Saturday, August 04, 2012 10:03:49 PM
Charts: America Has the World's Luckiest Billionaires
Ultra-high-net-worth individuals by country, 2011
James Davies, Rodrigo Lluberas and Anthony Shomocks, Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, 2011
None of our main global competitors give the ultrarich such a sweet deal.
By Josh Harkinson | Mon Jul. 30, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
The tax plan passed by Senate Democrats [ http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2012/07/25/senate_rejects_gop_tax_cuts_in_showdown_with_dems/ ] on Wednesday isn't really about taxing the rich; it's about taxing the megarich. As Timothy Noah has explained [ http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/104971/more-middle-class-taxes ] in The New Republic, the plan would actually reduce taxes on a lot of fairly rich people by renewing the (supposedly temporary) Bush-era tax cuts for everyone except those who make more than $250,000 a year. Even then, Democrats are only proposing a higher marginal tax rate, which means that even people raking in far more than $250,000 will still pay lower taxes on their first quarter million in annual earnings. Crunch the numbers, and it turns out that the biggest losers under the Senate plan are couples who earn more than $1 million a year [ http://www.offthechartsblog.org/new-analysis-confirms-high-income-taxpayers-benefit-from-middle-class-tax-cuts/ ]—mostly multimillionaires and billionaires.
While the Senate tax plan could certainly go further in taxing the rich, focusing on the megawealthy makes sense considering how much of our economy is now controlled by them. According to the Internal Revenue Service, there are 66,000 taxpayers who individually control $20 million or more in assets, and all these people put together are worth $4 trillion—more than the net worth of 70 percent of the US population.
The investment bank Credit Suisse, for its part, classifies "ultra high net worth individuals" as people with at least $50 million in assets—and according to the bank's 2011 Global Wealth Databook, more of these UNHWIs live in the United States than anywhere else in the world (see chart above).
So perhaps America has lots of multimillionaires because it's a prosperous country? That's certainly a factor—but not the only one. Compared to the superrich in the six other countries with the most multimillionaires, American tycoons grab a disproportionately large share of the economic pie:
Percent of Income Earned by Top 0.1% of Taxpayers
Source: The Paris School of Economics World Top Incomes Database (missing years reflect lack of current data)
Yet despite raking in such a large share of the national income, our nation's über-wealthy pay very little in taxes by global standards:
Top Income Tax Rates in the 6 Countries With the Most Ultra-High-Net-Worth Citizens
Global Finance Magazine, 2009
But don't higher tax rates at the top slow economic growth? Apparently not, considering the growth rates of our tax-happy competitors.
Change in Gross Domestic Product, 2011
CIA World Factbook
So why hasn't Congress already raised taxes on the rich? Perhaps because the superwealthy have raised a lot more political money than the rest of us.
- Percent of donations to super-PACs this year that come from just 196 Americans: 80 [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/big-campaign-spending-government-by-the-1/259599/ ]
- Amount the Koch brothers and their foundations plan to spend to defeat Obama: $395 million [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-billion-dollar-mitt-machine-20120530 ]
- Total money raised by John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign: $384 million [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_for_the_2008_United_States_presidential_election ]
- Number of billionaires who've made donations to Mitt Romney's super-PAC, Restore Our Future: 32 [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/06/13/sheldon-adelson-tops-romney-donor-list-that-now-includes-32-billionaires/ ]
- Percentage of Americans who give more than $10,000 in any election cycle: 0.01 [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/big-campaign-spending-government-by-the-1/259599/ ]
Copyright ©2012 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress (emphasis in original)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/charts-how-americas-billionaires-get-off-tax-rich-congress [with comments]
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Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem
Charles Murray examines the cloud now hanging over American business—and what today's capitalists can do about it.
By CHARLES MURRAY
Updated July 30, 2012, 1:20 a.m. ET
Mitt Romney's résumé at Bain should be a slam dunk. He has been a successful capitalist, and capitalism is the best thing that has ever happened to the material condition of the human race. From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with only the thinnest film of wealth on top. Then came capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn't take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased.
Capitalism has lifted the world out of poverty because it gives people a chance to get rich by creating value and reaping the rewards. Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?
Yet it hasn't worked out that way for Mr. Romney. "Capitalist" has become an accusation. The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer.
What happened to turn the mood of the country so far from our historic celebration of economic success?
Two important changes in objective conditions have contributed to this change in mood. One is the rise of collusive capitalism. Part of that phenomenon involves crony capitalism, whereby the people on top take care of each other at shareholder expense (search on "golden parachutes").
But the problem of crony capitalism is trivial compared with the collusion engendered by government. In today's world, every business's operations and bottom line are affected by rules set by legislators and bureaucrats. The result has been corruption on a massive scale. Sometimes the corruption is retail, whereby a single corporation creates a competitive advantage through the cooperation of regulators or politicians (search on "earmarks"). Sometimes the corruption is wholesale, creating an industrywide potential for profit that would not exist in the absence of government subsidies or regulations (like ethanol used to fuel cars and low-interest mortgages for people who are unlikely to pay them back). Collusive capitalism has become visible to the public and increasingly defines capitalism in the public mind.
Another change in objective conditions has been the emergence of great fortunes made quickly in the financial markets. It has always been easy for Americans to applaud people who get rich by creating products and services that people want to buy. That is why Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were American heroes a century ago, and Steve Jobs was one when he died last year.
When great wealth is generated instead by making smart buy and sell decisions in the markets, it smacks of inside knowledge, arcane financial instruments, opportunities that aren't accessible to ordinary people, and hocus-pocus. The good that these rich people have done in the process of getting rich is obscure. The benefits of more efficient allocation of capital are huge, but they are really, really hard to explain simply and persuasively. It looks to a large proportion of the public as if we've got some fabulously wealthy people who haven't done anything to deserve their wealth.
The objective changes in capitalism as it is practiced plausibly account for much of the hostility toward capitalism. But they don't account for the unwillingness of capitalists who are getting rich the old-fashioned way—earning it—to defend themselves.
I assign that timidity to two other causes. First, large numbers of today's successful capitalists are people of the political left who may think their own work is legitimate but feel no allegiance to capitalism as a system or kinship with capitalists on the other side of the political fence. Furthermore, these capitalists of the left are concentrated where it counts most. The most visible entrepreneurs of the high-tech industry are predominantly liberal. So are most of the people who run the entertainment and news industries. Even leaders of the financial industry increasingly share the politics of George Soros. Whether measured by fundraising data or by the members of Congress elected from the ZIP Codes where they live, the elite centers with the most clout in the culture are filled with people who are embarrassed to identify themselves as capitalists, and it shows in the cultural effect of their work.
Another factor is the segregation of capitalism from virtue. Historically, the merits of free enterprise and the obligations of success were intertwined in the national catechism. McGuffey's Readers, the books on which generations of American children were raised, have plenty of stories treating initiative, hard work and entrepreneurialism as virtues, but just as many stories praising the virtues of self-restraint, personal integrity and concern for those who depend on you. The freedom to act and a stern moral obligation to act in certain ways were seen as two sides of the same American coin. Little of that has survived.
To accept the concept of virtue requires that you believe some ways of behaving are right and others are wrong always and everywhere. That openly judgmental stand is no longer acceptable in America's schools nor in many American homes. Correspondingly, we have watched the deterioration of the sense of stewardship that once was so widespread among the most successful Americans and the near disappearance of the sense of seemliness that led successful capitalists to be obedient to unenforceable standards of propriety. Many senior figures in the financial world were appalled by what was going on during the run-up to the financial meltdown of 2008. Why were they so silent before and after the catastrophe? Capitalists who behave honorably and with restraint no longer have either the platform or the vocabulary to preach their own standards and to condemn capitalists who behave dishonorably and recklessly.
And so capitalism's reputation has fallen on hard times and the principled case for capitalism must be made anew. That case has been made brilliantly and often in the past, with Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" being my own favorite. But in today's political climate, updating the case for capitalism requires a restatement of old truths in ways that Americans from across the political spectrum can accept. Here is my best effort:
The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.
"Lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole" is produced by a relatively small set of important achievements that we can rightly attribute to our own actions. Arthur Brooks, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has usefully labeled such achievements "earned success." Earned success can arise from a successful marriage, children raised well, a valued place as a member of a community, or devotion to a faith. Earned success also arises from achievement in the economic realm, which is where capitalism comes in.
Earning a living for yourself and your family through your own efforts is the most elemental form of earned success. Successfully starting a business, no matter how small, is an act of creating something out of nothing that carries satisfactions far beyond those of the money it brings in. Finding work that not only pays the bills but that you enjoy is a crucially important resource for earned success.
Making a living, starting a business and finding work that you enjoy all depend on freedom to act in the economic realm. What government can do to help is establish the rule of law so that informed and voluntary trades can take place. More formally, government can vigorously enforce laws against the use of force, fraud and criminal collusion, and use tort law to hold people liable for harm they cause others.
Everything else the government does inherently restricts economic freedom to act in pursuit of earned success. I am a libertarian and think that almost none of those restrictions are justified. But accepting the case for capitalism doesn't require you to be a libertarian. You are free to argue that certain government interventions are justified. You just need to acknowledge this truth: Every intervention that erects barriers to starting a business, makes it expensive to hire or fire employees, restricts entry into vocations, prescribes work conditions and facilities, or confiscates profits interferes with economic liberty and usually makes it more difficult for both employers and employees to earn success. You also don't need to be a libertarian to demand that any new intervention meet this burden of proof: It will accomplish something that tort law and enforcement of basic laws against force, fraud and collusion do not accomplish.
People with a wide range of political views can also acknowledge that these interventions do the most harm to individuals and small enterprises. Huge banks can, albeit at great expense, cope with the Dodd-Frank law's absurd regulatory burdens; many small banks cannot. Huge corporations can cope with the myriad rules issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and their state-level counterparts. The same rules can crush small businesses and individuals trying to start small businesses.
Finally, people with a wide range of political views can acknowledge that what has happened incrementally over the past half-century has led to a labyrinthine regulatory system, irrational liability law and a corrupt tax code. Sweeping simplifications and rationalizations of all these systems are possible in ways that even moderate Democrats could accept in a less polarized political environment.
To put it another way, it should be possible to revive a national consensus affirming that capitalism embraces the best and most essential things about American life; that freeing capitalism to do what it does best won't just create national wealth and reduce poverty, but expand the ability of Americans to achieve earned success—to pursue happiness.
