I have my problems with PolitiFact, but they did decide that President Obama’s main critique of Mitt Romney’s tax plan was correct. People making a million dollars a year in cash income would receive an annual $250,535 tax break. People in the top 1% of cash income would receive an annual $725,716 tax break. He’d also eliminate the Estate Tax, allowing a new aristocracy to develop in our country. So, it’s in this context that we must examine Kathleen Parker’s column today. For example, should we be impressed by the following?
Romney’s opponents seem to be aghast that he has made money for investors (aren’t we all investors?), though they studiously ignore other greed-less facts: He never took a dime in salary for heading the Olympics in Salt Lake City nor as governor of Massachusetts, to mention a couple.
It’s true that Romney makes most of his annual income off of dividends and capital gains he earns by investing his fortune. But he made $374,327.62 in 2010 on speaker’s fees alone. That’s a figure, by the way, that Romney characterized as “not very much” money. Kathleen Parker thinks people are just hating on the Romneys’ success out of some kind of pony-envy, but we’re really appalled about something completely different. We’re appalled that he wants to cut way back on programs to help the poor and middle-class survive and advance in our society at the same time that he wants to hand out a $250,000 annual income tax break to millionaires. Over a four-year presidential term, that would be a million dollar tax break to everyone who made a million dollars a year for those four years. You can’t make a proposal like that when you are worth a quarter of a billion dollars and then complain about the budget deficit and call for massive cuts in social spending, and then think you’ll be above criticism.
As for Ann Romney’s horse, Ms. Parker doesn’t get into the specifics for a good reason. Apparently, the Romneys formed a corporation to deal with this horse, and they declared a $77,000 loss in 2010 for that corporation. If the corporation ever makes any money by, for example, breeding this Olympic-performing horse, they can write off those losses. And you thought the Olympics were about amateur sports!
Apparently, for the Romneys, the Olympics are a business investment. And if they are successful in making money off the Olympics, you and I get to fork over the cost of feeding and training Ms. Romney’s horse. That makes me a lot less impressed with Romney’s decision to donate his salary when he worked for the Olympic Organizing Committee.
That’s why Kathleen Parker’s argument is so unconvincing:
The issue of Ann Romney’s horse is yet more ideological nonsense from the left, intended to portray Republicans generally and the Romneys specifically as enemies of The People. Riding horses is framed as just one more example of how out of touch the Romneys are with everyday Americans, though Democrats didn’t seem to mind that Jackie Kennedy was an avid horsewoman.
We didn’t mind when John Kerry went windsurfing either, but that became quite an issue for the right. If this were nothing more than tit-for-tat squabbling, Parker’s hypocrisy would still be staggering. But this is about how Romney’s policies would line the pockets of people who are so rich that they can spend nearly $80,000/yr on a single horse while telling the rest of us that we have an unaffordable social safety net that must be slashed down to the bone.
