditions or can’t afford health insurance for other reasons. Second, Mr. Romney is proposing drastic cuts in Medicaid — basically to save money that he could use to cut taxes on the wealthy — which would deny essential health care to millions more Americans. (And, no, despite what he has said, you can’t get the care you need just by going to the emergency room.)
Wait, it gets worse. The true number of victims from Mr. Romney’s health proposals would be much larger than either of these numbers, for a couple of reasons.
One is that Medicaid doesn’t just provide health care to Americans too young for Medicare; it also pays for nursing care and other necessities for many older Americans.
Also, many Americans have health insurance but live under the continual threat of losing it. Obamacare would eliminate this threat, but Mr. Romney would bring it back and make it worse. Safety nets don’t just help people who actually fall, they make life more secure for everyone who might fall. But Mr. Romney would take that security away, not just on health care but across the board.
What about the claim made by a Romney adviser after the debate that states could step in to guarantee coverage for pre-existing conditions? That’s nonsense on many levels. For one thing, Mr. Romney wants to eliminate restrictions on interstate insurance sales, depriving states of regulatory power. Furthermore, if all you do is require that insurance companies cover everyone, healthy people will wait until they’re sick to sign up, leading to sky-high premiums. So you need to couple regulations on insurers with a requirement that everyone have insurance. And, to make that feasible, you have to offer insurance subsidies to lower-income Americans, which have to be paid for at a federal level.
And what you end up with is — precisely — the health reform President Obama signed into law.
One could wish that Mr. Obama had made this point effectively in the debate. He had every right to jump up and say, “There you go again”: Not only was Mr. Romney’s claim fundamentally dishonest, it has already been extensively debunked, and the Romney campaign itself has admitted that it’s false.
For whatever reason, the president didn’t do that, on health care or on anything else. But, as I said, never mind the theater criticism. The fact is that Mr. Romney tried to mislead the public, and he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 4, 2012
“A Gigantic House Of Cards”: Mitt Romney Gets Away With It, For Now
So other than the fading echoes of Republican celebration and Democratic angst from last night’s presidential debate, and the wait we will now have to endure to see if it made any tangible difference in the contest, what should we actually carry away from the event?
I’ve already confessed myself a non-expert on the “visuals,” and on the “energy level” of the candidates, because I honestly don’t give a damn about any of that. What Mitt Romney needed to do last night, however, was relatively clear: reintroduce himself to swing voters as someone other than a distant plutocrat, and fill in the gaping holes (of omission and commission) in his policy agenda. With quite a bit of help from Barack Obama, he achieved both of those goals, at least temporarily, and in that respect he “won.”
But it came at a price. Jonathan Bernstein summed it up nicely last night at WaPo:
Romney’s policy positions are even more of a shambles now than they were previously. Romney’s position, over and over again, is to simply bluff it on policy. His tax plan continues to be the most obvious one, but it really happens across the board. Romney insisted tonight more than once that his tax plan will keep taxes the same for the wealthy, cut them for everyone else, and not add to the deficit. Forget about the Tax Policy Center; just that much is obviously incoherent and impossible. And, more to the point, it’s clear he’s going to keep on insisting that it adds up, no matter how clearly it doesn’t. But it’s not just that; on every policy, he’s just going to insist that the consequences of his plans that anyone might not like simply don’t exist, so that he’s for sweeping spending cuts but insists that no particular program that anyone brings up might lose any funding, or that he’s for repealing Obamacare but those with pre-existing conditions will magically be protected.
In other words, Mitt Romney lied a lot, and his lies extended beyond his own policies to those of the president (particularly in health care and “green jobs”). His self-representation, moreover, as a deeply caring moderate who shares the president’s goals but is far more eager to reach across the aisle, must have caused some bitter laughter behind the scenes in conservative circles. But because the president, presumably quite deliberately, chose not to depict Romney as a liar and a phony, Mitt largely got away with it, at least for the moment.
Jon Chait believes that Romney has finally pulled off his “etch-a-sketch” moment, reinventing himself as the moderate Republican he once seemed to be in Massachusetts, at a moment when conservatives were too terrified of defeat to object, as they certainly would have earlier in the year if he had hedged on his tax cut plan, let his heart bleed all over the stage for the unemployed and suffering, and begged for a chance to work with Democrats.
But atmospherics aside, what did Mitt actually change last night? He’s long claimed his tax plan wouldn’t increase the deficit, and wouldn’t reduce the relative tax burden on high earners. Last night he said he wouldn’t pursue it if his plan violated either of those principles. But since he’s denied repeatedly there’s any risk of that, why should anybody believe he’d somehow sacrifice the crown jewel of Republican policy–tax cuts for the wealthy–when he’s in office, surrounded by Republicans clamoring for it? But you’d best believe a lot of assurances were going out last night from Team Mitt to conservative opinion leaders denying anything had changed other than how Romney chose to frame and defend his tax plan.
Had Obama more effectively counterpunched last night (or had Jim Lehrer not provided the most passive moderation of a debate in memory), Mitt might not have been able to pull off this feat of prestidigitation. After all, when you think about it, Romney is now saying the high-end tax cuts that Republicans want more than life itself just won’t happen unless he can come up with revenue offsets that don’t change the tax burden, and also get through spending reductions that he’s consistently refused to identify (yea, promised to oppose when it came to most popular spending categories). It’s all a gigantic house of cards. And even if you buy the ludicrous assumption that Romney was sincere in his desire not to upset anyone with his policies, his party won’t for a moment let him actually “move to the center.” Hell, they spent the entire primary season roping him in, and even if they let him posture and maneuver a bit right now, the rope’s still around his neck and their brand is on his posterior.
Obama continually talked around the central problem, attacking the vagueness of Romney’s policies and near the end, finally just coming right out and saying Mitt’s hiding something. But he could not bring himself to say out loud that Mitt’s a serial dissembler who owes his political soul to extremist ideologues and depends strictly on a hidden-hand presentation of his record and agenda. I guess it wouldn’t have been “presidential.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 4, 2012
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