“Weakness In Romney’s Boldness”: Confident Candidates Don’t Go For Boldness, They Make A Choice For Balance
By making Rep. Paul Ryan his running mate, Mitt Romney guaranteed that this will be a big election. The Ryan budget plan will be front and center. Romney now owns its every number, policy and semicolon — unless he specifically says otherwise.
For that reason, the choice was bold. The 2012 election is now about whether the country believes that cuts in Medicare, deep reductions in programs for the poor and steep cuts in taxes for the wealthy are necessary for growth and prosperity. President Obama’s campaign is already running a sober advertisement framing the election as a referendum on this formula. For all the negative ads we will see, a great deal of substance — indeed, a fundamental choice — will underlie the rest of the campaign.
But Romney’s need to make such a bold choice is also a sign of weakness. Candidates confident in their position don’t go for boldness. They make a choice for balance, or to carry a state, or that reinforces their own persona.
Thus did Ronald Reagan pick George H.W. Bush in 1980 to appeal to GOP moderates. In 1992, Bill Clinton picked Al Gore to reinforce his own strengths: young, Southern, New Democrat.
But Romney picked Ryan because he was under intense pressure from right-wing elements of the Republican Party to prove, yet again, that he is truly a conservative. Romney has been trying to prove this ever since he announced his candidacy. Because he has been lagging in the polls, the right felt free to pressure him some more. Now, the right will back the ticket with enthusiasm. This really is the go-for-broke choice that conservatives were looking for. But the cost is that Romney will be unable to make a new appeal to the political center. And by passing on Sen. Rob Portman, Romney gives up an opportunity to strengthen himself in Ohio, a state that he absolutely needs to win and where he has been running behind.
The outcome of this election is now hugely consequential. If the Romney-Ryan ticket wins, conservatives will claim a mandate for Ryan’s radical budget ideas. But if Obama wins, conservatives will no longer be able to argue that the public was given a tepid choice by a philosophically inconstant Romney. A rejection of Romney-Ryan would be a huge blow to the conservative agenda. It will settle the argument over the role of government that we have been having since Barack Obama took the oath of office. This election really and truly matters.
UPDATE, 1:40 p.m.
The Romney campaign is clearly very sensitive about the argument that I made above — and that others, of course, are also making: that Romney now owns the Ryan budget. Here, courtesy of CNN, is a Q-and-A being distributed as part of the campaign’s talking points:
1.) Does this mean Mitt Romney is adopting the Paul Ryan plan?
Gov. Romney applauds Paul Ryan for going in the right direction with his budget, and as president he will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.
Romney’s administration will go through the budget line by line and ask two questions: Can we afford it? And, if not, should we borrow money from China to pay for it?
Note that the campaign doesn’t actually give a direct answer to the question it asked itself.
And then there was this:
2) Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have different views on some policy areas — like Medicare spending, entitlement reform, labor, etc. — do you think those differences are going to hurt or help?
Of course they aren’t going to have the same view on every issue. But they both share the view that this election is a choice about two fundamentally different paths for this country. President Obama has taken America down a path of debt and decline. Romney and Ryan believe in a path for America that leads to more jobs, less debt and smaller government. So, while you might find an issue or two where they might not agree, they are in complete agreement on the direction that they want to lead America.
Again, the Romney camp does not specify in its answer exactly where Romney disagrees with Ryan. It just mentions general areas of disagreement in its question.
If Romney really wants to separate himself from Ryan’s views and his budget, he will have to get a lot more specific than this. And journalists, one would expect, will be pressing Romney hard to offer specifics on the very questions the campaign itself posed.
And thanks to my colleague Greg Sargent for pointing out the existence of these talking points in his own thoughtful take on the Ryan pick.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 11, 2012
“After The Third Time, The Rooster Crowed”: Five Times Mitt Romney Has Embraced The Ryan Budget
Just minutes after Mitt Romney announced Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his vice presidential choice, his campaign was working to distancing itself from Ryan’s signature piece of legislation — his “Path to Prosperity” budget, which would massively overhaul Medicare, Social Security, and other social programs.
In internal talking points that are sure to disappoint conservatives, Romney’s campaign weaseled around fully embracing Ryan’s plan, writing, “Gov. Romney applauds Paul Ryan for going in the right direction with his budget, and as president he will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.”
But Mitt Romney has been a full-throttle endorser of the Ryan budget on several occasions since its launch. Here are five quotes from Romney himself, endorsing the Ryan plan:
1. “Very supportive.” “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan. It’s a bold and exciting effort on his part and on the part of the Republicans and it’s very much consistent with what I put out earlier. I think it’s amazing that we have a president who three and a half years in still hasn’t put a proposal out that deals with entitlements. This president’s dealing with entitlement reform — excuse me — this budget deals with entitlement reform, tax policy, which as you know is very similar to the one that I put out and efforts to reign in excessive spending. I applaud it. It’s an excellent piece of work and very much needed.”