Reviving that consensus also requires us to return to the vocabulary of virtue when we talk about capitalism. Personal integrity, a sense of seemliness and concern for those who depend on us are not "values" that are no better or worse than other values. Historically, they have been deeply embedded in the American version of capitalism. If it is necessary to remind the middle class and working class that the rich are not their enemies, it is equally necessary to remind the most successful among us that their obligations are not to be measured in terms of their tax bills. Their principled stewardship can nurture and restore our heritage of liberty. Their indifference to that heritage can destroy it.
Mr. Murray is the author of "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 [ http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421 ]" and the W.H. Brady Scholar [sic - Blithering Idiot] at the American Enterprise Institute [ http://www.aei.org/scholar/charles-murray/ ].
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More from Charles Murray
Why Economics Can't Explain Our Cultural Divide (3/16/12)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281582403394206.html [fifth item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73504847 ]
The New American Divide (1/21/12)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html
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Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443931404577549223178294822.html [with comments]
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Inside a Russian Billionaire's $300 Million Yacht [video]
Travel
4/15/2010 7:00:00 PM 3:55
Designed by Philippe Starck, the "A" has quickly become the most loved and loathed ship on the sea. WSJ's Robert Frank takes an exclusive tour of Andrey Melnichenko's 394-foot mega-yacht.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://live.wsj.com/video/inside-a-russian-billionaire-300-million-yacht/B91C478A-E6BB-4FCA-BD8C-61A1E79AB0B0.html#!B91C478A-E6BB-4FCA-BD8C-61A1E79AB0B0
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HSBC Apologizes for Compliance Failures
Jul 30, 2012
HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), the British bank accused of helping drug lords in Mexico launder money, apologized to investors for compliance failings and set aside $2 billion more to cover the costs of fines and redress.
The lender made a $1.3 billion provision in the first half to compensate British clients wrongly sold payment-protection insurance and derivatives, London-based HSBC said in a statement yesterday as it posted an 8.3 percent drop in net income. It also made a $700 million provision for U.S. fines after a Senate committee found the bank gave terrorists, drug cartels and criminals access to the U.S. financial system. That sum may increase, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver said.
“Regulatory and compliance events in the first six months of the year overshadowed financial performance,” Chairman Douglas Flint said in a statement yesterday. “HSBC has made mistakes in the past, and for them I am very sorry.”
HSBC is trying to estimate the costs of four scandals to hit the bank in the past year: the mis-selling of loan insurance as well as derivatives to individual customers; allegations that traders tried to rig Libor; and a Senate report that found the bank worked with firms linked to terrorism and hid transactions that bypassed sanctions against Iran.
Enforcement action “is completely at the discretion of the Department of Justice,” Gulliver told reporters yesterday. The provision is “a best estimate based on the information we have today. The actual number could be materially higher.”
[...]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-30/hsbc-profit-beats-estimates-on-income-from-asset-sales.html [with comments]
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Very Sad Graph: How Much Americans Have Left to Spend After Essentials, Today
By Derek Thompson
Aug 1 2012, 4:10 PM ET
Depends on how much there is. For those making $16,000 a year, more than half of it goes to housing and utilities. But those making $160,000 a year still have almost two thirds of their disposable income left over after those monthly bills.
Planet Money [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/01/157664524/how-the-poor-the-middle-class-and-the-rich-spend-their-money ] graphs one of our favorite topics: How families spend money. Here are their numbers rendered slightly differently:
The results aren't so surprising: Poor people spend more of their money on essentials than richer people (and these numbers don't account for dramatic geographical differences). But how much is left over?
After essentials -- housing, transportation (incl. gas), food, utilities, and clothes -- the poor have 15% of their disposable income left over, and the $150K+ crowd has about 40%. This next graph uses those figures to tell how much disposable income a typical person making $17,500, $60,000 or $150,000 has left, after the essentials are taken care of:
This graph doesn't include a few categories you might argue are essential: food at restaurants (which is somewhere between elective and essential), health care (which is essential, but spiky) and education (which is practically essential, but specific to certain years). After those categories, the poorest group has spent 98% of their income, leaving them with $367 for the year -- or a dollar per day.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/very-sad-graph-how-much-americans-have-left-to-spend-after-essentials-today/260606/ [with comments]
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The Man Who Saved Capitalism
Milton and Rose Friedman
Corbis
Milton Friedman, who would have turned 100 on Tuesday, helped to make free markets popular again in the 20th century. His ideas are even more important today.
By STEPHEN MOORE
Updated August 1, 2012, 2:14 p.m. ET
It's a tragedy that Milton Friedman—born 100 years ago on July 31—did not live long enough to combat the big-government ideas that have formed the core of Obamanomics. It's perhaps more tragic that our current president, who attended the University of Chicago where Friedman taught for decades, never fell under the influence of the world's greatest champion of the free market. Imagine how much better things would have turned out, for Mr. Obama and the country.
Friedman was a constant presence on these pages until his death in 2006 at age 94. If he could, he would surely be skewering today's $5 trillion expansion of spending and debt to create growth—and exposing the confederacy of economic dunces urging more of it.
In the 1960s, Friedman famously explained that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." If the government spends a dollar, that dollar has to come from producers and workers in the private economy. There is no magical "multiplier effect" by taking from productive Peter and giving to unproductive Paul. As obvious as that insight seems, it keeps being put to the test. Obamanomics may be the most expensive failed experiment in free-lunch economics in American history.
Equally illogical is the superstition that government can create prosperity by having Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke print more dollars. In the very short term, Friedman proved, excess money fools people with an illusion of prosperity. But the market quickly catches on, and there is no boost in output, just higher prices.
Next to Ronald Reagan, in the second half of the 20th century there was no more influential voice for economic freedom world-wide than Milton Friedman. Small in stature but a giant intellect, he was the economist who saved capitalism by dismembering the ideas of central planning when most of academia was mesmerized by the creed of government as savior.
Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for 1976—at a time when almost all the previous prizes had gone to socialists. This marked the first sign of the intellectual comeback of free-market economics since the 1930s, when John Maynard Keynes hijacked the profession. Friedman's 1963 book "A Monetary History of the United States," written with Anna Schwartz (who died on June 21), was a masterpiece and changed the way we think about the role of money.
More influential than Friedman's scholarly writings was his singular talent for communicating the virtues of the free market to a mass audience. His two best-selling books, "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962) and "Free to Choose" (1980), are still wildly popular. His videos on YouTube on issues like the morality of capitalism are brilliant and timeless.
In the early 1990s, Friedman visited poverty-stricken Mexico City for a Cato Institute forum. I remember the swirling controversy ginned up by the media and Mexico's intelligentsia: How dare this apostle of free-market economics be given a public forum to speak to Mexican citizens about his "outdated" ideas? Yet when Milton arrived in Mexico he received a hero's welcome as thousands of business owners, students and citizen activists hungry for his message encircled him everywhere he went, much like crowds for a modern rock star.
Once in the early 1960s, Friedman wrote the then-U.S. ambassador to New Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith, that he would be lecturing in India. By all means come, the witty but often wrong Galbraith replied: "I can think of nowhere your free-market ideas can do less harm than in India." As fate would have it, India did begin to embrace Friedmanism in the 1990s, and the economy began to soar. China finally caught on too.
Friedman stood unfailingly and heroically with the little guy against the state. He used to marvel that the intellectual left, which claims to espouse "power to the people," so often cheers as states suppress individual rights.
While he questioned almost every statist orthodoxy, he fearlessly gored sacred cows of both political parties. He was the first scholar to sound the alarm on the rotten deal of Social Security for young workers—forced to pay into a system that will never give back as much as they could have accumulated on their own. He questioned the need for occupational licenses—which he lambasted as barriers to entry—for everything from driving a cab to passing the bar to be an attorney, or getting an M.D. to practice medicine.
He loved turning the intellectual tables on liberals by making the case that regulation often does more harm than good. His favorite example was the Food and Drug Administration, whose regulations routinely delay the introduction of lifesaving drugs. "When the FDA boasts a new drug will save 10,000 lives a year," he would ask, "how many lives were lost because it didn't let the drug on the market last year?"
He supported drug legalization (much to the dismay of supporters on the right) and was particularly proud to be an influential voice in ending the military draft in the 1970s. When his critics argued that he favored a military of mercenaries, he would retort: "If you insist on calling our volunteer soldiers 'mercenaries,' I will call those who you want drafted into service involuntarily 'slaves.'"
By the way, he rarely got angry and even when he was intellectually slicing and dicing his sparring partners he almost always did it with a smile. It used to be said that over the decades at the University of Chicago and across the globe, the only one who ever defeated him in a debate was his beloved wife and co-author Rose Friedman.
The issue he devoted most of his later years to was school choice for all parents, and his Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice is dedicated to that cause. He used to lament that "we allow the market, consumer choice and competition to work in nearly every industry except for the one that may matter most: education."
As for congressional Republicans who are at risk of getting suckered into a tax-hike budget deal, they may want to remember another Milton Friedman adage: "Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with."
No doubt because of his continued popularity, the left has tried to tie Friedman and his principles of free trade, low tax rates and deregulation to the global financial meltdown in 2008. Economist Joseph Stiglitz charged that Friedman's "Chicago School bears the blame for providing a seeming intellectual foundation" for the "idea that markets are self-adjusting and the best role for government is to do nothing." Occupy Wall Street protesters were often seen wearing T-shirts which read: "Milton Friedman: Proud Father of Global Misery."
The opposite is true: Friedman opposed the government spending spree in the 2000s. He hated the government-sponsored enterprises like housing lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In a recent tribute to Friedman in the Journal of Economic Literature, Harvard's Andrei Shleifer describes 1980-2005 as "The Age of Milton Friedman," an era that "witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. As the world embraced free-market policies, living standards rose sharply while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined."
Well over 200 million were liberated from poverty thanks to the rediscovery of the free market. And now as the world teeters close to another recession, leaders need to urgently rediscover Friedman's ideas.
I remember asking Milton, a year or so before his death, during one of our semiannual dinners in downtown San Francisco: What can we do to make America more prosperous? "Three things," he replied instantly. "Promote free trade, school choice for all children, and cut government spending."
How much should we cut? "As much as possible."
Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board [and another blithering idiot].
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.\
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444226904577558882802335216.html [with embedded video "Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on Milton Friedman's legacy", a thriller no doubt, and comments]
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One In Four American Workers Will Be In Low-Wage Jobs For The Next Decade
By Travis Waldron on Aug 2, 2012 at 9:30 am
The share of the economy made up by low-wage jobs has grown since the Great Recession, and according to one new study, it won’t shrink in the future even as the economy continues to recover. The number of Americans working in low-wage jobs — those that pay wages equal to or below the poverty line — will remain steady over the next decade [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/02/news/economy/low-pay-jobs/index.htm ], according to the Economic Policy Institute, as CNNMoney reports:
Some 28% of workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs in 2020, roughly the same percentage as in 2010, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
The study defines low-paying jobs as those with wages at or below what full-time workers must earn to live above the poverty level for a family of four. In 2011, this was $23,005, or $11.06 an hour.
