By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 5, 2012
A “Rich Guy’s Dilemma”: Mitt Romney’s Big Tax Reveal
One of the stickier dilemmas awaiting Mitt Romney’s campaign is the intersection between his personal wealth and his economic program. Romney is a very rich guy who enjoys a low tax rate, which is a political problem. Combine that with his tax plan, which locks in the Bush tax cuts and then cuts taxes even more, you have a ready-made political theme for the Obama campaign to deploy against him should he win the nomination.
At the same time, Romney has not wrapped up the nomination. And conservative elites are saying that his plan doesn’t go far enough in cutting taxes for himself and his economic peers. So Romney is pulled between two competing forces — Republican supply-siders who want him to cut taxes for the rich even more, and general election swing voters who not only don’t want to cut taxes for the rich at all but think they need to go higher.
It’s pretty significant, then that Romney is planning to roll out an updated and (apparently) more detailed version of his tax proposal, via Jennifer Rubin:
Will he do more on taxes? “Yes,” [Romney] responds promptly. “We’ve talked about two immediate things we can do: Bring the corporate tax down from 35 percent to 25 percent, and eliminate cap-gains for people in the middle [class].” He said he would roll out the full tax reform plan “as soon as it gets through modeling.” Romney is not the candidate to charge forward without data. It doesn’t sound like a flat tax. He talks about “lowering rates and lowering deductions and exemptions.” (That sounds more akin to the plan suggested by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).) He promises, with a not-so-subtle shot at his critics, “You can be sure I won’t be doing it to lower taxes on the top one percent. It will be pro-growth.”
But what does that mean exactly? Saying he won’t be “doing it to lower taxes on the top one percent” could mean two completely different things. It could mean he won’t be lowering taxes on the top one percent — perhaps he’ll keep the current effective tax rates on the top one percent steady. Or it could mean that he will be cutting taxes for the one percent, but he’ll just insist that he’s doing it because he cares about growth — the fact that people like himself will be getting a tax cut is merely the accidental byproduct of his pro-growth plan.
Which will it be? His choice will help signal how worried Romney really is about Rick Santorum’s polling surge. If Romney cuts taxes for the rich even more in his new plan than his old one, it shows he feels compelled to lock down the supply-siders against Santorum. If he cuts taxes for the rich less, then it shows he’s not taking Santorum all that seriously. And, of course, his decision will hold pretty important implications for the general election – either Romney will be narrowing the target profile he offers Obama or else he’ll be making it even wider.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 13, 2012
Romney For Sale: Mitt Hosts $10K “Policy Roundtables”
Giving a preview of how he would govern as president, Mitt Romney hosted a series of “policy roundtables” with top dollar donors Thursday at the JW Marriott hotel in Washington, DC. Once again demonstrating that he is much more concerned with helping the very rich than the very poor, the panels were open to all interested parties — who were willing and able to raise $10,000for his campaign, each.
The roundtable topics included education, energy, financial institutions and markets, defense/homeland security/foreign policy, health care, and infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, the panels were chaired and hosted by a few prominent Republican politicians and several wealthy investors and industry insiders. They roundtable leaders and industry finance chairs included:
– L.E. Simmons (energy), who has has “guided the investment of over $1.6 billion in private equity capital used to build energy service and equipment companies.”
– Patrick Durkin, managing director of Barclay’s Capital and a top Romney lobbyist-bundler.
– Richard Breeden, a hedge fund manager and a former SEC chairman under President George H. W. Bush.
– Tom Farrell, president and CEO of Dominion Power.
– Former Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO) (infrastructure), now a “distinguished fellow” at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
– Former HHS Secretary and ex-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt (R), now head of a “health care intelligence business.”
If the number $10,000 seems familiar, perhaps it was because he offered to make a bet with then-primary opponent Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) for that amount in a disagreement over his previous positions on federal health insurance mandates. Now, Romney is asking the wealthiest 1 percent to make a similar-sized bet on him. And, according to one of the event’s co-chairs, the event raised $1.5 million for Romney’s campaign.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, February 11, 2012
“Money And Morals”: The GOP’s Attempt To Divert The Inequality Conversation
Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.
So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.
But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.
To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.
But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?
Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.
Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?
Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.
Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.
For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.
One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.
Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.
So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 9, 2012
“Can’t-Win Cul-de-Sac”: Mitt Romney’s Clumsy Economic Centrism
There are times when I feel a twinge of sympathy for former Gov. Mitt Romney. Really and truly. The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Mitt in the current ideological climate—with its highly-charged suspicions of both “socialism” and conspicuous wealth—forces him to tack left and right in ways that leave him pitifully exposed.
His calculated moves toward the right sometime in the mid-2000s, on key issues like abortion, gay rights, and immigration, are well-known and justly scrutinized.