2.”The right tone.” Romney told Talking Points Memo, “He is setting the right tone for finally getting spending and entitlements under control. …Anyone who has read my book knows that we are on the same page.’”
3. “Marvelous.” “I think it’d be marvelous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budgetand to adopt it and pass it along to the president,” Romney once professed while in Wisconsin. Obama mocked him for this one: http://youtu.be/Tnp2Wa3AFRc
4. “An important step.” “I spent a good deal of time with Congressman Ryan. When his plan came out, I applauded it, as an important step. … We’re going to have to make changes like the ones Paul Ryan proposed.”
5. “The same page.” In March, on a local Wisconsin radio show called the Vicki McKenna Show, Romney told the host “Paul Ryan and I have been working together over some months to talk about our mutual plans and we’re on the same page.”
The Romney campaign’s attempt to distance itself from Ryan’s budget is particularly striking, given that one of Romney’s surrogates attacked Newt Gingrich’s campaign for doing the same thing during the GOP presidential primary. Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu said on a call with reporters, “Mitt Romney supports what Paul Ryan did. He endorsed what Paul Ryan did. Mitt Romney had his own package of entitlement reform, which Paul Ryan has praised. They both meshed together.”
Now that Romney is distancing himself from the proposal, it will be interesting to know which parts of Ryan’s budget he disagrees with.
By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, August 11, 2012
“Romney’s Incredible Extremes”: Mitt Romney’s Tax And Spending Plans Are Irresponsible And Cruel
Mitt Romney’s tax and spending plans are so irresponsible, so cruel, so extreme that they are literally incredible. Voters may find it hard to believe anyone would support such things, so they are likely to discount even factual descriptions as partisan distortion.
The pro-Obama New Priorities PAC stumbled across this phenomena early in 2012 in its focus group testing. When they informed a focus group that Romney supported the budget plan by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and thus championed ending Medicare as we know it while also championing tax cuts for the wealthy, focus group participants simply didn’t believe it. No politician could be so clueless.
Incredulity may complement what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd dubbed Romney’s strategy of “hiding in plain sight.” Romney refuses to release his tax returns, scrubbed the records and e-mails of his time as governor and as head of the Olympics, keeps secret details of his Bain dealings and covers up the names of his bundlers. And then, he’s able to announce extremely cruel policy positions with impunity, because the voters just can’t believe that’s what he is for.
This is what comes to mind with the publication of a study on the effects of the Romney tax policy by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center and the Brookings Institution.
The study took its assumptions from Romney’s tax agenda on his Web page — where he promises to cut tax rates by 20 percent, sustain all the Bush tax breaks, keep the reduced rate for capital gains, eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, eliminate capital gains taxes on married families earning less than $200,000 (or as Gingrich noted, on those that don’t have any capital gains) and eliminate the estate tax (a small boon to his strapping sons).
Romney then promises to make these cuts without losing revenue by eliminating tax loopholes. Only he refuses to identify which tax breaks or loopholes he would eliminate.
Under the best (and most improbable) of circumstances — that the Congress decided to completely eliminate tax expenditures for those making over $200,000 before reducing any of the benefits to those making under that amount — the study found that Romney’s tax plan would transfer a staggering $86 billion in tax burden from those making over $200,000 to those making under that amount. Millionaires would pocket an average tax cut of $87,000 while everyone else would suffer a tax hike of $500 a year.
That’s because to make up for the lost income, Congress would have to cut the mortgage deduction, the deduction for gifts to charity, the deduction for employer based health care, the Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credit that goes to middle- and lower-income earners. But simply eliminating these and other tax breaks for the rich doesn’t generate enough revenue. So the people who really take it in the teeth are middle-income earners — small business people, middle management and professionals. It is, the study concluded, “not mathematically possible” to lower tax rates as Romney proposes without giving the rich a tax break and working and middle-income people a tax hike.
But will people believe that Romney really is for that — more tax breaks for the rich paid for by tax hikes on working families? Most of course will never learn about the Romney tax plan. But even those that do, could they ever accept the incredible truth?
Last month, the Democracy Corps, led by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, released a survey arguing that Obama and Democrats benefit greatly when the election is framed as a choice on the Republicans’ Ryan plan, the extreme budget passed by the House of Representatives, that exacts deep cuts in education, programs for poor children and turns Medicare into a voucher that pushes more and more costs on seniors.
