“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
“It’s August Already”: Will We Ever Get To See Romney’s 2011 Tax Return?
I don’t know about you, but this year I filed my taxes just before the April 15 deadline. Most people do. But if you need to, you can file for an extension from the IRS. That’s what Mitt Romney did. And if you look around the discussion about his taxes, you’ll find that everyone keeps referring to the “two years of tax returns” Romney has agreed to release. But what people don’t mention is that Romney hasn’t actually released two years of tax returns. He released one year, his 2010 return (and even that was incomplete). But we haven’t seen his 2011 return. He keeps saying he’ll release it when it’s ready, but is it going to be ready before November?
In fairness, Mitt Romney’s taxes are really, really complicated. He has so many different income streams and accounts and pass-throughs and roundabouts and double-flipping financial McTwists that it takes a team of accountants to prepare the documents. His 2010 return ran to more than 200 pages. But it’s August. Maybe someone should ask whether the accountants are making progress.
My guess is that for the next three months, every time the question comes up, Romney will say that the return is being prepared, and he’ll release it as soon as it’s ready. And then lo and behold we’ll get to election day never having seen it.
From Romney’s perspective, this makes perfect strategic sense. Nobody seems interested in the 2011 return, so there isn’t much cost to putting it off, and if he does release it, that’ll mean a couple of days of stories about all the interesting stuff it contains. It’s essentially the same calculation as he’s using on the rest of his returns: there’s a cost to not releasing them, but it’s evidently smaller than the cost he anticipates from releasing them. So, voters: No tax returns for you!
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 6, 2012
“No Budget, No Pay”: How To Get Congress On Good Behavior
If taxpayers want better results from Congress, they must stop paying their elected officials for failure. After all, you get what you pay for.
That’s why I’ve introduced a bill called No Budget, No Pay. It’s not your typical congressional reform. It is the first effort to pay Congress for performance, the way that an increasing number of doctors, teachers, corporate executives, athletes, and other professionals are paid.
The bill, H.R. 3643, is so simple that it sells itself. If Congress fails to pass a budget and all 12 appropriations bills by the beginning of each fiscal year, October 1, congressional pay will stop. If Congress is even a day late, the penalties could be hundreds of dollars per day per congressman. Longer delays mean greater penalties (and the missed pay cannot be retroactively restored). It’s a harsh regime, but a necessary one. Our nation suffers when Congress fails to pay America’s bills on time.
Today’s Congress has not passed a budget in three years and has not completed all of its budget and appropriations bills on time in 15 years. Few incumbents can even remember meeting these obligations. This is no way to run a superpower.
Congress is so accustomed to today’s back-loaded schedule that it cannot imagine efficiency. Congress barely meets in January and February and, this year, the House was in session for only 10 days in May. Each house delights in passing bills that are dead on arrival in the other body. No Budget, No Pay would make the House and Senate actually talk to one another again. The heat from members to meet the deadline would be so intense that Congress, as a whole, could start forging deals.
A conventional reform would simply levy a flat penalty to punish Congress for tardiness. That’s like yanking a teenager’s allowance because he misbehaved. The goal should be to encourage better behavior. The threat of cutting congressional pay would do precisely that.
Properly understood, No Budget, No Pay is gentler than you think. It will not result in a single senator or congressman losing any pay. The reason: When everyone has an incentive to meet a deadline, you naturally finish on time, even early. For example, when California legislators tried it, they suddenly got much better at meeting deadlines. This is the power of aligned incentives: When everyone is on the same team, you have a much better chance of winning. The threat of punishment is more effective than the punishment itself.
This new type of reform engages the most powerful lobbyists on earth: congressional spouses. No one wants to miss a paycheck, especially spouses who are tired of excuses. These spouses will force Congress to work much harder much earlier in the winter and spring, instead of procrastinating into the summer and fall. Remember, members’ spouses have never let Congress miss a major holiday like Christmas. No Budget, No Pay puts October 1 in the same elite category as December 25.