The study is the latest to detail the growth of low-wage occupations in the United States. A recent report from the National Employment Law Project found that more than one in four [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/24/573671/one-in-four-private-sector-workers-earn-less-than-10-an-hour/ ] private sector workers now make less than $10 an hour, an even lower threshold than was used in the EPI study. The five industries that are comprised mostly of low-wage workers, meanwhile, are growing faster than the overall American economy.
While the number of low-wage jobs has increased, so has the gap [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/05/03/475952/ceo-pay-faster-worker-pay/ ] between low-wage workers and the executives who employ them. The federal minimum wage would need to be raised by more than $3 an hour [ http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm/ ] to match the buying power it had in 1968, and overall wages in the U.S. have been virtually stagnant for decades, even as pay for chief executives has risen exponentially. At the 50 companies that employ the largest number of low-wage workers, chief executives made an average of $9.4 million [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/24/573671/one-in-four-private-sector-workers-earn-less-than-10-an-hour/ ] last year.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/08/02/627021/workers-low-wage-jobs/ [with comments]
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The Case for Lying to Yourself
Some Self-Deception Can Boost Power and Influence; Starts as Young as Age 3
By Sue Shellenbarger
July 30, 2012, 7:02 p.m. ET
Lying to yourself—or self-deception, as psychologists call it—can actually have benefits. And nearly everybody does it, based on a growing body of research using new experimental techniques.
Self-deception isn't just lying or faking, but is deeper and more complicated, says Del Paulhus, psychology professor at University of British Columbia and author of a widely used scale to measure self-deceptive tendencies. It involves strong psychological forces that keep us from acknowledging a threatening truth about ourselves, he says.
Believing we are more talented or intelligent than we really are can help us influence and win over others, says Robert Trivers, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and author of "The Folly of Fools," a 2011 book on the subject. An executive who talks himself into believing he is a great public speaker may not only feel better as he performs, but increase "how much he fools people, by having a confident style that persuades them that he's good," he says.
Researchers haven't studied large population samples to compare rates of self-deception or compared men and women, but they know based on smaller studies that it is very common. And scientists in many different disciplines are drawn to studying it, says Michael I. Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. "It's also one of the most puzzling things that humans do."
Researchers disagree over what exactly happens in the brain during self-deception. Social psychologists say people deceive themselves in an unconscious effort to boost self-esteem or feel better. Evolutionary psychologists, who say different parts of the brain can harbor conflicting beliefs at the same time, say self-deception is a way of fooling others to our own advantage.
In some people, the tendency seems to be an inborn personality trait. Others may develop a habit of self-deception as a way of coping with problems and challenges.
Behavioral scientists in recent years have begun using new techniques in the laboratory to predict when and why people are likely to deceive themselves. For example, they may give subjects opportunities to inflate their own attractiveness, skill or intelligence. Then, they manipulate such variables as subjects' mood, promises of rewards or opportunities to cheat. They measure how the prevalence of self-deception changes.
In an unpublished study earlier this year, young women were asked to stand in front of a sheet of brown paper and sketch outlines of their bodies. Some were then asked to read a story about dating to put them in a romantic mood. The others were asked to read about buildings and architecture, says Carrie Keating, a psychology professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., who led the research.
When the women were asked later to outline their bodies again, those who had read about dating sketched themselves as slimmer, with narrower waists, compared with their earlier drawings, reflecting an effort to "block out any negative information about their bodies" and succeed at the dating game, Dr. Keating says. The women who read about buildings didn't much change their sketches.
As early as age 3, children have what researchers call a "positivity bias"—a tendency to see themselves as smart regardless of their abilities, and to exaggerate positive traits in others, says a 2010 study in the journal Child Development Perspectives. By adolescence, one-fourth of college-bound students rate themselves in the top 1% in their ability to get along with others, research shows.
In a separate study, female students who take leadership positions on campus score higher on measures of self-deception, based on recent research by Dr. Keating. Women who aspire to leadership may have to "conveniently forget about some negatives," such as the fact that "women who behave in a dominant fashion may be perceived as more masculine," Dr. Keating says.
Many people have a way of "fooling their inner eye" to believe they are more successful or attractive than they really are, Dr. Trivers says. When people are asked to choose the most accurate photo of themselves from an array of images that are either accurate, or altered to make them look up to 50% more or less attractive, most choose the photo that looks 20% better than reality, research shows.
Many people deceive themselves to avoid making difficult changes. For years, Greg Duval piled on pounds while telling himself "I just needed to go for a run" to take off extra weight, he says. A former high-school quarterback, "I had that 'man up' mentality: 'Guys don't need personal trainers,'" says Mr. Duval, a Dallas sales executive. The rationale helped him feel as if he was in control, but gave him an excuse to put off exercise. Recently, as he approached age 50, he decided, "No more playing games with myself," he says. Working with a trainer, Mallory Mansour Dubuclet, he has taken off 53 pounds since last winter. In the realm of health and fitness, Ms. Dubuclet says, "many people kid themselves about how much they can eat, or how much exercise they are doing."
It takes a certain amount of self-discipline to keep self-deception from becoming a hindrance on the job or in relationships. Getting too wrapped up in achievements or public image is one danger sign. Dodging a chronic problem by telling yourself you'll solve it in the future is another.
The trick, Dr. Norton says, is finding the line. While "a little bit of self-deception isn't an unhealthy thing, a lot is an extremely unhealthy thing." Benefits tend to come, research shows, when people simply block out negative thoughts, envision themselves enjoying future successes or take an optimistic view of their abilities—all of which tend to improve performance or persuasive ability.
For some people, self-deception becomes a habit, spinning out of control and providing a basis for more lies. In research co-written by Dr. Norton and published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, college students who were given an answer key to an intelligence test, allowing them to cheat, scored higher than a control group. They later predicted, however, that they also would score higher on a second test without being allowed to cheat. They were "deceiving themselves into believing their strong performance was a reflection of their ability," the study says.
Giving them praise, a certificate of recognition, made the self-deception even worse: The students inflated their predicted future scores even more.
Just as phony war heroes come to believe they actually won medals for valor, cheaters come to believe their own lies, Dr. Norton says. "They forget very quickly," he says, "that there were situational factors that propelled them forward."
*
How Honest Are You With Yourself?
Answer on a seven-point scale, with 1 being 'not true,' 4 being 'somewhat true,' and 7 being 'very true.'
1. My first impressions are always right.
2. I don't care to know what other people really think of me.
3. Once I've made up my mind, other people can seldom change my opinion.
4. I am fully in control of my own fate.
5. I never regret my decisions.
6. I am a completely rational person.
7. I am very confident of my judgments.
— ANSWER KEY: For each question, give yourself one point for answering 6 or 7. The higher your score, the more self-deceptive you tend to be.
— SOURCE: Del Paulhus, University of British Columbia
*
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443343704577548973568243982.html [with embedded video and audio, and comments]
===
Romney’s World
Mitt Romney meets with Prime Minister David Cameron at 10 Downing Street on July 26, 2012
Photograph by David Bebber/AFP/GettyImages.
Mitt’s insults, mistakes, and blunders abroad aren’t gaffes. They actually represent his true worldview.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, July 27, 2012, at 4:21 PM ET
Mitt Romney’s not-so-excellent adventure abroad (“Romneyshambles [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9432463/Romneyshambles-Democrats-seize-on-Mitt-Romneys-gaffes.html ],” the Brits are calling it) has been many things: shabby, hilarious, scandalous, an enlivening hoot to a dreary election season. One thing it shouldn’t be, though, is surprising.
Charles Krauthammer, the right-wing commentator who usually finds every excuse to attack Barack Obama—he took Obama’s blinking during a tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin as a sign of appeasement—pronounced himself befuddled by the GOP candidate’s flare of incompetence.
These sorts of trips, Krauthammer said on Fox News [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/27/charles-krauthammer-romney-london-olympics_n_1709599.html ] Thursday night, are easy. You express solidarity with the allies, listen, nod your head, and say nice things or nothing at all. Instead, Romney questioned his hosts’ ability to run the Olympics, raised doubts about Londoners’ community spirit, and violated protocol by publicly mentioning a meeting with the head of MI-6. “It’s unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible,” Krauthammer, normally a paragon of self-confidence, sputtered. “I’m out of adjectives … I don’t get it.”
The thing that Krauthammer doesn’t get is that Romney is not the sort of businessman—that his brand of capitalism is not the sort of enterprise—that requires even the most elementary understanding of diplomacy, courtesy, or sensitivity to other people’s values, lives, or perceptions.
The American capitalists-turned-statesmen of an earlier generation—Douglas Dillon, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze—took risks, built institutions, helped rebuild postwar Europe, befriended their foreign counterparts: in short, they cultivated an internationalist sensibility at their core. Whatever you think of their politics or Cold War policies generally (and there is much to criticize), financiers formed an American political elite in that era because finance (through the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, the IMF, and so forth) was so often the vehicle of American expansionism.
By contrast, private-equity firms, such as Bain Capital, where Romney made his fortune, tend to view their client companies as cash cows, susceptible to cookie-cutter formulas from which the firms’ partners reap lavish fees, almost regardless of the outcome. Their ends and means breed an insularity, a sense of entitlement, a disposition to view all the world’s entities through a single prism and to appraise them along a single scale.
How Romney should have behaved in London may have been obvious to Charles Krauthammer, who studies politics; it would have been obvious to politically ambitious businessmen from more traditional lines of work or from an earlier era. But as we have been graced to see this week, it is not necessarily obvious to Romney himself.
Already, Romney’s surrogates back home are spinning with frantic intensity. In the face of merrily savage media coverage of the candidate’s remarks and British officials’ rejoinders, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/jindal-defends-romney-over-olympics-snafu/ ] said, with as much nonchalance as he could muster, “The reality is, we’re not worried about overseas headlines … I think the focus needs to continue to be on what’s happening here at home. That’s what’s important to voters.”
This may be, but why then did Romney go abroad in the first place? It wasn’t to watch his wife’s horse trot and dance in the Olympics’ dressage competition (as he scoffed [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/romney-puts-horse-sized-distance-between-himself-and-dressage/ ] in another head-shaking remark, certain to anger a large number of wives who feel their husbands don’t take their interests seriously). The intent, obviously, was to demonstrate his comfort and capabilities on the world scene—a demonstration that, at least so far, has gone about as well as North Korea’s last few missile tests. And London, his first stop, was supposed to be the easy part of the trip, the place where the white, patrician candidate could forge bonds through, as one of his spokesmen put it, their common “Anglo-Saxon heritage.”