In their survey, Obama’s margin over Romney “more than doubles” when the election is framed on the two candidates’ position on the Ryan budget. That of course, assumes that the election can be so framed, and that the voters will accept the assumption. But as the Priorities crowd discovered, voters have a hard time believing any politician could be supporting 20 percent cuts in education, an elimination of the refundable tax credit for children or dramatically changing Medicare. That is simply too extreme to be believed.
Ironically, of course, if Romney is elected and Republicans keep the House, the tea party right will claim a mandate. As Grover Norquist says, the House will drive the agenda and Romney will sign anything that emerges from the Senate. And sadly, given that the millionaires on the Democratic side of the Senate aisle aren’t nearly as united as those on the Republican side — and many are dependent on funding from some of the same special interests that now dominate Washington — we’re likely to see less Senate obstruction and more “bipartisan cooperation” on an agenda that Americans consider literally incredible.
The only hope is that voters take another look before they decide to vote for a change. In the case of Romney, the Republican really does support a budget plan that would scrap Medicare and give tax breaks to millionaires. He really is planning to eliminate Wall Street safeguards and take away health-care benefits from millions. He really believes the country will be better off if more teachers and police officers are laid off and foreclosures continue unabated.He really does want to deregulate Wall Street again, and gut the protections the EPA provides for clean air and clean water, to say nothing of global warming, the existence of which he now denies.
This isn’t a liberal caricature based on election-year demagoguery; this is Mitt Romney’s policy agenda. That is truly incredible — incredibly true.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 7, 2012
“Hurting The Most Vulnerable”: Cutbacks To Unemployment Insurance Came Long Before The Great Recession
You may have heard that we’re in the middle of an unemployment crisis. It’s little wonder that an average of 365,500 people per week made new claims for unemployment benefits over the past month. These high numbers have been straining unemployment insurance programs at the federal and state level, and many states have run out of reserves to pay for them, triggering a reduction in benefits. But this crisis wasn’t inevitable. The pull back in unemployment benefits is just another result of state-level choices to cut taxes at the expense of state spending, spending that could be cushioning the blow of the Great Recession.
States are unable to adequately finance their unemployment insurance programs just when they are most needed not because they were unexpectedly overwhelmed. As a new report from the National Employment Law Project shows, it was because they failed to finance them during the good times like they’re supposed to. Here’s the way it works: federal law requires each state to collect unemployment insurance contributions from employers and deposit them into a state trust fund held in the treasury. During good times, the trust funds accumulate reserves so that claims can be paid out during downturns. This makes the program countercyclical, helping to pump money into workers’ pockets and therefore businesses (via their spending) when times are tough.
The problem is that employer contribution rates vary among and even within states. Not shockingly, business groups turn on political pressure to reduce employer contributions and taxes during good times before the coffers are adequately full. And too many states gave in to this temptation before the recession. As the report notes, “Thirty‐one states reduced UI taxes by at least 20 percent between 1995 and 2005.” Meanwhile, from 2000–09 the average UI contribution rate was .65 percent of total wages, “the lowest in the life of our federal‐state UI program.” That left many of the reserves underfunded, especially when they were called upon to respond to the financial crisis.
And now, of course, the demand for these benefits is at a historically high levels. So what have states done to address the fact that they don’t have the funds to pay them out? The solutions “have tended to focus more on curtailing and reducing benefit payments than on the revenue side of the equation,” the report says. That is, rather than looking at ways to hike taxes or employer contributions to make up the shortfall, most states have cut back on benefits for the unemployed.
Over the past thirty years, lawmakers have eroded long-standing features such as the duration of benefits that were “previously seen as untouchable,” and today’s responses follow that trend. Six states have reduced the maximum duration of benefits below twenty-six weeks, which has been the standard since the 1950s. Other states have put up barriers to benefits, like drug testing requirements and excluding seasonal workers. Several states and even the federal government have limited the number of unemployed workers who qualify, forced skilled workers to accept low-wage jobs and lowered the value of payments. Meanwhile, most states did nothing to raise revenues or “passed token policies that will raise a negligible amount of revenue”—the only states to buck that trend were Colorado, Rhode Island and Vermont.
This may sound familiar. That’s because tax cuts have gotten in the way of other important policies at the state level. As Mike Konczal and I showed earlier this year, a handful of ultraconservative state governments were responsible for the massive wave of public sector job losses the country has experienced during the recovery. But layoffs weren’t the only option for dealing with tight state budgets: many of these states also cut corporate taxes or taxes on high-income earners (or both). Estimates have shown that without these job losses, unemployment would likely be a full percentage point lower than what it is now.
