“Limousine Jerks”: The Rise Of The “Drawbridge Republicans”
As Republicans head toward next week’s convention something extraordinary has come into view now that their ticket is complete.
Mitt Romney came from wealth and went on to build his own quarter-of-a-billion dollar fortune. Paul Ryan, who has never worked a day in the private sector (outside a few months in the family firm) reports a net worth of as much as $7 million, thanks to trusts and inheritances from his and his wife’s family.
Wealthy political candidates are nothing new, of course. But we’ve never had two wealthy candidates on a national ticket whose top priority is to reduce already low taxes on the well-to-do while raising taxes on everyone else — even as they propose to slash programs that serve the poor, or that (like college aid) create chances for the lowly born to rise.
Call them the Drawbridge Republicans. As the moniker implies, these are wealthy Republicans who have no qualms about pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Such sentiments used to be reserved for the political fringe. The most prominent example was Steve Forbes, whose twin obsessions during his vanity presidential runs in 1996 and 2000 — marginal tax rates and inflation — were precisely what you’d expect from an heir in a cocoon.
(In case you were wondering, Ronald Reagan wasn’t a Drawbridge because he entered office when marginal rates, at 70 percent, were truly damaging to the economy. But as GOP business leaders now tell me privately, the Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent, let alone today’s 35 percent, are hardly a barrier to work or investment).
Most rich Republicans who champion regressive tax plans find it necessary to at least pretend they’re doing something to help average folks. John McCain, who’s lived large for decades thanks to his wife’s inheritance, famously had trouble keeping track of how many homes he owned — but McCain also tried bravely to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” and touted education initiatives that made this claim plausible.
Today’s Drawbridge Republicans can’t be bothered. Yes, when their political back is to the wall — as Romney’s increasingly is — they’ll slap together a page of bullet points and dub it “a plan for the middle class.” But this is only under duress. The rest of the time they seem blissfully unaware of how off-key they sound. As the humorist Andy Borowitz tweeted the other day, “As a general matter, it’s a bad idea to talk about austerity if you just had a horse lose in the Olympics.”
Contrast conservative Prime Minister (and heir) David Cameron’s decision to defer his plans to lower the top 50 percent marginal rate in the UK. “When you’re taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions,” Cameron said, “you’ve got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you’re doing is fair and seen to be fair.” As his spokesman added: “We need to ask those with the broadest shoulders to contribute the most.”
Now that’s a conservative ruling class with a conscience! Can anyone imagine Romney and Ryan saying the same?
The interesting question concerns psychology. Drawbridge Republicans are flesh and blood human beings peddling indefensible priorities. How do they manage it and still feel good about themselves? One possibility is that they’re simply missing the genes for empathy and self-awareness. (Steve Forbes always did seem a bit like a bubble boy whose inheritance left him impervious).
But for today’s GOP ticket that explanation feels off. Romney, for all his awkwardness, campaigned and governed in a liberal state, and he enacted a pioneering universal health care law that’s helped many of modest means achieve health security. Ryan is equally mysterious — the boy-next-door who pays lip service to “upward mobility” yet seems to have no notion his plans would likely produce what liberal analyst Robert Greenstein calls “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.”
My hunch is that extreme forms of rationalization and other defense mechanisms help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance. The growth of partisan media makes it easy to tune out disquieting dissenting views.
Whatever lies behind it, the rise of the Drawbridge Republicans makes the stakes of this election even higher. If Romney and Ryan actually win on their Drawbridge agenda, the United States will have crossed a scary new Rubicon for a supposedly advanced democracy. For years, whenever I’ve heard people criticize “limousine liberals,” I’ve always thought, well, at least that’s better than being a “limousine jerk.” Now it turns out that’s exactly what a Drawbridge Republican is.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 21, 2012
“Serious As A Snakebit”: The Ryan-Romney Flim-Flam Ticket
Let’s talk budget! Yes, the wonky wonderland of the federal budget, with page after page of numbers — what fun, eh?
No. Most people would prefer a root canal to a budget discussion (indeed, I’ve heard that some dentists use a recording of budget numbers to anesthetize their root-canal patients — everything from the neck up quickly goes numb). But Paul Ryan is different.
The GOP’s vice presidential nominee is touted as Mr. Budget, a guy who gets excited by running his fingers through fiscal things. That’s why the Washington cognoscenti have declared him to be “serious,” rather than just another political opportunist riding the right-wing wave of tea party ridiculousness.
Being branded as “serious” means never having to admit you’re a flim-flam man. Thus, the widely ballyhooed Ryan Budget is called “honest” and “responsible” by insiders who obviously haven’t run the numbers on it.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, however, has tallied Ryan’s budgetary giveaways to the rich and take-backs from the middle-class and the poor. Far from balancing the federal budget, as the self-proclaimed deficit hawk claims, the analysts found that Ryan’s plan increases the federal deficit. And not by a little, but by about $2.5 trillion! So, yes, he is serious — serious as a snakebite.
