“No Such Thing As Good Luck?: For Mitt Romney, His Entire Life Has Been A String Of Good Luck
Now that we’re having a real debate about the fundamentals of capitalism and success, it’s worth considering another part of the now-infamous “You didn’t build that” speech President Obama recently gave. When he was accused of taking Obama’s words out of context, Mitt Romney’s defense was that “The context is worse than the quote.” As evidence, he cited not the actual context of “You didn’t build that” but what Obama said a paragraph before, about the role of fortune in success. And it’s that idea—that success has to do not only with hard work and talent but also with luck—that really got Mitt Romney steamed. Here’s the passage in question:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there
You might think that this would be hard to argue with, but as David Frum observed, many successful people find the idea that luck played a part in their success to be deeply offensive. And it makes me wonder whether Mitt Romney himself believes that the fact that his father was a wealthy industrialist and governor had nothing to do with his financial success. Does he think that if he been born to a poor single mother in backwoods Appalachia, he would have grown up to be the same private equity titan he turned out to be?
I’m guessing he does, but it would be interesting to hear what he said if someone asked him, “Governor, what role do you think luck played in your success? Do you think you had more of a chance to succeed because of who your parents were?”
Don’t know about you, but I’m happy to admit that luck played a large part in whatever success I’ve had. I was fortunate in my parents; we weren’t rich, but they valued education highly, created an environment with lots of opportunities for learning, and moved us to a town with excellent public schools. Had I been born in more deprived circumstances, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have had anything like the opportunities I did, and I seriously doubt I would have pulled myself up by my bootstraps unless some other piece of luck fell my way. Luck played some part in getting most of the jobs I had, even if it was just knowing someone who knew someone who had an opening. I work hard enough, but I’m not such a jerk that I don’t understand how lucky I am to have a career as a writer, which is absurdly cushy compared to the jobs of people who stand on an assembly line or run around a distribution center or change bedpans. In my youth I had just enough exposure to a series of not-particularly-pleasant jobs like waiting tables and working a cash register in a supermarket to make me never forget how absurdly lucky I am to make a living doing what I do.
Mitt Romney is right about one thing: it’s hard to start and maintain a business. And it’s particularly hard if, unlike someone like Mitt Romney, you can’t live off your stocks when you do it. So I understand why some business owners would get their backs up when Romney tells them that Barack Obama told them they didn’t actually build their business. I’d hope they’d take the time to figure out that Romney is actually lying to them about that, but what can you do. But what I struggle to understand is the rich guy who thinks that luck played absolutely no part in him getting where he is. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t hear that coming from a guy who built up a construction business from the ground up. People like that have usually had exposure to enough bad luck to know good luck when they see it. It’s only the people whose entire lives have been nothing but a string of good luck who so angrily assert that there’s no such thing. It’s the Wall Street tools who got six-figure jobs in their uncle’s firm fresh out of Wharton who insist so vehemently that everything they have is because of their own talents. Only if you think that could you genuinely believe that an increase in your income tax of a few points constitutes some kind of communist attack on success.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 30, 2012
“The Job Creator”: Repeat After Me, Mitt Romney Doesn’t Care About Jobs
If you’re running a campaign against an incumbent president when the economy’s persistently sluggish and unemployment is over 8%, you are naturally going to harp on said president’s failure to create more jobs. This is true even if you are the nominee of the Jewish Anti-Abortion Isolationist Foodie Party (just to make something up), and really just care about “your issues.”
As it happens, Mitt Romney is the nominee of a party whose activist base and elite opinion-leaders alike mainly care about relieving businesses and the wealthy from taxes and regulations, paring back or eliminating the New Deal/Great Society social safety net (along with resisting extensions of it like the Affordable Care Act), and reversing most of the cultural trends of the late twentieth century. Do they think their agenda will generally produce a stronger society and economy, making Americans healthier, wealthier and wiser? Probably, though the “constitutional” wing of the conservative movement tends to treat small government, laissez-faire capitalism, and a patriarchal culture as having been divinely ordained via the Declaration of Independence, and thus as normative regardless of the practical consequences. Would they think that regardless of the current GDP and employment statistics? You betcha, because they were advancing much the same agenda during the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s. Would they support the same agenda if the federal budget were balanced? Absolutely, as we know from their argument prior to enactment of the Bush tax cuts that the federal government was in danger of running surpluses so large that it would have to start buying up assets to soak up the excess revenues.
I mention these familiar if oft-forgotten facts by way of presenting this snippet at The Hill from recent conservative semi-apostate Juan Williams, who is wondering what the Mitt Romney’s actual agenda might be to boost employment:
[F]ixing the economy is the entire basis of Romney’s campaign. So what plans does the GOP candidate have to rev up the economy?