And there’s another fiscally irresponsible choice a number of states have said they’ll be making soon: the refusal to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law struck down the part that would have all but ensured across-the-board participation, and now at least fifteen governors are indicating that they’ll opt out—despite the fact that the federal government will pick up the tab for the full price of expansion in the early years and 90 percent after that. One study even found that the expansion could actually end up saving these states money. But even if that didn’t pan out, Richard Kim recently made a clear case that there are some pretty painless ways for these states to find the money to expand Medicaid. The only catch? They require raising taxes. Either by undoing some unnecessary tax breaks or raising taxes modestly, the states that are threatening fiscal ruin at the hands of this mandate can actually easily afford what it’ll cost them. Small price to pay when Medicaid saves lives.
So-called “tough choices” aren’t always so tough. Some of the policies that are exacerbating the effects of the recession and hurting the most vulnerable among us have been implemented because states refuse to look at the revenue side of their ledgers. The choices to lower taxes or ignore raising them aren’t made in a vacuum. There are often painful consequences, borne by those who can least afford it.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, August 6, 2012
“Mystical Economic Pixie Dust”: The Tax Trap Springs Shut On Romney
It’s all too easy to hyperventilate about the importance of this or that campaign development in an electorate where swing voters are few and pay little attention to the news, but Mitt Romney appears to have blundered his way into a bona fide political disaster with his tax plan. Republican policy elites and fund-raisers fervently believe, for both moral and economic reasons, in the paramount necessity of cutting taxes for the rich. This position is, however, a political trap; the vast majority of Americans want taxes on the rich to be higher, not lower, and the commitment to cutting taxes on the rich further requires larger entitlement cuts or higher middle class taxes, both of which are more unpopular still.
At the outset of his campaign, Romney tried to avoid committing himself, but by February, with GOP rivals outflanking him and facing steady pressure from Republican elites, he declared himself in favor of a 20 percent tax cut, a move greeted with joy from anti-tax activists. But he still attempted to hide the ball. Romney promised that his rate cut would be matched by closing tax deductions and some unspecified allowance for economic growth, and thus would not decrease the level (or the share) of taxes paid by the rich. Romney’s boast that his plan could not be scored revealed the essential calculation. But the campaign miscalculated. Yesterday’s study by the Brookings Institution and the Tax Policy Center showed that, even allowing for the faster growth predicted by Romney’s own economist, there aren’t enough tax deductions to account for the cost of the lower rates for the rich — raising taxes for the middle class would be the only way to make Romney’s promises add up. Romney didn’t hide the ball well enough.
Obama has already unleashed an ad making the simple and devastating point that Romney is proposing to cut taxes of people like himself and raise them on the vast majority of the public: http://youtu.be/r1D1jI61ckY
Romney’s play here is to turn the study’s findings into a matter of partisan dispute. It has mustered two arguments. The first is that the Brookings study cannot be trusted because its authors are biased. (Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom called the study a “joke.”) The Weekly Standard pushes this line, noting that one of its authors visited the White House twelve times. Unfortunately, Romney’s campaign itself once cited the Tax Policy Center (accurately) as “objective,” and its findings are basically simple math.
Romney’s second argument is more convoluted. The study examined the effects of Romney’s income tax proposals. He has also promised to reform the corporate tax code. Romney policy advisor Lanhee Chen argued yesterday that Romney corporate tax reforms could increase economic growth even more. So, even though the study allowed for optimistic growth assumptions of the income tax cuts, it didn’t also allow for optimistic assumptions of the corporate tax cuts.
Of course, Romney doesn’t really have a corporate tax reform plan. He says basically the same thing everybody says. The corporate tax code is filled with deductions and loopholes. The statutory rate (35 percent) is unusually high by international standards, but the effective rate is unusually low. We could lower the rate to, say, 28 percent, close a bunch of deductions and loopholes, and have a fairer tax code. That’s what Romney endorses, and it’s also what Obama endorses.
But the whole trick here is assembling an actual legislative coalition to pass a tax reform plan. The whole problem is that companies that benefit from loopholes and deductions lobby to keep them. Romney isn’t offering a policy blueprint for what deductions he would take away, let alone a plausible scenario to pass such a plan even if it did exist. He’s just using the mystical economic pixie dust of the nonexistent corporate tax reform plan in order to hold out the hope of some missing ingredient, some unmeasurable X factor, to keep his proposal in the safe dreamworld where the cruel tyranny of math cannot apply.
But the math is inescapable. When Romney looks back at the positions he adopted during the Republican primary — the hard line on immigration, the embrace of Paul Ryan — his pander to supply-siders may loom as his largest mistake.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, August 2, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 