Not only did Romney fail at that no-brainer, he also put a foot through stateside customs. Before leaving on his overseas tour, he said that he would not criticize the current president on foreign soil, a long-standing, universally respected tradition in American politics. But then he spoke at an exclusive, closed-door fundraising dinner (tickets went for $50,000 to $70,000 apiece) sponsored by Barclays bank, which is currently in the middle of a whopping financial crisis. Eleven members of Parliament wrote a letter to the bank’s board members, demanding that they stop swelling Romney’s war chest and instead focus on repairing their own problems. Will Americans express outrage at this whiff of foreign influence? Obama catches hell when he raises money from Hollywood movie stars. What would happen if he flew to London or Paris and raised money from European movie stars (who don’t have as much influence as, say, European bankers).
Had Romney’s handlers dipped into their candidate’s biography, they might have put the kibosh on this trip from the get-go. Joshua Keating [ http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/07/26/romney_book_britain_is_a_tiny_island_that_makes_stuff_nobody_wants ], a blogger at Foreign Policy, dug up the following passage from Romney’s 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312609809 ]:
England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions.
Nice. Anglo-Saxon heritage indeed. Presidential material? Get serious [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/06/mitt_romney_s_foreign_policy_ideas_can_t_be_taken_seriously_.single.html ].
© 2012 The Slate Group, LLC
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/07/mitt_romney_s_insults_and_mistakes_while_at_the_london_olympics_aren_t_gaffes_as_much_as_a_fair_representation_of_his_worldview_.html [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/07/mitt_romney_s_insults_and_mistakes_while_at_the_london_olympics_aren_t_gaffes_as_much_as_a_fair_representation_of_his_worldview_.single.html ] [with comments]
===
Romney's CEO style rankled Mass. lawmakers
By ANDREW MIGASTEVE LeBLANC
Thursday, Aug. 2, 2012 - 2012-08-02 06:48:23 GMT
BOSTON (AP) — What worked for Mitt Romney in the corporate boardroom didn't fly in the more raucous corridors of the Massachusetts Legislature.
Now the Republican candidate for president, Romney took over as governor in 2003 after a long, successful career as CEO at the private equity firm Bain Capital.
But his top-down, corporate management style soon rankled Democrats who overwhelmingly controlled the state House and Senate and saw themselves as an equal partner in the government. His approach jolted a clubby political culture where schmoozing over after-hours drinks and cutting backroom deals are well-worn pathways to success.
Unlike his three GOP gubernatorial predecessors, the politically inexperienced Romney was never at ease in the chummy world of trading favors for votes. He bypassed rank-and-file Democrats and dealt mostly with the party's legislative leaders during his four-year term, though he did work with Democrats to pass the state's health care overhaul.
Romney's mostly fraught relations with state lawmakers could provide insight into how he'd handle a Congress that might still be politically divided if he becomes president.
He so far has embraced his party's conservative leadership in Congress — a break with recent GOP nominees, who had kept some distance. That plays to the conservative GOP base, but many independent voters view the congressional GOP with suspicion.
These days, Romney the candidate puts a positive spin on his Massachusetts record, holding it up as proof that he can bridge Washington's bitter partisan divides.
"I began a relationship with the speaker of the House and the Senate president that was personal," he said of his governorship in a recent NBC News interview. "We respected each other. We often disagreed. But we found common ground from time to time."
Some Democratic lawmakers accused Romney of being aloof, unapproachable and not much interested in working with them to build the kind of friendships and alliances that are needed to help pass legislation. They say Romney's legislative agenda on big issues like transportation and higher education fizzled as a result.
"He didn't get that government was not a business," said state Rep. Cory Atkins, a Democrat elected in 1999.
A notable exception was Romney's work with Democratic leaders to craft a landmark health care bill, which then launched his 2008 presidential bid. Romney's signature legislative success got a big boost from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, then the state's most powerful Democrat and a passionate advocate for universal health care.
Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom stressed Romney's ability to work with Democrats to solve the state's economic woes.
"Working on a bipartisan basis, Mitt Romney balanced the budget without raising taxes, created tens of thousands of new jobs and lowered the unemployment rate to 4.7 percent," Fehrnstrom said by email. "Working together with Democrats in the Legislature, Mitt Romney left Massachusetts in better shape than he found it."
While he did not raise state income or sales taxes, Romney and Democratic lawmakers raised hundreds of millions of dollars in new and higher fees on everything from marriage licenses to real estate transactions.
Former House Speaker Tom Finneran, a Democrat, recalled being "summoned" along with fellow legislative leaders by Romney for a meeting on the state's fiscal crisis early in Romney's term. Romney delivered a PowerPoint presentation brimming with numbers and charts on his plan for fixing the budget. Finneran said it quickly became apparent that Romney was issuing marching orders, not seeking their advice.
"Initially his sense was, 'I have been elected governor, I am the CEO here and you guys are the board of directors and you monitor the implementation of what I say,'" Finneran said. "That ruffled the feathers of legislators who see themselves as an equal branch (of government)."
Finneran said that, while he grew to respect Romney, "you have to work to have a conversation with him."
Romney supporters say he ran for governor as an outsider vowing to "clean up the mess" on Beacon Hill, and governed accordingly. They say Democratic leaders ruled with such an iron hand that there was no need for Romney to cultivate rank-and-file lawmakers who rarely strayed from their party's line.
Democrats portrayed Romney as being out of touch.
"He made no effort to get acquainted with lawmakers," said Tom Birmingham, a former state Senate president who left just before Romney took office. "To call him disengaged would be charitable."
Romney's GOP predecessors enjoyed smoother relations with the Legislature.
Bill Weld ran as an outsider, but he quickly developed an inside game working with Democrats. Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift had served in the Legislature, so they had plenty of allies and knew how to work across the aisle.
Weld's goofy personal charm and fondness for after-hours drinks also made him especially popular with lawmakers.
"You could negotiate anything with Weld," said Birmingham. "It was a game to him."
Republican state Sen. Robert Hedlund said Romney doesn't get enough credit for refusing to cut deals with Democrats.
"Some administrations used capital projects like goodies, handing them out like candy," said Hedlund. "Not Romney."
Romney often opted for confrontation over compromise. He issued more than 800 vetoes, but they were routinely overturned by lawmakers irked at what they saw as grandstanding by the governor.
In an ad during the 2008 presidential primary, Romney boasted: "I like vetoes. I vetoed hundreds of spending appropriations as governor. And, frankly, I can't wait to get my hands on Washington."
"If you're a Republican governor in Massachusetts, you have to work around the Legislature and use the bully pulpit," said Richard Tisei, a former state Senate minority leader running for Congress this year. "On big issues that mattered like health care and the fiscal crisis, Romney did work with the other side of the aisle."
On the health care bill that laid the foundation for his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, Romney aggressively courted Democrats. The law since has become a political liability for him.
He reached for compromises with top Democrats, particularly Kennedy, whom he had unsuccessfully challenged in a Senate race in 1994. Kennedy, who died in 2009, had the strong personal and political ties to state legislators that Romney lacked. Democrats marveled over how engaged Romney was, even showing up on a Sunday at the homes of top legislative leaders to try to break a key logjam on the bill.
In a rare moment of unity, Romney, Kennedy and leading Democrats were all handshakes and smiles as they shared the stage at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall for the bill signing ceremony in 2006.
"My son said that having Sen. Kennedy and me together like this on this stage behind the same piece of landmark legislation will help slow global warming," Romney joked to Kennedy, who was instrumental in shepherding the bill through the Legislature. "That's because hell has frozen over."
"My son said something, too," Kennedy retorted. "When Kennedy and Romney support a piece of legislation, usually one of them hasn't read it."
Miga reported from Washington.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://news.findlaw.com/apnews/e44ba0e326324ee1abbf565708b9b527 [also at e.g. (and image from) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/mitt-romney-massachusetts-legislature_n_1732249.html (with comments)]
===
AdWatch: Ad glosses over Romney's Mass. record
July 31, 2012 3:10 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) — TITLE: "Believe In Our Future"
LENGTH: 60 seconds.
AIRING: Mitt Romney's campaign did not disclose where the ad is running.
KEY IMAGES: Opens with Romney getting into a dark-colored SUV. "My own experience was I got the chance to start my own business," he says, looking from the driver's seat to a camera behind him. "I know what it's like to hire people and to wonder whether you're going to be able to make ends meet down the road. Freedom and enterprise are what create jobs, not government."
Images of Romney greeting people and a tableau of American flags follow, as Romney touts his work running the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City: "I came in and found that we had not only a scandal to deal with, but also a financial crisis to deal with. By the time the games were over, we had about a hundred million dollars that we put into an endowment there for the future of Olympic sport."
Next, Romney cites his fiscal stewardship as Massachusetts governor. "The real experience was in Massachusetts," he says. "I found a budget that was badly out of balance. We cut our spending. Our Legislature was 85 percent Democrat and every one of the four years I was governor, we balanced the budget."
There's also a scene of Romney giving a speech in a small-town setting: "I want to use those experiences to help Americans have a better future. We believe in our future. We believe in ourselves. We believe the greatest days of America are ahead."
ANALYSIS: The ad released by Romney's campaign and the Republican National Committee attempts to paint a positive picture for the many voters who still don't know much about him. It highlights his success in business, credits him for saving the troubled Olympics and solving a state's budget crisis, and suggests he'll be able to fix the nation's struggling economy.
But the ad doesn't tell the full story of how he handled the fiscal crisis when he took over as Massachusetts governor in 2003.
Romney's claim that he erased a $3 billion budget shortfall without raising taxes ignores important facts. While he didn't raise state income or sales taxes, he and Democratic lawmakers raised hundreds of millions of dollars through new and higher fees on everything from marriage licenses to real estate transactions to gun licenses. It was a way for Romney to boost state revenue and ease the budget squeeze while technically sticking to his pledge not to raise taxes.
Under Romney, the state also raised an additional $350 million to $375 million annually for three years by closing what his administration called business tax "loopholes." Many business executives saw the moves as tax increases just the same. Romney also got a boost from a massive $1.1 billion package of tax hikes passed by the Democrat-controlled Legislature the year before he took office. The increased revenue in his first year as governor helped cut the deficit nearly in half.
Romney's boast about balancing the state budget every year in office also ignores that state law requires a yearly balanced budget.
He also trumpets having started his own business, but doesn't mention the name of the private venture capital firm he co-founded, Bain Capital. The Obama campaign has attacked Romney's Bain ties for weeks, saying in one ad that Romney's companies were "pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low-wage countries."
