Month: August 2012

I got the following over at Benen’s place:

President Obama will be in Mansfield, Ohio, today, and according to remarks prepared for delivery, he’s going to take full advantage of the new revelations:

“[T]he centerpiece of my opponent’s entire economic plan is a new, $5 trillion tax cut. A lot of this tax cut would go to the wealthiest 1% of all households. Folks making more than $3 million a year — the top one-tenth of one percent — would get a tax cut worth almost a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars.

“But it gets worse. Under my opponent’s plan, guess who gets the bill for these $250,000 tax cuts? You do. And you don’t have to take my word for it.

“Just today, an independent, non-partisan organization ran all the numbers. And they found that if Governor Romney wants to keep his word and pay for his plan, he’d have to cut tax breaks that middle-class families depend on to pay for your home, or your health care, or send your kids to college. That means the average middle-class family with children would be hit with a tax increase of more than $2,000.

“But here’s the thing – he’s not asking you to contribute more to pay down the deficit, or to invest in our kids’ education. He’s asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a tax cut.”

The simple way of looking at this is that Romney proposes to create a very large tax break for super rich people, and he promises that this won’t increase the deficit. So, the only way to make that happen is to eliminate tax credits used by middle class people. Or, I should say that the only way to try to do it is to go after middle class tax credits. It turns out that it’s not possible to accomplish what Romney is suggesting:

Mitt Romney’s plan to overhaul the tax code would produce cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans — and bigger bills for everybody else, according to an independent analysis set for release Wednesday.

The study was conducted by researchers at the Brookings Institution and the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, who seem to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate. To cover the cost of his plan — which would reduce tax rates by 20 percent, repeal the estate tax and eliminate taxes on investment income for middle-class taxpayers — the researchers assume that Romney would go after breaks for the richest taxpayers first.

They even look at what would happen if Republicans’ dreams for tax reform came true and the proposal generated significant revenue through economic growth.

None of it helped Romney. His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.

“It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers,” the study concludes.

Even if tax breaks “are eliminated in a way designed to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible, there would still be a shift in the tax burden of roughly $86 billion [a year] from those making over $200,000 to those making less” than that.

What you are seeing here is the con-game exposed. Cutting taxes is easy. Cutting tax credits for the middle class is hard. Romney could conceivably get his tax cuts passed through Congress, but he could never attack the middle class with this kind of ferocity. The end result would be very similar to what happened when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush slashed taxes on the rich. We wound up with enormous deficits, the rich got richer, and everyone else saw their wages stagnate.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me three times, shame on you.

So, to sum up:

First Mitt went to England where he:

   
• insulted the organizers of the London Olympics;

   

• pissed off Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron;

   

• got mocked by Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson in front of a crowd of tens of thousands;

   

• pissed off Britain’s entire foreign policy and intelligence establishment by revealing where and when he’d met with the head of MI 6; and,

   

• confirmed George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language” when he took a “look out the backside of 10 Downing Street“, which in contemporary British English means, roughly, to “look out the Prime Minister’s ass“.

Next he went to Israel where he:

   
• basically said that “Israel can bomb Iran any time it wants and America will be happy to inherit the blowback”;

   

• repeated the assertion he made in his 2010 book that “culture makes all the difference“ in explaining the disparity between Israeli and Palestinian GDP;

   

• then went on Fox News to say that he “did not speak about the Palestinian culture or the decisions made in their economy“;

   

• then completed the very difficult 2 day flip-flop-flip by writing a National Review column claiming that “the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by (culture)“;

   

• told ABC News he’d be “happy to go back and look” at whether he ever paid federal income taxes at a rate lower than the 13.9% he paid in 2010; and,

   

• praised Israel’s socialistic medical system for its low costs and universal coverage.

Finally he went to Poland where he managed to avoid making any ridiculous or dangerous statements.

His press secretary, on the other hand, told journalists ““Kiss my ass. This is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.” as they attempted to ask Romney questions when he was leaving the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.

This is a trip that the Romney campaign spent months planning for.  It was designed to burnish Mitt’s foreign policy credentials…or at least demonstrate that he could observe diplomatic niceties with some of the United States’ closest allies.