Less noticed—but no less calculated—have been his efforts to hew to the center.
I’m thinking, first, of Romney’s proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes only for married couples making under $200,000 and singles making less than $100,000. The cap at those income levels is head-scratchingly pointless, as the vast majority who benefit from low capital gains tax rates make well over $200,000.
Romney’s official rationale for limited capital gains tax relief is that “We need to spend our precious tax dollars on the middle class.”
That sounds nice and centrist-y, but the more likely reason became clear when Romney finally released his tax returns: If he proposed eliminating taxes on capital gains altogether—as former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul and Gov. Rick Perry have proposed—then Romney would be forced to defend the prospect of paying even less than his already low rate of 13.9 percent.
“Under that plan”—meaning Gingrich’s—”I’d have paid no taxes in the last two years,” Romney said, in one of his sharpest lines in the debate in Tampa last month.
Romney is similarly lukewarm, from the libertarian economic perspective, on the issue of the minimum wage. As in 2008, Romney favors automatic increases to keep pace with inflation. The right uniformly hates this idea—they think it will actually eliminate entry-level jobs and hurt the very people it’s trying to help.
As with his suspicious-seeming lurches toward the right to appease the social conservative base, Romney trims toward the center on sensitive economic issues to limit the appearance of rank plutocracy.
Steve Forbes tells Yahoo News: “It goes to show he’s still very defensive about his own wealth. All it does is give the base another reason to be unenthusiastic about him.”
At National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy likewise asserted that Romney was “doubling down on stupid to overcompensate for any hint of a compassion deficit.”
Hence my (momentary) twinge of sympathy for Romney. His ideological contortions, whichever direction they take him, land him in the same can’t-win cul-de-sac.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, February 7, 2012
“We The People,” Not “We The Rich”: The Citizens United Catastrophe
We have seen the world created by the Supreme Court’sCitizens United decision, and it doesn’t work. Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn’t happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.
Two years ago, Citizens United tore down a century’s worth of law aimed at reducing the amount of corruption in our electoral system. It will go down as one of the most naive decisions ever rendered by the court.
The strongest case against judicial activism — against “legislating from the bench,” as former President George W. Bush liked to say — is that judges are not accountable for the new systems they put in place, whether by accident or design.
The Citizens United justices were not required to think through the practical consequences of sweeping aside decades of work by legislators, going back to the passage of the landmark Tillman Act in 1907, who sought to prevent untoward influence-peddling and indirect bribery.
If ever a court majority legislated from the bench (with Bush’s own appointees leading the way), it was the bunch that voted for Citizens United. Did a single justice in the majority even imagine a world of super PACs and phony corporations set up for the sole purpose of disguising a donor’s identity? Did they think that a presidential candidacy might be kept alive largely through the generosity of a Las Vegas gambling magnate with important financial interests in China? Did they consider that the democratizing gains made in the last presidential campaign through the rise of small online contributors might be wiped out by the brute force of millionaires and billionaires determined to have their way?
“The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” Those were Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words in his majority opinion. How did he know that? Did he consult the electorate? Did he think this would be true just because he said it?
Justice John Paul Stevens’ observation in his dissent reads far better than Kennedy’s in light of subsequent events. “A democracy cannot function effectively,” he wrote, “when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”
But ascribing an outrageous decision to naivetéis actually the most sympathetic way of looking at what the court did in Citizens United. A more troubling interpretation is that a conservative majority knew exactly what it was doing: that it set out to remake our political system by fiat in order to strengthen the hand of corporations and the wealthy. Seen this way, Citizens United was an attempt by five justices to push future electoral outcomes in a direction that would entrench their approach to governance.
In fact, this decision should be seen as part of a larger initiative by moneyed conservatives to rig the electoral system against their opponents. How else to explain conservative legislation in state after state to obstruct access to the ballot by lower-income voters — particularly members of minority groups — though voter identification laws, shortened voting periods and restrictions on voter registration campaigns?
Conservatives are strengthening the hand of the rich at one end of the system and weakening the voting power of the poor at the other. As veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in an important New York Review of Books article, “little attention is being paid to the fact that our system of electing a president is under siege.”
Those who doubt that Citizens United (combined with a comatose Federal Election Commission) has created a new political world with broader openings for corruption should consult reports last week by Nicholas Confessore and Michael Luo in the New York Times and by T.W. Farnam in The Washington Post. Both accounts show how American politics has become a bazaar for the very wealthy and for increasingly aggressive corporations. We might consider having candidates wear corporate logos. This would be more honest than pretending that tens of millions in cash will have no impact on how we will be governed.
In the short run, Congress should do all it can within the limits of Citizens United to contain the damage it is causing. In the long run, we have to hope that a future Supreme Court will overturn this monstrosity, remembering that the first words of our Constitution are “We the People,” not “We the Rich.”
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