The full extent to which Romney-owned companies have outsourced is not clear. But there's no question that Bain invested in businesses that moved jobs overseas to cut costs — a trend that began in the 1990s and which many U.S. companies followed. Romney insists job outsourcing was not a Bain policy when he was in charge.
As the ad claims, Romney led the revival of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, which had become mired in a bid-rigging scandal and financial troubles. The Olympics produced a $100 million surplus after Romney trimmed the budget, boosted revenue and worked to repair the committee's reputation with sponsors. The games also were boosted by unprecedented federal support, in large part due to security concerns after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
© 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57483686/adwatch-ad-glosses-over-romneys-mass-record/
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New Analysis Shows Romney Tax Plan Would Raise Taxes On Middle Class Families By More Than $2,000
By Pat Garofalo on Aug 1, 2012 at 10:45 am
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has been promising [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/06/17/501037/romney-tax-plan-key/ ] that he will cut taxes “across the board,” while also instituting tax reform that will not add to the nation’s deficit [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/22/430396/romney-tax-cut-rich/ ]. But a new report from the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution shows that this is much easier said than done.
In fact, if Romney were to actually implement his plan to reduce tax rates by 20 percent while eliminating tax deductions in order to pay for it, taxpayers with more than $200,000 would certainly see a tax cut. But everyone else — 95 percent of Americans — will see their taxes increase [ http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/8/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney.pdf ]. And this result occurs even assuming that Romney would eliminate tax deductions so as to make the tax as progressive as possible:
To estimate how average household tax burdens among different income groups would change as a result of this shift, we assume that the available tax expenditures are curtailed “from the top down” in order to make the tax plan as progressive as possible…Even after eliminating all available tax expenditures for households earning more than $200,000, this group still faces a net tax break. Americans making over $1 million would see an increase in after-tax income of 4.1 percent (an $87,000 tax cut), those making between $500,000 and $1 million would see an increase of 3.2 percent (a $17,000 tax cut), and those making between $200,000 and $500,000 would see an increase of 0.8 percent (a $1,800 tax cut).
Because taxpayers above $200,000 as a group have received a net tax cut, revenue neutrality requires that taxpayers below $200,000—about 95 percent of the population—experience a tax increase.
Here’s how the plan would affect the average taxpayer in each income group. As the column labeled “revenue neutral” shows, all taxpayers making less than $200,000 would see their taxes go up by hundreds [id.], if not thousands, of dollars. In particular, families with children would see their taxes go up by $2,041, on average:
Again, this analysis assumes that deductions are eliminated in a way that would make the tax code as progressive as possible, so its likely that, in practice, Romney’s plan would look even worse. To this point, Romney has refused to specify which deductions he would limit or eliminate.
On several occasions [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/22/430396/romney-tax-cut-rich/ ], Romney has denied that his tax plan would provide a big tax break to the wealthy. But as this analysis shows, even giving him all of the benefit of the doubt when it comes to eliminating deductions, the plan is still a massive tax break for the rich.
Update
The Romney campaign is pushing back on the Tax Policy Center’s study by claiming that TPC is a “liberal” group, due to the fact that one of its analysts used to work for the Obama administration. However, when TPC analyzed Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) tax plan during the GOP presidential primaries, the Romney camp called it an “objective, third party analysis [ http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/romney-camp-cited-same-think-tank-they-now ].”
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/08/01/620561/tpc-romney-study-taxes/ [with comments]
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How Romney Could Raise Taxes on 95% of the Country—in 1 Tall Graph
By Derek Thompson
Aug 1 2012, 10:48 AM ET
Mitt Romney's tax plan could force 95 percent of the country to pay more, while cutting taxes for the "1%" by tens of thousands of dollars, according to a new analysis from the Tax Policy Center and the Brookings Institution.
The Romney plan begins by cutting marginal rates by 20 percent and eliminating the estate tax and Alternative Minimum Tax, which would decrease federal tax revenue by $360 billion by 2015. This report considered what would happen if Romney eliminated tax expenditures to make his plan revenue-neutral, so that it wouldn't blow an enormous hole in our budget. Here's what they found: The revenue-neutral Romney plan would raise taxes on a typical family by more than $600. A household making between half-a-million and $1 million would get a tax cut equal to almost twice the disposable income [ http://www.thedeal.com/magazine/ID/039853/2011/the-end-of-mass-media.php ] of the poorest 20 percent.
Think about this plan as two steps. Step one, Romney's intended tax cuts, digs a hole. Step two is filling that hole by cutting tax spending, like the mortgage interest deduction and child tax credit. Even with a careful pruning of tax spending, the inevitable result is to massively swing the burden of taxes toward the "bottom 95%" because the top benefits so much from Romney's step one.
There are two reasons why this analysis might understate exactly how regressive the Romney plan is. First, the researchers started by eliminating tax expenditures for the highest-income groups and worked their way down. But it's impossible to expect Congress would completely eliminate all tax expenditures above a certain level. Second, the analysis doesn't include possible cuts to government spending, which tends to benefit low- and middle-income households more than tax expenditures. If Romney leaves military spending levels near their current share of GDP, the cuts would focus even more on programs that provide services or cash to the poor, sick, and elderly. That's not me being hyperbolic: Poor, sick, and old is simply where the vast majority of non-combat government spending goes.
We can argue over methodology and details, but there are a few things that can't be debated away. First, the Romney plan and the Obama plan both use the Bush tax cuts as a canvas, but from there, they paint very different pictures. Obama begins by raising taxes at the top, and Romney begins by cutting tax rates that benefit the top. Second, there's no getting around the fact that Romney's plan would make the tax code less progressive. "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.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/how-romneys-could-raise-taxes-on-95-of-the-country-in-1-tall-graph/260585/ [with comments]
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Romney Tax Plan on Table. Debt Collapses Table.
By Ezra Klein
Aug 2, 2012 12:10 PM CT
I can describe Mitt Romney’s tax policy promises in two words: mathematically impossible.
Those aren’t my words. They’re the words of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/ ], which has conducted the most comprehensive analysis to date of Romney’s tax plan and which bent over backward to make his promises add up. They’re perhaps the two most important words that have been written during this U.S. presidential election.
If you were to distill the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign to a few sentences, you could hardly do better than this statement of purpose from the speech [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2012/02/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-detroit-michigan ] Romney delivered in Detroit, outlining his plan for the economy: “I believe the American people are ready for real leadership. I believe they deserve a bold, conservative plan for reform and economic growth. Unlike President Obama, I actually have one -- and I’m not afraid to put it on the table.”
The truth is that Romney is afraid to put his plan on the table. He has promised to reduce the deficit, but refused to identify the spending he would cut. He has promised to reform the tax code, but refused to identify the deductions and loopholes he would eliminate. The only thing he has put on the table is dessert: a promise to cut marginal tax rates by 20 percent across the board and to do so without raising the deficit or reducing the taxes paid by the top 1 percent.
The Tax Policy Center took Romney at his word. They also did what he hasn’t done: They put his plan on the table.
Favorable Conditions
To help Romney, the center did so under the most favorable conditions, which also happen to be wildly unrealistic. The analysts assumed that any cuts to deductions or loopholes would begin with top earners, and that no one earning less than $200,000 would have their deductions reduced until all those earning more than $200,000 had lost all of their deductions and tax preferences first. They assumed, as Romney has promised, that the reforms would spare the portions of the tax code that privilege saving and investment. They even ran a simulation in which they used a model developed, in part, by Greg Mankiw, one of Romney’s economic advisers, that posits “implausibly large growth effects” from tax cuts.
The numbers never worked out. No matter how hard the Tax Policy Center labored to make Romney’s promises add up, every simulation ended the same way: with a tax increase on the middle class. The tax cuts Romney is offering to the rich are simply larger than the size of the (non-investment) deductions and loopholes that exist for the rich. That’s why it’s “mathematically impossible” for Romney’s plan to produce anything but a tax increase on the middle class.
The Romney campaign offered two responses to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis, one more misleading than the other.
First, the campaign called the analysis “just another biased study from a former Obama staffer.” That jab refers to Adam Looney, one of the study’s three co-authors, who served in a staff role on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. But the Tax Policy Center is directed by Donald Marron, who was one of the principals on George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. Calling the Tax Policy Center biased simply isn’t credible -- a point underscored by the fact that the Romney campaign referred to the group’s work as “objective, third-party analysis” during the primary campaign.
Then the Romney campaign said, “The study ignores the positive benefits to economic growth from both the corporate tax plan and the deficit reduction called for in the Romney plan.” There’s a reason the study ignores those “positive benefits”: Romney has called for a revenue-neutral corporate tax plan that brings the rate down from 35 percent to 25 percent while also promising to balance the budget. He has not said how he will achieve either goal. Until he does, those positive benefits -- if they exist -- are impossible to calculate.
Regressive Cuts
If Romney tries to pay for his tax cuts by reducing spending, the results, as the Tax Policy Center notes, would be even more regressive. Romney has promised to increase defense spending and hold benefits steady for the current generation of seniors. The only remaining big spending programs are those that help the poor; that’s where Romney’s cuts would have to be concentrated. Paying for tax cuts for the rich by curtailing programs for the poor is even more of a reverse-Robin Hood act than paying for tax cuts for the rich by cutting the tax expenditures (deductions and the like) of the middle class.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities produced its own analysis of Romney’s plan, based on an assumption that Romney pays for half of his tax cuts through spending cuts. The conclusion: By 2022, Romney would need to cut all non-defense, non-Social Security programs by 49 percent. That is not plausible, to say the least.
The Romney campaign has not provided good answers to the questions raised by its own math. But we already knew the Romney campaign didn’t have good answers. If Romney had good answers, he would have made good on his rhetoric and put his plans on the table.
It would be great if Romney could fulfill his promise to cut taxes by trillions of dollars, increase defense spending, keep entitlement spending on pretty much its current path for the next decade, and balance the budget. But as Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University economist, put it in a pithy tweet [ https://twitter.com/tylercowen/status/230805948132892673 ] (though perhaps “pithy tweet” is a tautology), “The proposed Romney fiscal policy just doesn’t make any sense.”
This is not a surprise. Even some Republican policy experts admit in private that Romney’s promises simply don’t add up. To twist Abraham Lincoln’s famous formulation, the Romney campaign has decided it’s better to remain silent and be thought evasive than to reveal your plan and remove all doubt that you’re cutting taxes on the rich while increasing the deficit, raising taxes on the middle class and cutting programs for the poor.
Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, the Tax Policy Center’s analysis has removed all doubt. Romney needs to come up with a way to make his promises mathematically possible -- and quick.