The dirty secret of today’s Congress is that many members actually benefit from missing our financial deadlines. When they hold up negotiations, highlight a parochial cause, and take a budget or appropriations bill hostage, they get lots of free publicity and become a hero to the special interests they are protecting. This helps them finance their reelection campaigns. Some of their colleagues will honestly object to the delays, but most are just waiting for their own chance to grandstand. Meanwhile, taxpayers suffer because government agencies are crippled with unpredictable funding starts and stops on a month-to-month or even week-to-week basis. Sometimes a key agency like the Federal Aviation Administration is even forced to shut down many of its operations, as happened last August.
Having experienced (and often envied) their colleagues’ selfishness, many members are naturally afraid to be held accountable for the behavior of Congress as a whole. They are particularly afraid to vouch for the other body, either the House or Senate. Social scientists call this a collective action problem. It seems foolish to bet a paycheck that any group of politicians will be prompt. But these doubters have never been in a capitol where everyone was desperate to get paid.
Some fear that wealthy colleagues could afford to grandstand, while poorer members would be deprived of that free publicity. This is possible, but the rich are just as vulnerable to peer group pressure, sometimes more so, because they do not want to be stigmatized for being wealthy. The vast majority of members in the Senate and House need their paychecks and would be quick to ostracize anyone who slowed the budget process down, particularly a rich colleague. Fearing for their positions, party leaders would also make sure that wealthy members were not able to obstruct.
The task is an urgent one. The bill currently has 10 cosponsors in the Senate and 73 in the House. We need more cosponsors now, because there are only a few weeks left in this session of Congress before the November elections. Of course, Congress will miss its October 1 deadline again this year, but passage of No Budget, No Pay this fall would help us meet the deadline next year, in October of 2013. Unless Congress passes No Budget, No Pay this session, no adjustments to congressional pay will be possible until at least 2015, because the 27th Amendment requires an intervening election before any adjustment to congressional pay.
Since no president or Supreme Court has the constitutional power to reform Congress, Congress must heal itself with help from voters back home. Ultimately, Congressional medicine is like veterinary medicine: It must be strong enough to work, and tasty enough to swallow. No Budget, No Pay meets all these tests. It is hugely popular with voters, potent enough to make Congress meet the annual October 1 deadline, and palatable to members once they understand that they will be paid — because they will finish their work on time.
By: U. S. Rep Jim Cooper, The Atlantic, July 26, 2012
“Magic Word Gaffes”: So What If A Few Facts Get Bent Or Invented Along The Way
Reading a lot of conservative posts last night and this morning (unfortunately, just part of the gig here), I was mystified at the conviction of so many people that the mangled clips of the president’s “you didn’t build that” quote from Roanoke provided a gigantic, “aha” moment in the campaign that would drive Obama from the White House like a whipped Kenyan dog. The money quote that most of them are tossing around comes from the deep thinker Pat Sajak:
It’s as if President Obama climbed into a tank, put on his helmet, talked about how his foray into Cambodia was seared in his memory, looked at his watch, misspelled “potato” and pardoned Richard Nixon all in the same day.
Really? I mean, even if you buy the twisted, mendacious version of the Obama quote that the Romney campaign is retailing, are Americans really so protective of the tender sensibilities of business owners that they are shocked anyone would suggest that each and every one of them built their businesses strictly on their own? (Aside from from roads and bridges and inheritances, how’s about employees as a significant factor in business success?).
But then Dave Weigel explained it to me:
Call it a magic word gaffe—a statement that reveals not what a politician believes, but what you already feared, in your bone marrow, that a politician believes. Democrats still can’t understand why Obama’s speech is supposed to offend anyone. Republicans know that he’s a closet socialist, and that this sentiment only comes out when his energy is flagging….
A normal gaffe is usually discovered by the “mainstream” press, or by a rival campaign, in real time. Think about the Obama campaign hounding John McCain on his “the fundamentals of the economy are sound” as Lehman collapsed. Think about “the private sector is doing fine” becoming proof, for Romney, that Obama saw no problems in the private sector. The magic word gaffe takes more digging, because the media that mostly covers campaigns aren’t primed to hear what partisans hear.