Then there was Ryan’s explosive admission recently that the budget plan of his presidential partner, Mitt Romney, is also a con game. Despite Romney’s repeated assertion that — by golly — his nifty plan will balance the federal budget in only eight years, Ryan confessed that they don’t really know that, because “we haven’t run the numbers on that specific plan.”
Say what? What? Hello — a budget is nothing but numbers — numbers that have, in fact, been run! Otherwise, it’s just a political hoax.
During his run in the presidential primaries this spring, when he was trolling for votes in the shallow waters of the Republican fringe, Romney embraced the Ryan budget, calling it a “bold and exciting effort” that is “very much needed.” And, hoping to glom onto Ryan’s “wow” appeal to the hyper-energized right wing, Romney brought Mr. Budget onboard for the fall run — with one interesting condition: The veep candidate has had to jettison his budget.
That document, which Ryan had rammed through the U.S. House in 2011, would have provided another gold mine for the one-percenters, with millionaires-and-up averaging around $300,000 a year in tax breaks. The rest of us would’ve gotten the shaft, including tax increases, privatization of Medicare, deep cuts in student aid and job training programs, and federal abandonment of food stamps and health care for the poor.
Yet Ryan is on the Republican presidential ticket specifically because his budget whackery has enthralled the GOP’s far right. Anti-government guru Grover Norquist, for example, has gushed that the six-term Wisconsin congress-critter would be the Dick Cheney of economic policy. Sheesh — that’s not a threat to be taken lightly!
But the very bauble that got him to the GOP’s No. 2 political slot turns out to be so widely and wildly unpopular with voters in the deeper waters of the general election that it’s already been trashed by the party’s No. 1. “I have my own budget plan,” Romney backpedaled the day after he knighted Sir Ryan, “and that’s the budget plan we’re going to run on.” Yes, the budget with no numbers.
That aside, it’s kind of strange (and a bit unsettling) to see a candidate for president straining to explain that he’s the one in charge, not the young ideologue. Romney even went on national TV to tell us that, while Ryan would certainly be among the people he asks for advice, “I have to make the final call in important decisions.” Sure, Mitt — you da man! But was he trying to convince us … or himself? Or Ryan?
Embarrassingly, at the staged event where Romney introduced his VP selectee, he bungled his line, presenting Ryan as “the next president of the United States.” Was that just another Romney gaffe? A Freudian slip? Or an eerie moment of candor?
After all, Romney has no unwavering principles or solid commitment to any policy except, “Elect me, and I’ll lower my taxes.” Republican leaders are now trying to downplay Ryan’s extremism, but if they were honest with voters, their bumper sticker would read: “Ryan-Romney in 2012.”
BY: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, August 22, 2012
“A Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy”: This Is Not Westminster; Congress Writes Laws, Not Presidents
Niall Ferguson responds to critics once again. Read it and make your own mind up. Here’s his summary:
My central critique of the President is not that the economy has under-performed, but that he has not been an effective leader of the executive branch. I go on to detail his well-documented difficulties in managing his team of economic advisers and his disastrous decision to leave it to his own party in Congress to define the terms of his stimulus, financial reform and healthcare reform. I also argue that he has consistently failed to address the crucial issue of long-term fiscal balance, with the result that the nation is now hurtling towards a fiscal cliff of tax hikes and drastic spending cuts.
Niall is surely aware that the Congress writes laws, not presidents. This is not Westminster. And Niall’s preferred top-down approach was indeed pursued by the Clintons in 1994. Healthcare reform failed that time spectacularly prcisely because it didn’t flatter Congress’ prerogatives; under Obama’s “failed” executive leadership, universal healthcare passed for the first time in history. It’s very close to Romneycare. Was that as big a mess as well?
The well-documented difficulties on economic policy come from Ron Suskind’s book, which was subject to strong pushback from the people it quoted. I’m sure there were divisions and fights in the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s. But the results are pretty clear: the economy under Obama has performed much better than the British economy under Osborne, or Europe or Japan. The private sector has recovered at Reagan-like rates. It’s the slashing of public sector jobs that has kept employment so subdued – but far less subdued than anywhere else in the developed world. If this is executive mismanagement, more, please.
Then the notion that Obama “has consistently failed to address the crucial issue of long-term fiscal balance.” What, then, was the Bowles-Simpson Commission about? Ryan didn’t create it – he merely torpedoed it because it dared to raise revenues in order to cut the deficit! Obama actually created it and if the necessary majority in Congress had backed it, he would have gone a long way to sign it. Why not? It would give him credit for the biggest deal since 1993. And that’s precisely why the GOP – spearheaded by Ryan – killed it.