(Ezra Klein is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on this article: Ezra Klein in Washington at wonkbook@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.net.
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-02/romney-tax-plan-on-table-debt-collapses-table-.html [with comments]
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'He's asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a big tax cut'
Obama on Romney: 'He's asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a big tax cut'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV8b48KA3xI [via http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/01/1115720/-Obama-slams-Romney-tax-plan-Asking-you-to-pay-more-so-that-people-like-him-can-get-a-big-tax-cut (with comments)] [shorter excerpt from BarackObamadatcom at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dyV0-Mz_2E ]
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"Stretch" - Obama for America TV Ad
Learn more: http://OFA.BO/AHWfiR
You work hard, stretch every penny, but chances are you pay a higher tax rate than him: Mitt Romney made $20 million dollars in 2010, but paid only 14% in taxes—probably less than you.
Now he has a plan that will give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2000 dollars a year. Mitt Romney's middle class tax increase: he pays less, you pay more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1D1jI61ckY
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Obama's New Ad Jumps on Study of Romney's Tax Plan
[the ad just above embedded]
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign released a new ad based on a study of Mitt Romney’s tax plan.
By Laura Meckler
August 2, 2012
It took President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign less than 24 hours to turn a new study on Mitt Romney’s tax plan into a TV advertisement. Mr. Obama seized on the study a day earlier on the stump in Ohio. The new ad takes the matter a step further, linking Mr. Romney’s personal fortune to his tax plan.
The spot first points out that Mr. Romney made $20 million in 2010 but paid just an effective tax rate of just 14%. “Probably less than you,” the announcer says.
“Now he has a plan,” the ad continues, “that would give millionaires another tax break.” That’s a reference to Mr. Romney’s promise to reduce income tax rates across the board by 20%, which would deliver large benefits to those at the top of the income scale because they pay the most in taxes. It would also cut tax rates for lower-income taxpayers. Mr. Romney has said he will offset the cost of this tax plan, estimated at about $5 trillion over 10 years, by ending various deductions and other tax breaks, but he hasn’t identified them.
The new study by the Tax Policy Center concludes that even if his plan was written to deliver as many benefits as possible to those earning lower incomes, it would still “provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.”
The ad concludes: “Mitt Romney’s middle class tax increase. He pays less. You pay more.”
On Wednesday, the Romney campaign complained that the study was not objective because one of the co-authors used to work for the Obama White House and that it did not take into account the growth effects of lowering the corporate tax rate, as he also proposes. The Obama campaign countered that another co-author worked in the George H.W. Bush White House. In general, the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institute and the Urban Institute, is viewed as nonpartisan, and the Romney campaign cited their work last November as “objective” and “nonpartisan.”
The study was written by Samuel Brown, a Brookings research associate and former Federal Reserve analyst; William Gale, a Brookings scholar and former senior economist in Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; and Adam Looney, policy director for the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project and a former senior economist for Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Despite the back-and-forth over the authors of the report, the staff economists on the Council of Economic Advisers are nonpartisan and often work for administrations that are not aligned with their personal politics.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://stream.wsj.com/story/campaign-2012-continuous-coverage/SS-2-9156/SS-2-40553/ [with comments]
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President Obama on Mitt Romney's Tax Hike - Orlando, FL
Share this: http://OFA.BO/MZyHjW
Tweet this: http://OFA.BO/ewnVBX
In Orlando, FL President Obama spoke on Romney's middle class tax increase and shared how his plan will keep strengthening middle class families.
President Obama was in Orlando, FL to discuss the choice in this election between two fundamentally different visions of how to grow the economy, create middle-class jobs and pay down the debt.
The President believes the only way to create an economy built to last is to build it from the middle out, not the top down. He highlighted the stark contrast between his plan to provide tax relief for middle class families and Mitt Romney's tax plan, which a new report by the independent, nonpartisan Tax Policy Center shows that his $5 trillion tax plan would require hiking taxes on middle class families to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
President Obama's plan to prevent a tax hike on the middle class enacts spending cuts and reforms and asks the wealthiest to pay their fair share again so we can reduce our deficit in a balanced way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGngljoM4U
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"Balanced" - Obama for America TV Ad
Learn more: http://OFA.BO/GZxA4m
"The choice on debt.
Mitt Romney's plan: huge tax cuts for millionaires, tax breaks for oil companies and corporations that ship jobs overseas, adding trillions to the deficit.
President Obama's plan: a balanced approach that asks the wealthy to pay a little more, eliminates tax breaks for outsourcing and oil subsidies, cuts government spending, and reduces the deficit by four trillion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=civrt8Vl35c
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‘Americans Are Overtaxed’ and Other Federal Budget “Myths”
By Aaron Task | Daily Ticker – Wed, Aug 1, 2012
You're probably aware the U.S. government spends a lot of money and more than it brings in. But few Americans have a really good understanding of how the budget works, where the money comes from and where it goes.
In Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget [ http://www.amazon.com/Red-Ink-High-Stakes-Politics-Federal/dp/0770436145 ], Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel shines a light on the federal budget and seeks to clear up some of the "myths and unrealities," including:
Politicians Choose How the Money Is Spent: Over 60% of the federal budget -- $3.6 trillion in fiscal 2011 -- is on "autopilot," Wessel notes, citing Social Security checks, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies and veterans benefits that occur "without a vote of Congress."
All the Money Goes to Foreign Aid and Government Workers: Foreign aid is typically less than 2% of the budget -- "it's a pittance," Wessel says, and firing all federal employees wouldn't even cut the deficit in half.
Uncle Sam Keeps Reaching in Our Pockets: "It's not the case that people are paying more and more in taxes," Wessel says. "People are feeling the pain because wages aren't going up, that's for sure. But the fraction of paychecks that go to fed government in taxes have been steadily going down since early 1980s." (As an aside, he notes there were $1.1 trillion of tax breaks and loopholes in the code nearly as much as the $1.3 trillion the IRS collected last year.)
Another big myth about the budget, Wessel says, is that it can't be tamed.
"It's hard but not impossible," he says. "But if you're going to do something on the deficit there's only a few big levers to push: taxes, defense and entitlements. Everything else is just completely detail."
Like many D.C. pundits, Wessel has very little faith the politicians currently in Congress can work together to find a solution to America's problem of spending more than we bring in.
"At the moment, especially now before the election, if you're even seen talking to someone on the other side of the aisle you're seen as a traitor," he laments.
And like most non-partisan economists, Wessel believes the best way to address the budget deficit is through a combination of higher taxes and less spending.
"There's a view you can do this without raising taxes," he says, citing House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's plan. "Basically that requires people to take...much more belt tightening than in my judgment they're willing to take."
Citing Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf, Wessel says the problem is "the American people want more in benefits then they're willing to send to Washington in taxes."
And maybe that's the biggest budget myth of all: That we can have our cake, eat it too and not pay for it.
Copyright © 2012 Yahoo! Inc.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/americans-overtaxed-other-federal-budget-myths-171349674.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Promises 'Millions' Of Jobs -- But Offers No Data To Back It Up
Presumptive Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, talks about jobs during a campaign stop July 19 in Roxbury, Mass.
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
by Jon Ward
Posted: 08/02/2012 1:04 pm Updated: 08/02/2012 2:28 pm
WASHINGTON -- Growth.
That's the word, and the concept, that Mitt Romney's campaign is emphasizing in response to the Obama campaign's new attacks [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/obama-hammers-romney-tax-plan-ohio/story?id=16906049 ] on Romney's tax plan.
President Obama is seizing on a new think-tank study [ http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/8/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney.pdf ] that says Romney's plan to cut tax rates for all brackets, lower the corporate rate, close loopholes and keep taxes low on investments, would require him to eliminate deductions and credits that benefit the lower- and middle-class, such as child credits and mortgage deductions.
The Romney campaign is not engaging on the same playing field. When asked Thursday in a conference call how much Rommey's plan might add to the deficit before the economic-growth it projected to create was factored in, along with closing loopholes and cutting spending, the campaign declined to provide specific numbers.
In a sense, the Romney campaign is handicapping itself, because Obama is now out on the campaign trail wielding specific numbers against Romney, whacking him over the head with lines like this: "The average middle-class family with children, according to this study, would be hit with a tax increase of more than $2,000."
"In order to afford just one $250,000 tax cut for somebody like Mr. Romney, 125 families like yours would have to pay another $2,000 in taxes each and every year," Obama told a crowd in Mansfield, Ohio, on Wednesday.
"Does that sound like a good plan for economic growth?" Obama asked the crowd, which screamed back, "No!"
The Obama campaign even put out a web-based "tax calculator [ http://www.barackobama.com/tax-calculator ]" on Thursday, where a user can plug in his or her income and other variables to see how much of a tax increase he or she might see if Romney is elected and implements his plan.
This is an effective attack by the president, even if he himself has endorsed many of the same elements of a broad-based tax reform plan as Romney, though there are significant differences between them.
But in response, the Romney campaign is refusing to engage in a number-by-number fight over how much its plan would impact the bottom line for each American. The campaign is instead banking on the idea that Americans are more concerned with results, specifically economic growth.
The Romney camp's retort, in a nutshell, is that Romney's plan would produce growth and jobs, and that Obama's plan would not because it is focused only on an ideological/political determination to make the wealthy pay more, and not on what would actually get the economy going.
Job growth, the Romney argument goes, is the best solution to help the middle class.
"The fact is that if you can create jobs then you're going to have an enormous positive impact on income distribution because people who don't have a job right now have an income of about zero," Romney economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on the conference call Thursday. "And if you give people with incomes of zero jobs, then their incomes go up a lot and the income distribution improves tremendously."
The Romney campaign was happy to be specific with one number on Thursday: the number of jobs that their plan would create. The only issue was that different advisers said different things.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443687504577562842656362660.html ], Romney economic adviser Glenn Hubbard said the Republican candidate's plan would create "about 12 million new jobs in a Romney first term, and millions more after that due to the plan's long-run growth effects."
But Hassett said Thursday that Romney's plan would result in "job creation of 5 to 10 million higher than baseline over a decade."
Hassett laid out the logic: "It's very easy to get millions and millions of jobs out of something like the Romney plan. And that contrasts a lot with what President Obama is proposing, which is basically just a hike of marginal tax rates. I don't think there's any economist on earth that would look at something like that and say it's a jobs plan."
But while Hassett said they had numbers to back this up, there was no such data offered on the call.
"What a small group of us have been doing is trying to establish what the economic science, the state of the art, would say that the Romney fiscal plan would do to the economy," Hassett said. "And I think what we've found is the numbers are striking and interesting and based on extremely strong science."