His best-known idea is cutting taxes. But there is no way to specify how many jobs that will create. After-tax profits for corporations are already high.
His most concrete idea for creating jobs is to approve construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The idea has political potency because President Obama, citing environmental concerns, denied a permit for TransCanada Corp. to construct the 1,700-mile pipeline.
However, the number of jobs that would be created by Keystone could generously be described as modest.
That number, according to a study Williams cites, is 1,400. He also goes on to report that less than half of Republicans think Romney has an actual plan for the economy.
While the search for a Romney/GOP “jobs plan” is, to put it mildly, elusive, they do have very concrete ideas for reshaping the tax code and the federal government. It’s called the Ryan Budget, and whatever its long-term effect via the alleged moral tonic to the poor and the liberating impact on “job creators,” the most immediate and by far the most certain consequences for jobs are negative. I mean, you may rhetorically say that public-sector jobs aren’t “real” or “good” or that they pay too much, but they are jobs, not turnips. Combined with the restrictive monetary policies virtually all Republicans favor these days, the short-term prognosis for Republican rule is higher, not lower, unemployment.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 17, 2012
“Bootstrapping Your Way To The Top”: The Myth Of Rags To Riches
In the latest version of SimCity, a computer game that let’s you pretend to be an urban planner, city residents are born into an economic class and there they remain for life. This may have been done for simplicity’s sake, but the scenario makes the popular computer game disturbingly similar to the situation of most Americans.
The latest report from Pew Charitable Trusts, “Purusing the American Dream,” deals a stunning blow to any romantic notions of bootstrapping your way to the top. It turns out only 4 percent of those raised in the bottom 20 percent ever climb into the top 20 percent. Rather, people raised on one rung of the income ladder are likely to stay pretty close to it as adults. As the report notes, “Forty-three percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile remain stuck in the bottom as adults and 70 percent remain below the middle class.”
The report, from a non-partisan group that’s far from ideological, shows that while in absolute numbers, the vast majority of Americans are making more than their parents, those increases are rarely enough to help move Americans up the class ladder. In other words, even after adjusting for inflation, most Americans make more than their parents—but few have actually been able to change their socio-economic class. (The report uses the ladder analogy, and the rungs represents 20 percent marks.) That’s because the rich are getting richer faster; income growth has been disproportionately high among those who are already in the top 20 percent. That makes the distribution of classes significantly uneven, finds the report. “The difference between the size of the rungs between the two generations means that while the vast majority of Americans exceeded their parents’ family incomes, the extent of that increase—particularly at the bottom—was not always enough to move them to a different rung of the income ladder.” For 20 percent of Americans, they’re making more money than their parents but are still in a lower class rung.
Among African Americans, the cycle of poverty is even worse. They’re more likely than whites to get stuck in the bottom income quintile—more than half of blacks born in the bottom rung of the income ladder stay there as adults, compared with 33 percent of whites. Even more disturbing: Fifty-six percent of blacks raised in middle class families fall to the bottom two quintiles as adults.
The report confirms what many see in their daily lives: if you’re born rich or born poor, you’ll probably stay that way for the rest of your life. Right now, the American Dream seems to be just that—a myth with little relation to the reality. The implications are impossible to overstate. Our country’s identity is heavily rooted in the idea of economic mobility, and as far back as Alexis de Toqueville, commentators have discussed the importance of that belief. Conservative political rhetoric goes cheerfully on, of course, assuring us that anyone can be successful in this great country if they so choose. Meanwhile our public institutions are increasingly punitive to the poor: Whether it’s the humiliations of getting welfare or the difficulties of escaping student loan debt, we make the poor (and increasingly, the middle class) pay for the sin of not getting born in the right rung of the ladder.
Unlike a computer game, however, a static class system isn’t inevitable and doesn’t have to be permanent.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 11, 2012
“Warped Moral Universe”: Why The GOP Want’s To Raise Taxes On The Poor
Citing the widely-repeated meme on the right that 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax (not to be confused with taxes in general), James Kwak has two theories:
The first is that the modern Republican Party is funded by the very rich… The result is that the parties’ platforms now reflect the wishes of their major funders, not their median voters. This is why Republican presidential candidates spent the primary season competing to offer the most generous tax breaks to the rich—while Paul Ryan’s budget slashes Medicare, a program supported by the Tea Party rank and file. For the rich people who call the shots, it’s simply in their interest to lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor. End of story…
The other, even-more-disturbing explanation, is that Republicans see the rich as worthy members of society (the “producers”) and the poor as a drain on society (the “takers”). In this warped moral universe, it isn’t enough that someone with a gross income of $10 million takes home $8.1 million while someone with a gross income of $20,000 takes home $19,000.* That’s called “punishing success,” so we should really increase taxes on the poor person so we can “reward success” by letting the rich person take home even more. This is why today’s conservatives have gone beyond the typical libertarian and supply-side arguments for lower taxes on the rich, and the campaign to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich has taken on such self-righteous tones.
