“Assaulted, Victimized And Wounded”: It’s Hard Out There For A Billionaire
Is there a group of people you can think of who have thinner skin than America’s multi-millionaires and billionaires? Wall Street titans have been whining for a couple of years now about the horror of people in politics criticizing ineffective banking regulations and the favorable tax treatment so many wealthy people receive (you may remember the time when hedge fund billionaire Steven Schwarzman said that President Obama suggesting that we eliminate the “carried interest loophole,” which allows hedge fund managers to pay taxes at only the 15 percent capital gains rate instead of standard income tax rates, was “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939”). America’s barons feel assaulted, victimized, wounded in ways that not even a bracing ride to your Hamptons estate in your new Porsche 911 can salve. And now that the presidential campaign is in full swing, their tender feelings are being hurt left and right.
David Weigel points us to this remarkable video, in which someone at the Heritage Foundation interviews an aggrieved Frank VanderSloot, an ordinary businessman whose “life changed forever” when “President Obama’s campaign included his name, and seven others, on an enemies list” because he donated to a pro-Romney superPAC. And what was VanderSloot subjected to, once he was placed on this “enemies list”? Harassment from government officials? IRS audits? Baseless prosecutions? National Park Police pulling him over, smashing one of his taillights, then giving him a ticket for having a broken taillight? Well, no. But it is true that he was mentioned on an Obama campaign web site as a major donor to a Romney superPAC. That’s the “enemies list.” As far as we can tell, no actual government action was taken against him, though he did lose some customers when people found out about his political activities. The entire part of the post concerning VanderSloot reads as follows:
Frank Vandersloot: Frank Vandersloot is the national finance co-chairman of the Romney campaign and, through his company Melaleuca, has donated $1 million to Restore Our Future. He is also a “litigious, combative, and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement” who “spent big” on ads in an “ultimately unsuccessful effort to force Idaho Public Television to cancel a program that showed gays and lesbians in a favorable light to school children.”
Shield your eyes from the brutal government oppression!
The quotes come from this Mother Jones article about VanderSloot, his political activities, and his company, a “multi-level marketing” firm that sells supplements and cleaning products. You can argue that the “multi-level marketing” industry is basically made up of con artists who make money by roping gullible people into pyramid schemes and convincing them they’ll make riches without actually working. I don’t know enough about VanderSloot’s company to say if this is an accurate picture of what it does. But what’s critical is that the Obama campaign never criticized VanderSloot’s business practices, or attacked him for being rich. The paragraph they put on their web site about VanderSloot concerned his involvement in politics.
Frank VanderSloot has a lot of money, and has decided to use some of that money to engage in politics, both in his home state and nationally, by doing things like taking out ads about issues that concern him in newspapers and on billboards, and investing heavily in the candidacy of Mitt Romney, whom he’d like to see become president. Which is fine. I’d prefer a system in which it wouldn’t be legal for multi-millionaires to buy presidential candidates, but in America today it is legal. But the whining we get from them is just unbelievable. These guys all seem to think that they are the personal embodiment of the wonder of free enterprise, and if anybody ever criticizes them for their political activities, it can only mean that economic freedom itself is under vicious assault. “We don’t hear about the American Dream anymore, do we? It’s almost a bad thing. It’s almost evil if you become successful in America today,” VanderSloot says in the video. “The whole principle of people getting out there and producing jobs for folks, we ought to go back to knowing that’s a good thing as opposed to believing it’s not.”
I’ve got a deal for Mr. Vandersloot. I’m only an underpaid political writer, but I hereby declare that I will give him one billion dollars if he can show me a time when that committed socialist Barack Obama ever said that “people getting out there and producing jobs for folks” is a bad thing.
I find VanderSloot’s whining particularly grating because as a political writer, I get attacked all the time. People say that I’m wrong, people say that I’m an idiot and a jerk, I get plenty of hate mail, and I’ve even gotten some threats. The latter are a bit unsettling, but as for everything else, it comes with the territory. Like giving a million dollars to a super PAC, writing about politics is a choice, and if you can’t tolerate anybody disagreeing with you, or even calling you names from time to time, you shouldn’t do either one. What VanderSloot obviously wants is a situation in which he can put millions of dollars into influencing the course of elections and policy debates, but nobody ever criticizes him for it. Well, that’s just not how things work in a democracy.