That, however, was the last mention of those numbers. And until such supporting data is offered, Romney's plan will be dismissed by many as vague reassurances rather than a credible proposal.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/mitt-romney-jobs_n_1733359.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney: Memories to Last a Lifetime
Tweet this: https://my.barackobama.com/romneymemoriesTWvid
Post on Facebook: https://my.barackobama.com/romneymemoriesFBvid
President Obama has his opponent: Mitt Romney. Here are some things we all need to remember about him—and make sure our friends know, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSh7G48_wOI
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Mitt Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
Facebook it: https://my.barackobama.com/romneywhatevervid
Tweet it: https://my.barackobama.com/romneywhatevertwvid
Tumblr it: https://my.barackobama.com/romneywhatevertbrvid
Mitt Romney in February:
"I'm not sure which is worse; him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation"
Does he stand by his comment?
"I'm actually going to --I haven't, I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
What else does he stand by?
"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process let it run it's course and hit the bottom."
"Let Detroit go bankrupt."
"I will repeal Obamacare and I'll kill it dead on it's first day."
Reporter:
"Governor Romney, if you don't deport them, how do you send them home?"
Mitt Romney:
"Well the answer is self-deportation"
"Planned Parenthood, we're going to get rid of that."
"Corporations are people my friend."
"I was a severely conservative Republican governor."
"I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
Mitt Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6wF7PTyEY
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Hold Mitt Romney accountable, join the Truth Team at BarackObama.com/TruthTeam
Join the Truth Team: https://my.barackobama.com/truthteamvid
Mitt Romney is lying about President Obama again.
Mitt Romney: "And the President said something very revealing yesterday. He said that in a perfect world, the government could spend a lot more money. I disagree."
President Obama: "Now, if this were a perfect world, we'd have unlimited resources. No one would ever have to pay any taxes, and we could spend as much as we wanted. But we live in the real world. We don't have unlimited resources. We have a deficit that needs to be paid down. And we also have to pay for investments that will help our economy grow and keep our country safe: education, research and technology, a strong military, and retirement programs like Medicare and Social Security. That means we have to make choices. When it comes to paying down the deficit and investing in our future, should we ask middle-class Americans to pay even more at a time when their budgets are already stretched to the breaking point? Or should we ask some of the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share? That's the choice."
Hold Mitt Romney accountable, join the Truth Team: https://my.barackobama.com/truthteamvid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH9pIDUshww
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Mitt Romney versus Reality
Are you in? https://my.barackobama.com/distortionvid
Mitt Romney: "The President has pledged to "transform America," and he has spent the last four years laying the foundation for a new Government-Centered Society."
President Obama: "I have never been somebody who believes that government can or should try to solve every problem."
Mitt Romney: "He saw free enterprise as the villain and not the solution."
President Obama: "I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history."
Mitt Romney: "When you attack business and vilify success, you're going to have less business and less success."
President Obama: "I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington."
Mitt Romney: "... tax increases become not only a necessity, but also a desired tool for social justice."
President Obama: "I've cut taxes for small business owners 17 times over the last three years."
Mitt Romney: "... government spending always increase because...well why not?"
President Obama: "As President I've eliminated dozens of programs that weren't working. And put annual domestic spending on a path to become the smallest share of the economy since Dwight Eisenhower held this office"
Mitt Romney: "If we become one of those societies that attack success, one outcome is certain -- there will be a lot less success."
President Obama: "In this country broad based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class."
Mitt Romney: "We'll stop the days of apologizing for success at home and never again apologize for America abroad."
President Obama: "I have no doubt that we will continue our long and prosperous journey as the greatest nation on Earth. Thank you. God bless you. God bless the United States of America."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=858vyozbpWc
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Mitt Romney versus Reality
https://my.barackobama.com/distortionvid
Mitt Romney continues to distort reality in this latest installment of "Mitt Romney versus Reality"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM9DVC7kd7s
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Mitt Romney Versus Reality: Student Loans Edition
Are you in? https://my.barackobama.com/studentloantt5vid
Romney's budget plan cuts Pell Grants and locks in higher student loan rates. His advice for students?
"The best thing I can do for you is tell you to shop around."
Reality:
College would be more expensive under Mitt Romney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwI2dvvN4oM
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Mitt Romney Versus Reality: Global Edition
Are you in? https://my.barackobama.com/globalttvid
Mitt Romney continues to distort reality in this global edition of "Mitt Romney versus Reality"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrfxymxuyxA
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Charles Hill: The Empire Strikes Back
Ken Fallin
One of American's foremost strategists [sic - blithering idiots] says the era of liberal democracy is in jeopardy, and the historical norm of dominance by great powers will return if the U.S. fails to lead.
By ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Updated July 27, 2012, 6:53 p.m. ET
Yale Prof. Charles Hill is often called a "conservative." But he is one of the foremost students and advocates of what he calls the "liberal" ("in the finest sense of the word") world order. And he is worried that Americans increasingly don't understand how special the modern era has been or their own crucial role in developing and securing it.
To some, the Obama's administration's desire to "lead from behind" and seek United Nations approval for actions abroad represents an appropriate retreat to a more humble American posture. Mr. Hill, by contrast, sees the possible end of a great era of human rights and democracy promotion the likes of which the planet has never seen.
Our world has "been increasingly tolerant and increasingly trying to eradicate racism and increasingly trying to expand freedom. And it can come to an end," he says.
What might replace it? "Spheres of influence." Or to use a more archaic term, "empire."
Mr. Hill is the all-too-rare professor with an extensive background outside of academia. He made his career in the U.S. foreign service working on China and the Middle East, among other issues. He has advised secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and served as a policy consultant to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali. His ability to combine real-world experience with appreciation of the intellectual currents animating history—Dickens comes up during our discussion of the anti-slavery movement in 19th-century Britain—has made his courses some of the most popular at Yale.
So what makes our era unique and valuable? And how did we get here? To understand the road we've travelled, we have to go back—a long way.
"The way the world through almost all of history has been ordered is through empires. The empire was the normal unit of rule. So it was the Chinese empire, the Mughal empire, the Persian empire, and the Roman empire, the Mayan empire."
What changed this was the Thirty Years War in Europe in the 17th century. "That was a war between the Holy Roman Empire and states, and states were new. They had come forward in northern Italy in the Renaissance and now they were taking hold in what we think of as a state-sized entity. The Netherlands and Sweden and France were among these. . . . France was both an empire and a state—and the key was when [Cardinal] Richelieu took France to the side of the states, which was shocking because France was Catholic and the empire was Catholic and the states were Protestant."
Our modern concept that war should be governed by law dates from the era. "It was so awful that it produced Grotius," the Dutch philosopher of international law.
It also produced the Treaty of Westphalia. "What they did in creating something to prevent another Thirty Years War, they put in place what would develop into the international state system. . . . This is a work of genius, probably inadvertent in some sense," Mr. Hill says. "To be a good member of the international club you had to follow minimal procedures. . . . You could be Catholic or Protestant, but you had to be a state. So the state then replaces the empire as the fundamental unit of world affairs."
The next major event is the Congress of Vienna in 1814, when the powers that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte put their own stamp on the system. Meanwhile, the procedural norms for membership in the international club—such as hosting and protecting ambassadors—are being supplemented by more substantive and moral-sounding requirements.
"The Ottomans are an empire and there's kind of a back and forth across the 19th century—it's kind of a precursor to the Turkish thing of the 20th century—of European statesmen saying, well, yeah, you can come in to it but you have polygamy, you have slavery, so you can't be all the way in," the 76-year-old Mr. Hill says.
"My view is that every major modern war has been waged against this international system. That is, the empire strikes back. World War I is a war of empires which comes to its culmination point when a state gets into it. That's the United States." And then we get something very interesting added: "That's Woodrow Wilson and [the promotion of] democracy."
"World War II, and I think this is uncomprehended although it's perfectly clear, . . . World War II is a war of empires against the state system. It's Hitler's Third Reich. It's Imperial Japan." The Axis goal "is to establish an empire. The Nazi empire would be Europe going eastward into the Slavic lands. The Japanese empire in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as they called it."
Is the story uncomplicated? Of course not. One of the most important developments was the rise of the British navy—the "empire" on which "the sun never set"—in the mid-19th century. But that so-called empire arguably was the global rules-based system, committed to abolishing slavery and to free trade and free movement on the seas.
So too for the United States, as it assumed responsibility for protecting the air and sea lanes while the British pulled back after World War II. "The grand strategy of the U.S. since Harry Truman," says Mr. Hill, has been the establishment of a rules-based system built on institutions like the U.N. and NATO. It's a system designed to protect the rights of states to Wilsonian "self determination," not to subject them to the will of the strongest.
Mr. Hill is neither a U.N. basher nor romantic about the institution. "The U.N. is a very useful organization. Its usefulness goes up or down" depending on "whether it is used within the boundaries it was designed to be used. . . . When the states themselves don't want to get involved and hand something over to the U.N., then it always goes wrong." He cites Bosnia, and now Syria, as examples.
On former Secretary-General Kofi Annan's mission in Syria: "What he's doing is very detrimental. By its own design it can't do anything but serve as a kind of rescue mission for Bashar Assad." Mr. Annan "takes a U.N. approach to this that says what you want to do is stop the fighting. Well, if you stop the fighting you're serving Assad."
And then there is the misimpression that the U.N. is itself a global governing body, rather than an instrument of the state system.
"Model U.N. is very deleterious. It has been educating now two or more generations of high school and college students about a U.N. that isn't really the U.N. Now when people talk about the U.N. they talk about something that doesn't exist. They talk about it as though it's a kind of untethered international governing body," he says. "So you've got 4,000 high-school students coming in for a weekend at Yale" and "you give them 45 minutes for a little problem like Iran's nuclear program, and they solve it! And they wonder why, if we solved it this morning before lunch, why can't you solve it?"
The U.N. works, Mr. Hill says, when states take charge. "The point is not that the U.S. has to act unilaterally. . . . The point is will the U.S. take a leading role?" he says. "The whole system has been defended by the leadership of the U.S. and its allies. And the idea of open expression and open trade is the American way of seeing the world improve itself in the future. If America is not gonna do that, nobody else is gonna do it. And that's what's happening now."
Mr. Hill sees two very different kinds of challenges to the liberal, state-based world order. One, the aggressive kind, is exemplified by China. The other, very different, can be seen in the European Union.
China has been a believer in the international system in recent decades, he says. It has seen advantages in the doctrine of state equality (which it uses to defend against human-rights complaints) and has gained from the liberalization of trade. But as the U.S. pulls back—a shrinking Navy, President Obama's foreign policy—things are starting to change.