Yes, Obama deserves a shellacking for not owning Bowles-Simpson – in what was, in my view, the biggest error of his presidency. But I have no doubt he wanted and wants a Grand Bargain – and revealed how far he would go by cutting $700 billion from Medicare in the ACA (which Ryan is now exploiting on the campaign trail). But how do you get a grand bargain between the two parties when one party refuses to bargain on its central priority, no tax increases? Given Obama’s record of Medicare cuts (never before imposed by a Democratic president), it’s clear who the culprit is for the fiscal cliff: a Republican party that wanted the US to default rather than agree to even a tiny revenue increase, and that pledged in the primaries to refuse a budget deal that was 10-1 spending cuts to revenue increases.
As for the executive banch, the commander-in-chief role is part of the job. Niall doesn’t mention the extremely successful attack on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the end of torture, the killing of Osama bin Laden and capture of mounds of intelligence, or the fact that, unlike his predecessor, Obama has not presided over a major terror attack in this country or authorized grotesque torture that effectively destroyed America’s moral standing. As for Iraq, Niall says the exit was premature. It was negotiated by Bush. Maliki didn’t want us there any more. Niall thinks we should occupy a country with all the massive expense that entails – against its will? Seriously? And it’s Obama who is unserious on the debt?
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, August 21, 2012
“Aiding The Masters Of The Universe”: With Romney-Ryan, GOP Becomes Grand Old Private-Equity Party
The ticket Republicans will nominate in Tampa next week is uniquely connected to the “vulture capitalist” constituency, and uniquely committed to protecting the interests of today’s robber-baron class.
Paul Ryan grew up in a wealthy family with a Republican bent and all the right political and corporate connections.
He could easily have made his way into the private sector—doing business with family and friends, as have generations of wealthy Ryans.
But Paul was always the starry-eyed, perhaps wild-eyed. idealist. He read Austrian economic texts and far-right authors with a passion, committing to memory the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and his intellectual heartthrob, Ayn Rand. Reading Rand, the newly minted Republican vice presidential contender once said was “the reason I got involved in public service.”
Ryan has since tried to distance himself from Rand’s militant atheism and even more extreme attitudes regarding the least among us. But his older brother, Tobin, told reporters: “Paul can still quote every verse out of Ayn Rand.”
Rand’s greed-is-good thinking plays well with hedge-fund managers, private equity players and the “vulture capitalist” class that enjoys taking a break from pillaging to plod through novels about, well, guys like them.
But as the youngest Ryan child, Paul got a little mavericky. Much as he talks up the private sector, Paul Ryan forged a career in the public sector. He’s worked as a Congressional aide and congressman—with brief breaks as a conservative “think tank” associate and a speech writer for Jack Kemp’s 1996 presidential campaign—since leaving college.
But older brother Tobin followed the more traditional route for sons of privilege.
As Fortune magazine notes, Tobin Ryan is a full partner with Seidler Equity Partners, a California-based “private equity investment firm that partners with visionary executives to grow their businesses.” Before he went to Seidler, Tobin worked with a politically connected Wisconsin-based private equity firm, King Capital (founded by former Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman Steve King, who served as finance chair for Paul Ryan’s Congressional runs). He also put in a stint with Bain & Company, the consulting firm where Mitt Romney says he “enjoyed working with a team of people to arrive at ideas and solutions” for what Texas Governor Rick Perry described as “vulture capitalist” interventions.
Tobin Ryan joined the Bain & Co. team after Romney moved to the private-equity firm that the consulting firm spawned, Bain Capital. But the connection has raised eyebrows, and spawned plenty of headlines, in the financial press.
The Ryan brothers are, in Tobin’s words, “very close.” Indeed, they live “about a three-wood away from each other” in the town where the Ryans have for decades been a pre-eminent (construction and contracting) business family. Tobin, a frequent media spokesman and surrogate for his brother, refers to Paul’s first US House race as “our first campaign.”
“So we’ve now got a former private equity executive running for president alongside the brother of a current private equity executive,” observes Fortune senior editor Dan Primack.
And Paul Ryan, like Mitt Romney, is politically committed to the aiding the masters of the universe who run the private-equity empires that now so dominate the US economy.
The “Roadmap for America’s Future” budget plan that Ryan wrote in 2010—the document that, arguably, launched into orbit as a Republican star—pledges to change tax policies to create “an enhanced investment climate.”
Specifically, Ryan proposed to:
* eliminate taxes on “interest, capital gains, or dividends” and estate taxes
* allow investments to be “fully deducted immediately” by corporations
* “eliminate the corporate income tax entirely” and replace it with “a single-digit consumption tax” that businesses and investors would calculate themselves.
* repeal the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to assure that millionaires and billionaires who take advantage of tax-code loopholes will have to pay something
How good would a Romney-Ryan administration be to the private-equity constituency?