Barack Obama’s presidency has been full of these moments. If you watched Glenn Beck during his Fox News years, you got endless exposure (more than 100 episodes of it, according to Lexis-Nexis) to an Oct. 30, 2008 quote from an Obama rally in Columbia, Mo. “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” said the candidate.
Bingo. The “magic word gaffe” is sort of the inverse of the “dog whistle” whereby pols use banal language that has a special meaning to ideologues (“constitutional conservative” being one notable example; “respect for life” being another). For our right-wing brothers and sisters, progressive (itself a magic word—maybe even a secret handshake—connoting Marxist convictions) discourse is full of these signifiers. “Equality.” “Fairness.” “Giving something back.” “Shared sacrifice.” Constant vigilance for these magic words is how conservatives have convinced themselves that the blandly pragmatic center-left politician Barack Obama pursuing leftover moderate Republican policies is a villain-figure straight out of Atlas Shrugged or (for the godly) Left Behind, hating success and righteousness.
The problem with this stuff, of course, is that the low-information swing voters who will decide the present election will require an awful lot of education to understand the magic word gaffes. They haven’t marinated their brains with Beckian revisionist history and don’t run around pasting “Breitbart Is Here!” posters on telephone poles. Many of them, in fact, probably don’t own businesses and don’t much think of their own bosses—much less the Mitt Romneys of the world—as heroic figures. So the nastiness aimed at Obama will inevitably get a lot coarser than what we are hearing today. So what if a few facts get bent or invented along the way? America must be protected!
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 20, 2012
“The Unraveling”: Republican Drooling, Stupid, Transparent, Self Conscious Lying
One of the habits of political spinmeisters that I dislike the most is the tendency to claim that close contests are invariably about to break wide open into a complete debacle, a historic humiliation, a defeat of biblical proportions for their opponent. I don’t know what this sort of stupid, transparent, self-conscious lying is supposed to accomplish. Intimidation? Exciting “the base?” Discouraging the other “team’s” “base?” Working the refs? Beats me.
In any event, we’re getting a lot of this right now from the Romney campaign and its supporters. Here’s an item from The Hill:
A top Romney spokeswoman said the Obama campaign’s allegations that he misled the public over his tenure at Bain Capital are “reckless and wild,” and a sign that the president’s campaign is “unraveling.”
And here’s a post from Michael Walsh at The Corner:
The Obama campaign’s desperate “felony” charge against Mitt Romney ought to serve as a wake-up call for the Romney campaign and for the American public regarding the utter amorality of the president and his functionaries.
Neither of these excited people is offering any rationale for why the Obama campaign should be feeling “reckless and wild” or “desperate,” or should be “unraveling.” Well, actually, the Romney staffer in the Hill story, Gail Gitcho, offered this drooling bit of spin that wouldn’t fool a first grader:
[T]his attack from yesterday has frankly just jumped the shark and it shows that the Obama campaign, they are scared to death of having to run on their own record because they haven’t been able to create jobs and they have no plans in the future to be able to fix the economy, and that’s what the American people care about.”
That, BTW, is an excellent example of another spinmestier habit I absolutely hate, which is making generalizations about what “the American people” think or want.
But anyway, why would anyone actually think the Obama campaign is in extremis right now? Every time I turn around there’s another article about the incredible stability of the polls of this contest, and their utter imperviousness to the events of the campaign. The electorate is so polarized that Obama couldn’t drop to more than a few points behind Romney even if he suddenly came out and said his favorite writer was Frantz Fanon. The actual outcome is likely going to depend on GOTV efforts that aren’t even underway yet. So what, pray tell, is the point of the constant claims that Obama’s panicking or is going to lose as badly as Mondale or has been “rejected by the American people?” Will this change a single vote? I can’t imagine why.
What “the American people” really need are spinmeisters who are a little less shameless.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 13, 2012
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