Not only was the trip a failure from that perspective, it also tarnished the one remaining credential on Romney’s resume—his experience running the Salt Lake City Olympics—that he was still willing to talk about.  (Now that he no longer wants to discuss Bain Capital, his record as governor of Massachusetts, his faith, fortune or family.)

Romney’s supporters have been reduced to saying (quite correctly) that most American voters don’t care much about foreign policy.  But what a week like this does is narrow, even if only incrementally, Romney’s ability to maneuver as he tries to do what he can to rise from 45% in recent electoral polls to 51% on Election Day.  With 14 weeks left, he can’t afford too many more “victories” like this one.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

I see that Roll Call currently believes that the Democrats will pick up about eight seats in the House of Representatives, which is far short of the twenty-five they need to retake the House. I have not done my independent race-by-race analysis for this cycle yet, but my instincts tell me that they are a bit bearish on the Dems’ chances. The Republican Party is beginning to show multiple signs of internal stress. For example, one of Speaker Boehner’s closest friends, Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-OH), abruptly announced his retirement this week, citing a toxic environment for independent-minded thinking within the GOP caucus. In another example, Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) and Robert Dold (R-IL) confronted Eric Cantor on the House floor last night to complain about their vote on a bill that would in some circumstances force victims of rape and incest in the District of Columbia to carry their pregnancies to term even if the health of the mother is as risk.

Those events came on the heels of the harsh comments Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) leveled at his party.

“If all people do is go down there [to DC] and join a team, and the team is invested in winning and you have something that looks very similar to the shirts and the skins, there’s not a lot of value there,” he told The Syracuse Post-Standard editorial board on Monday, according to the paper. He called his Democratic friends “much more congenial” than Republican ones.

He then went on to warn that House Republicans are becoming “incapable of governing” by habitually deferring to “extremes.”

It is not just a few backbenchers from swing districts who are upset. Sen. Linsey Graham of South Carolina is begging Mitt Romney to authorize the party members to strike a deal on revenues, in defiance of Grover Norquist. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who is known as Doctor No for his willingness to obstruct procedure, recently attacked Norquist and his “tortured definition of tax purity” in the pages of the New York Times.

You don’t see any equivalent infighting on the Democratic side of the aisle. The Democrats seem to know what they want to do. The Republicans are struggling to come to a consensus on their mission. Rep. LaTourette explained it nicely in his retirement announcement:

[LaTourette] also singled out legislation he said used to sail through Congress “like a hot knife through butter”: the farm bill, a student loan rate extension and especially the transportation bill, which stalled in the House until a short-term extension was passed and used as the House position in a conference with the Senate.

“We’re talking about building roads and bridges for Christ’s sake. We’re not talking about big Democratic and Republican initiatives. … I think [it is] an embarrassment to the House of Representatives,” he railed. “But more than being an embarrassment to the House of Representatives, it was indicative of the fact that people are more interested in fighting with each other than they are in getting the no-brainers done and governing.”

At its root, the problem is that a sizable percentage of the GOP caucuses in Congress are opposed to so much of what the federal government does that those who want to actually legislate are being marginalized and ostracized. The GOP tends to walk in lockstep, but there is no consensus on where they’re going. On top of that, Mitt Romney isn’t helping. His campaign is totally opaque and utterly lacking in any kind of ideological leadership. It even seems likely that many Republicans would prefer that he lose rather than turn over control of the party to his Massachusetts-based team. In any case, I’m beginning to suspect that commentators like George Will and Charles Krauthammer feel that way, considering their willingness to blast Romney for, respectively, not releasing his tax returns and allowing his wife to enter a dressage horse in the Olympics.

With the weakness of Mitt Romney as a candidate and the lack of coherence and loyalty within the Republican caucuses, it may be a mistake to predict the outcome of congressional elections based on the 2008 results in those districts. It’s hard to say. The wheels definitely came off the GOP clown car in September and October of 2008. I think the wheels are starting to come off a little earlier this time around.

Can the GOP avoid terrifying swing-voters at their convention? Can Romney overcome his foot-in-mouth disease? Will outside money make all the difference?

I have said for a couple of years that this would not be a close election. I have believed for a long time that the American people would be more decisive this time, one way or the other, than they have been in recent times. I still believe that. And my gut tells me that the House of Representatives is in play.