According to a study by the chairman’s staff of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, most working Americans who earn under $200,000 a year would see their taxes go up under the latest version of the Ryan budget. By the same token, Mitt Romney—whose income is “comprised of interest income, capital gains and dividends”—would pay less than 1 percent of his income in taxes.
The Romney-Ryan approach, forged and advocated for by candidates with personal and family ties to private-equity concerns, will yield great benefits for those very wealthy Americans who understand private equity as a personal reality.
But as the Joint Economic Committee report says, “House Budget Committee Chairman Representative Paul Ryan claims that the policies outlined in his budget will reform the broken tax code and put ‘hardworking taxpayers ahead of special interests.’ In reality, the Ryan plan gives the largest tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and will pay for those tax cuts by raising the tax burden on middle-class workers.”
Indeed, the report concludes, “The richest households would receive the greatest benefit from these changes. The top 0.1 percent, for example, would receive an estimated average federal tax cut of close to $1.18 million per taxpaying household in 2015.”
America’s robber barons have had to wait for more than a century—since Teddy Roosevelt went rogue and joined the anti-trust campaigners—for a Republican ticket that would truly represent their interests.
But every indication is that the Romney-Ryan ticket will be of, by and for the private-equity managers who have become the masters of America’s economic universe.
The Romney-Ryan ticket rejects the American faith of not just Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt but of Republican presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt.
“The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” Teddy Roosevelt warned at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910. “The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.”
That remains the prime need.
Now, unfortunately, the party of Teddy Roosevelt is preparing to nominate a ticket that is passionately at odds with the principle that the general welfare must prevail over the passions of men “whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”
By: John NIchols, The Nation, August 20, 2012
“A Transparent Pander”: On The Stump, Romney And Ryan Avoid Real Medicare Debate
Last week, in the wake of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate, there was a rare moment of agreement across the political spectrum. Both liberals and conservatives concluded that Ryan’s addition to the ticket would make the campaign a choice between his radical right wing vision of privatizing Medicare and block granting Medicaid and President Obama’s desire to preserve guaranteed health coverage for vulnerable Americans. Both sides relished the fight, believing it would be to their benefit.
Now conservative pundits and activists are celebrating this supposed development. On “Fox News Sunday,” Karl Rove said, “There was going to be a battle about Medicare, no matter what. The question was: Was it going to be left to what the Democrats traditionally do — which is late-night phone calls in the final week of the campaigns, to seniors, and scary mail pieces? Or were we going to have a full-out, honest debate? And we’re having, for what passes in politics, a full-out, honest debate about it.” The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, also on the program, added, “It feels more like a movement and less like a couple hundred people in Boston, working very hard to kind of push the boulder up the hill — and more like a genuine, exciting cause.”
Alas, no such thing has occurred. Ryan has a reputation for political bravery and commitment to principle, and on the campaign trail Republicans such as Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli have tried to claim that merely by picking Ryan, Romney has demonstrated he also possesses those virtues. But when it comes to health care policy, the Romney/Ryan ticket is being cowardly and dishonest. When they give stump speeches they do not emphasize, or even mention, their radical, unpopular plans to leave seniors without adequate health coverage. Instead, the deliberately obscure the issue by attacking Obama for “raiding” Medicare to pay for the Affordable Care Act. It is nothing but a transparent pander to the GOP’s base of older voters. Unless Kristol’s “genuine cause” is to confuse and mislead the American people–always a distinct possibility–then his comment makes no sense.
All Romney/Ryan are doing is trying to hide from the American public just how badly they would shred the social safety net in order to pay for giving themselves giant tax cuts.
Ryan actually included the savings from cuts to wasteful private subsidies in the Medicare Advantage program that the ACA enacted–the same ones he now inveighs against in every speech–in his own budget. The reason he kept them in his budget, even while he votes to repeal the ACA and therefore would lose them, is because it gives him more breathing room. Take away those savings, and Ryan would have to come up with even more cuts to other popular programs.
The Obama campaign is understandably aggravated by their opponents’ cowardly refusal to stand and fight. On Saturday, after a typically evasive appearance by Ryan in Florida, Obama campaign spokesman Danny Kanner issued the following statement. “Congressman Ryan didn’t tell seniors in Florida today that if he had his way, seniors would face higher Medicare premiums and prescription drug costs, and would be forced to pay out of pocket for preventive care…. He didn’t say that they’d turn Medicare into a voucher system, ending the Medicare guarantee and raising costs by $6,400 a year for seniors. And he certainly didn’t say that they’d do it all to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. But those are the facts, and the ‘substantive’ debate he claims they want requires Romney and Ryan to be honest about them.”
Having a substantive debate about how to balance the budget is something liberals and conservatives should both want. Unfortunately, the Republicans are afraid to do so.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, August 20, 2012
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