Speaking of one billion dollars, that’s the amount that wealthy people and corporations are planning to spend this fall to make sure that Mitt Romney is the next president. It’s a good investment on their part–just think of all the goodies a Romney administration could shower on America’s beleaguered and oppressed wealthy.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, May 30, 2012
“Preserving The Status Quo”: Pope’s Butler Arrested, Nun’s Investigated, Which Is The Bigger Scandal?
Let’s face it — everybody loves a juicy scandal, especially when it involves the Vatican. And dear Animals, lest you think I veer from the topic of politics to which I am pledged while guest-blogging here, I can assure you that there is nothing in the realm of the Holy See that is not political.
From the Associated Press:
The Vatican confirmed Saturday that the pope’s butler had been arrested in its embarrassing leaks scandal, adding a Hollywood twist to a sordid tale of power struggles, intrigue and corruption in the highest levels of Catholic Church governance.
Paolo Gabriele, a layman who lives inside Vatican City, was arrested Wednesday with secret documents in his possession and was being held Saturday, the Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement.
At issue are confidential letters to and from Pope Benedict XVI regarding the Vatican’s financial dealings disclosed in the recently published book, His Holiness, by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. The AP notes that the scandal “has seriously embarrassed the Vatican at a time in which it is trying to show the world financial community that it has turned a page and shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”
So, in arresting Gabriele, the Vatican is doing what it does best with those who would challenge its sources and methods: putting the screws to them.
You’d think that the pope and his men might be so consumed with straightening out the Holy See’s financial mess, and penitentially finding the institution’s way back to the straight and narrow that they’d have little time to do much else. But, no, instead the pope has seen fit to focus his institution’s resources on a mission designed to bring U.S. nuns into line.
From Reuters’ Stephanie Simon:
The Vatican last month accused the leading organization of U.S. nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, of focusing too much on social-justice issues such as poverty and not enough on abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia. The Vatican also rapped the group for standing by as some nuns publicly challenged U.S. bishops on matters of church doctrine and public policy.
In a move that many nuns viewed as an insult, the Vatican put the nuns’ organization under the effective control of three U.S. bishops, who have the power to rewrite its statutes, its meeting agendas and even its liturgical texts. The board of the Leadership Conference is due to meet next week in Washington, D.C. to mull a response.
Those of a certain age may recall when, during a papal visit in 1979, Sister Theresa Kane, then president of the Leadership Conference, challenged Pope John Paul II to include women in the priesthood. At the time, Cardinal Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict, was JPII doctrinal enforcer. He apparently holds a grudge.
Readers may also remember the Vatican Bank scandal of the 1980s, which involved all manner of financial shenanigans, including a counterfeiting scheme that involved the delivery of $14.5 million in bogus bonds to the Vatican. All told, the Vatican Bank scams amounted to a “$1.3 billion scandal,” according to the New York Times And back in the 1980s, $1.3 billion was real money.
In 2009, now retired from her office at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Sr Kane addressed a gathering of the National Coalition of American Nuns, just as the Vatican embarked on its investigation of LCWR. From the National Catholic Reporter:
“Regarding the present interrogation, I think the male hierarchy is truly impotent, incapable of equality, co-responsibility in adult behavior,” she said, not mincing any words. “In the church today, we are experiencing a dictatorial mindset and spiritual violence.”
A scandal, then, of epic proportions.
BY: Adele Stan, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 26, 2012
“GOP Tax Jihad Continues”: The Enemy Within Shoots Down The Buffett Rule
To nobody’s surprise, the Senate has blocked the Buffett Rule that would have required those earning more than $1 million a year to pay a minimum tax of 30 percent.
The 51-46 vote—short of the 60 votes in support needed to bring the measure to the floor—went along party lines with only GOP Senator Susan Collins crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats while Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas sided with the Republicans.
While passage of the measure is estimated to bring in only $47 billion in additional revenue, the proposed law, which has been actively pushed by the Obama Administration, is viewed by supporters as fairness issue while opponents claim that the rich already pay a disproportionate share of the nation’s tax revenue.
Failure of the bill to advance is also likely to give the President a popular issue for his re-election campaign, given the strong support for the law among the general public. According to a CNN/ORC poll out today, 72 percent of the nation’s registered voters support the measure.