The most trafficked post ever on my own site continues to be this Graph of Doom look at the Newt Gingrich’s tax plan back when he was still running. It was stunning then and now how much the Republican primary candidates were tripping over each other to demonstrate how much they would give back to the ultra-rich. (See here for a full comparison of all the candidates.)
But, as Kwak says, they really seem to be invested in this Randian stuff. It should also be a reminder how badly Republicans are likely to govern. There on the ups now not because of any actual argument, but because of 1) the continuing unemployment crisis and 2) their skill at organizing. Their actual policy ideas would be laughable if they didn’t have an actual chance of becoming law.
There’s a halfway plausible argument that Romney would prefer to go big on Keynesian stimulus, like Nixon did, but when it comes to domestic policy, a determined Congress holds the whip hand. Be warned.
By: Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 6, 2012
“On WalMart Pond”: Markets, Morals And The Glorification Of Wealth
Does it bother you that an online casino paid a Utah woman, Kari Smith, who needed money for her son’s education, $10,000 to tattoo its Web site on her forehead?
Or that Project Prevention, a charity, pays women with drug or alcohol addictions $300 cash to get sterilized or undertake long-term contraception? Some 4,100 women have accepted this offer.
Michael Sandel, the Harvard political theorist, cites those examples in “What Money Can’t Buy,” his important and thoughtful new book. He argues that in recent years we have been slipping without much reflection into relying upon markets in ways that undermine the fairness of our society.
That’s one of the underlying battles this campaign year. Many Republicans, Mitt Romney included, have a deep faith in the ability of laissez-faire markets to create optimal solutions.
There’s something to that faith because markets, indeed, tend to be efficient. Pollution taxes are widely accepted as often preferable than rigid regulations on pollutants. It may also make sense to sell advertising on the sides of public buses, perhaps even to sell naming rights to subway stations.
Still, how far do we want to go down this path?
• Is it right that prisoners in Santa Ana, Calif., can pay $90 per night for an upgrade to a cleaner, nicer jail cell?
• Should the United States really sell immigration visas? A $500,000 investment will buy foreigners the right to immigrate.
• Should Massachusetts have gone ahead with a proposal to sell naming rights to its state parks? The Boston Globe wondered in 2003 whether Walden Pond might become Wal-Mart Pond.
• Should strapped towns accept virtually free police cars that come laden with advertising on the sides? Such a deal was negotiated and then ultimately collapsed, but at least one town does sell advertising on its police cars.
“The marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives,” Sandel writes. “We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. You might call it the skyboxification of American life. It’s not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live.”
“Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?”
This issue goes to the heart of fairness in our country. There has been much discussion recently about economic inequality, but almost no conversation about the way the spread of markets nurtures a broader, systemic inequality.
We do, of course, place some boundaries on markets. I can’t buy the right to cut off your leg for my amusement. Americans can sell blood, but (perhaps mistakenly) we don’t allow markets for kidneys and other organs, even though that would probably save lives.
Wealthy people can, in effect, buy access to the president at a $40,000-a-plate dinner, but they can’t purchase a Medal of Freedom. A major political donor can sometimes buy an ambassadorship, but not to an important country.
Where to draw the lines limiting the role of markets isn’t clear to me, but I’m pretty sure that we’ve already gone too far. I’m offended when governments auction naming rights to public property or sell special access, even if only to fast lanes on a highway or better cells in a jail. It is one thing for Delta Air Lines to have first class and coach. It is quite another for government to offer first class and coach in the essential services that government provides.
Where would this stop? Do we let people pay to get premium police and fire protection? Do we pursue an idea raised by Judge Richard Posner to auction off the right to adopt children?
We already have tremendous inequality in our country: The richest 1 percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But we do still have a measure of equality before the law — equality in our basic dignity — and that should be priceless.
“Market fundamentalism,” to use the term popularized by George Soros, is gaining ground. It’s related to the glorification of wealth over the last couple of decades, to the celebration of opulence, and to the emergence of a new aristocracy. Market fundamentalists assume a measure of social Darwinism and accept that laissez-faire is always optimal.
That’s the dogma that helped lead to bank deregulation and the current economic mess. And anyone who honestly believes that low taxes and unfettered free markets are always best should consider moving to Pakistan’s tribal areas. They are a triumph of limited government, negligible taxes, no “burdensome regulation” and free markets for everything from drugs to AK-47s.
If you’re infatuated with unfettered free markets, just visit Waziristan.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 30. 2012
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