Expressing disappointment with the vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said,
The wealthiest one percent takes home the highest share of the nation’s income since the early ’20s, the roaring ’20s. Times are tough for many middle class American families. Millionaires and billionaires aren’t sharing the pain or the sacrifice, not one bit. Last year there were 7,000 millionaires who didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes.
But Republicans aren’t buying it, arguing that the proposal is nothing more than a ‘political gimmick’—or so says GOP Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell:
The problem is, we’ve got a president who seems more interested in pitting people against each other than he is in actually doing what it takes to face these challenges head on. By wasting so much time on this political gimmick that even Democrats admit won’t solve our larger problems, it’s shown the president is more interested in misleading people than he is in leading.
Last week, ThinkProgress posted a video of President Ronald Reagan giving a speech indicating that he too objected to the notion of a secretary paying a higher rate of tax than her employer, the circumstance that gave rise to Warren Buffett’s proposal that resulted in his name going on this piece of legislation.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, April 16, 2012
“Don’t Tell Anybody”: Romney Offers A Peek Behind The Policy Curtain
“I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go,” Romney said. “Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later. But I’m not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we’ve got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states.”
“I’m going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction,” he continued, adding that he would also support eliminating deductions for state income and property taxes.
Till now, Romney has been very specific about his intention to be very vague. Back in March, he told the conservative Weekly Standard, “one of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education…So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”
Sunday’s comments, however, were “overheard by reporters on a sidewalk below.” Romney thought he was speaking privately to a group of conservative donors. And so they offer, in theory, a look behind the curtain. The only problem is there’s not much there.
Romney’s tax plan — which extends all the Bush tax cuts and then cuts taxes even further — will cost the Treasury trillions of dollars in lost revenue. You can’t make that up by capping a few deductions for high-income taxpayers. And while it sounds very tough to talk about closing agencies, it doesn’t save you much money unless you’re also willing to cut the services they provide.
To make his numbers add up, Romney needs to close the largest and most popular deductions in the tax code and cut huge swaths of government social spending. And as of now, he’s not willing to talk about doing that. Not even in private.
By: Ezra Klein, Wonkblog, The Washington Post, April 16, 2012
“Magic Asterisks”: Buffett Rule Is Not Raising A Tax; It’s Closing Republican Tax Loopholes
The debate over the Buffett Rule is missing something important. As it stands, the fight is between Democrats who believe millionaires shouldn’t pay a lower tax rate than the middle class vs. Republicans who says no one’s taxes should go up by any amount at any time for any reason.
That’s a legitimate fight, to be sure, but there’s more to it: approving the Buffett Rule would mean closing a loophole, and in the larger context of the debate over tax policy, this makes all the difference in the world.
Let’s step back for a second. Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget plan appears to add an additional $5.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. Ryan insists that’s not the case — once he “clears out all the special-interest loopholes,” his numbers will start to add up.
Which loopholes? Well, it turns out that Ryan refuses to say. Maybe they’re secret loopholes; maybe they’re imaginary loopholes; but either way, he hasn’t identified any — literally, not one — loophole he’s willing to close to help pay for his own agenda. It is, as Paul Krugman put it, the “mystery meat” of the Republican plan.
“Oh, yeah?” my Republicans friends ask, “well why don’t Democrats come up with some loopholes to close?”
And therein lies the point: the Buffett Rule closes a loophole. It’s a quirk of the tax code that certain millionaires who enjoy private-equity riches pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families, and approving the Buffett Rule would not only mean establishing a degree of fairness, it would also mean scrapping this loophole.
The point is not lost on President Obama, who made this observation on Wednesday:
“I’d just point out that the Buffett Rule is something that will get us moving in the right direction towards fairness, towards economic growth. It will help us close our deficit and it’s a lot more specific than anything that the other side has proposed so far.” [emphasis added]
In other words, where Paul Ryan is vague and evasive, Obama is being direct and specific. The president is identifying actual loopholes he wants to see closed (Buffett Rule, corporate-jet loophole, tax subsidies for oil companies), which would total tens of billions of dollars in the coming decade. Meanwhile Republican leaders talk about loopholes, but choose not to back this talk up with anything substantive.
One approach represents an honest budget policy. The other, relying on magic asterisks, is a fraud.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 13, 2012
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