The Chinese are talking about how they used to approach the world in the dynastic era, says Mr. Hill. "'[We] know that states are not equal and therefore we need a world order in which that reality is recognized.' This meme is getting around in China and is what accounts for statements starting two years ago as regards the South China Sea to Vietnam or the Philippines saying openly 'We are a big power and you're not a big power and therefore you should follow what we say.'"
The problem of the European Union, by contrast, is not the over-assertion of state power but the abdication of it without a suitable replacement. Of the current troubles in Europe, Mr. Hill says, "They took away the sovereign powers of the states" but they "didn't take enough power to Brussels to be able to run the Continent under crisis situations."
Why did Europe do that? Mr. Hill suggests that German and other war guilt was a big factor. "It so sickened the European intelligentsia" that "it was almost as though they said, yes, Europe has been the cause of all the world's problems. Napoleon and colonialism and imperialism and Stalin and Marx and Lenin and Hitler and the Holocaust. But no more. Now we're going to be the most moral people in the world. And the Americans who have been causing these problems along with us? They represent the past, we represent the future."
In short, "the European vision is we're just going to be nice" and "people will follow our lead. The Chinese view is why should we not do what we want to do with these little people who used to pay us tribute?"
What amazes Mr. Hill is how much of a break the Obama foreign policy represents compared with the bipartisan consensus stretching back to Truman. That culminated in President George W. Bush's second inaugural address, which he likens to an "emancipation proclamation for the world." But, he says, "The democracy wave that began 20 years ago [at the end of the Cold War] is now turning backward." Why? "The conduct of the Obama administration."
So the future is still very much a choice, not an inevitability, I ask.
"Absolutely. It's been a choice," he says. "I'm not so sure now that people even see the choice because the mentalities are shifting. . . . What I'm beginning to see is that when you try to explain something like this to someone, they don't have any idea what you're talking about. They just don't get it. But you wrecked your educational system the way we have. I'm talking about fourth grade, not higher education."
He talks about his aunt, who was principal of a middle school. The library was "incredible." Students read "Tacitus or Horace or Caesar's 'Gallic Wars.' Now we don't teach that. And we don't teach American history."
I ask about other possible future spheres of influence if the international system breaks down. If Europe doesn't get its act together, "the sphere of influence is going to be run from Moscow," Mr. Hill says. "There is an Indian sphere of influence" and "you look this way to Bali and this way to Zanzibar." Is Brazil a power of the future? "As they say, it always will be," he chuckles, alluding to a well-known joke about the country.
But the message remains dead serious. The "battle" for liberal democracy and some semblance of international order "has been being won because the U.S. has been putting out the effort for it," he says. "And now we're not."
Mr. Pollock is the Journal's editorial features editor [and yet another blithering idiot].
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443343704577552821956795292.html [with copmments]
===
Mitt Romney, at fundraiser in Israel, describes spiritual impact of visit
Mitt Romney pauses in prayer as he visits the Western Wall, Judaism holiest prayer site, on July 29. View more photos in London and Israel of Romney’s overseas trip.
(Reuters/Jason Reed)
Video [embedded]
Mitt Romney tried to pull back from an adviser's suggestion that he favored new American aggression on Iran, distancing himself from comments that he would "respect" Israeli military action to prevent Tehran from gaining nuclear capability.
By Philip Rucker, Published: July 30, 2012
JERUSALEM — Mitt Romney held an intimate breakfast fundraiser here Monday with some of his campaign’s biggest benefactors, telling them about the spiritual impact his trip to Israel had had on him.
Seated around a U-shaped conference table with roughly 40 donors, with Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sheldon-adelson-and-newt-gingrich-one-gained-clout-from-friendship-the-other-funding/2012/01/11/gIQACvSrBQ_story.html ] immediately to his left, Romney said he was “overwhelmingly impressed with the hand of providence.”
“I come to this place, therefore, with a sense of profound humility, as I look around here at great people who’ve accomplished a great thing, and also a sense of spiritual connection, acknowledging the hand of providence in establishing this place and making it a holy city,” Romney said.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was expected to raise more than $1 million from the donors, who each were required to raise or donate $25,000 to $50,000 to attend the event. All of the donors are U.S. citizens, and many of them flew here from the United States to be with Romney during his 36-hour visit to Jerusalem.
Many of those in attendance at the posh King David Hotel are major bundlers for Romney’s campaign, raising tens of thousands of dollars from their business associates and friends. Adelson, for instance, has personally committed to giving tens of millions of dollars [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/romney-super-pac-raised-record-20-million-in-june/2012/07/16/gJQAF5ZJoW_blog.html ] to a pro-Romney super PAC.
Other donors in attendance included hedge fund executive Paul Singer [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pro-romney-super-pac-raised-179-million/2012/01/31/gIQA6kDzgQ_story.html ], beef industry executive John Miller, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and lawyer Philip Rosen.
Ann Romney and one of the couple’s sons, Josh, as well as Scott Romney, the candidate’s older brother, also attended, as did national finance chairman Spencer Zwick and his wife, Jenny, and Bob White, one of Romney’s closest friends and founding partner at Bain Capital.
Ann Romney told the donors that the trip to Israel was emotional for her family. She said Josh had never visited Israel before, and she told him at the beginning of the trip that he would be touched at some point — and he was.
“I think your heart would have to be made of stone not to feel what is still here,” Ann Romney said. “And it is a magical place, and it is a place which makes us turn to our inner soul and to our hearts ... So it is with quiet ears that we can hear and listen to all that is around us and of the beauty and all of the extraordinary history that’s here.”
In his remarks, Mitt Romney contrasted the gross domestic product of Israel with its neighbors in the Middle East.
“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” Romney said.
Romney cited two books that had influenced his thinking about foreign affairs — “Guns, Germs and Steel [ http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel--N-A-/dp/B008549FPO ]” by Jared Diamond and “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations [ http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Nations-Some-Rich/dp/0393318885 ]” by David Landes, and he gave a shout-out for “Start-up Nation [ http://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation-Israels-Economic-Miracle/dp/0446541478 ],” a book one of his senior foreign policy advisers, Dan Senor, wrote about entrepreneurship in Israel.
His comparison brought swift condemnation from Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who told the Associated Press the statement was “racist.”
“This man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation,” Erekat told AP. “It seems to me this man lacks information, knowledge, vision and understanding of this region and its people. He also lacks knowledge about the Israelis themselves. I have not heard any Israeli official speak about cultural superiority.”
Romney separately noted that Israel — which has universal health care — spends just 8 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, while the United States spends 18 percent. “We have to find ways,” he said, “not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to [fund] and manage our health-care costs.”
Romney also boasted of meeting the founder of Under Armour [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/horse-racing/in-sagamore-farm-kevin-plank-has-a-long-shot-with-pedigree/2011/05/16/AFK6824G_story.html ], Maryland native Kevin Plank, last week at the London Olympics. Romney spotted Plank wearing a pullover with the Under Armour logo, and soon discovered he was the founder of the business. Naturally, Romney asked how he had created the company.
“He said he was playing football and the cotton underwear that they would wear would get all moist and crinkled up and create pressure points and so forth, and he decided to go buy some stretchy fabric, cut it and sew it together, which he did and it was very comfortable,” Romney recalled.
Soon, Under Armour had 5,500 people working at the company and making uniforms for professional sports teams.
As Romney told the anecdote to the donors, however, he acknowledged that he had forgotten the founder’s name. So, he told the donors, he had his national finance chairman, Zwick, look him up on Google.
“The individual who was the founder of Under Armour is Kevin — Plake — is that it?” Romney said.
“Plank,” replied Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets.
“You know Kevin?” Romney asked.
“I know Kevin,” Johnson said.
“You know Kevin!” Romney replied. “Did he sell product to the New York Jets?”
“I have his products,” Johnson said.
“You have them!” Romney replied. “Are you wearing his productions — can you demonstrate?”
Johnson declined to provide a demonstration.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-fundraiser-in-israel-romney-describes-spiritual-impact-of-visit/2012/07/30/gJQAFXJpJX_story.html [with comments]
===
Romney Doubles Down: Economically Successful Countries Are Culturally Superior
By Aviva Shen on Jul 30, 2012 at 3:09 pm
In a speech to wealthy donors in Tel Aviv over the weekend, Romney praised Israel’s “economic vitality” compared to the poor Palestinian economy. He attributed the economic success of the nation to a strong culture [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/30/604251/romney-statement-israel-palestinians-cultural-superiority/ ]:
I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. …
As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.
Palestinians took offense at Romney’s remarks, interpreting them to mean that Israel had the superior culture, and claimed that their economic development has been stymied by continued Israeli occupation. In response, the Romney campaign claimed the statement was “grossly mischaracterized” and chided the press for omitting the candidate’s full remarks. To contextualize Romney’s comparison — which actually underestimated the disparity between Israel’s GDP of US$31,000 to the West Bank and Gaza’s US$1,500 — the campaign offered his next line as proof that he did not target Palestinians: “And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.”
This defense underscores the fundamental tone-deafness of the comparison. To give the full context, Romney discussed two economic theories, one attributing success to the physical characteristics of the land, while another attributes it to culture. He argued that the successes of Israel, the U.S. and Chile can be attributed to strong cultures; conversely, the geographically similar Palestinian, Ecuadorean and Mexican economies are the result of a poorer culture.
The “culture” argument doesn’t merely imply that poorer economies somehow deserve their fate due to an inferior value system. It makes generalizations about the characters of both populations. Abraham Diskin, a political scientist professor from Tel Aviv pointed out [ http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120730/DA0BABG02.html ], “You can understand this remark in several ways. You can say it’s anti-Semitic. ‘Jews and money.’”
Update
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended Romney [ http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/30/13034595-mccain-israeli-palestinian-differences-have-nothing-to-do-with-cultures ] in a news conference: “I am sure that Gov. Romney was not talking about difference in cultures, or difference in anybody superior or inferior.” McCain chalked up the difference in economies to regulations, saying, “It has nothing to do with culture.”
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/30/607231/romney-doubles-down-economically-successful-countries-are-culturally-superior/ [with comments]
===
Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework
By JARED DIAMOND
Published: August 1, 2012
Los Angeles
MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.
It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel [ http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552 ],” as Mr. Romney described it [ http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/romney-israel-palestine-gdp-culture.php ] in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/mitt-romneys-2-favorite-books-that-explain-america-and-the-world/260519/ ] my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)
That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
Just as a happy marriage depends on many different factors, so do national wealth and power. That is not to deny culture’s significance. Some countries have political institutions and cultural practices — honest government, rule of law, opportunities to accumulate money — that reward hard work. Others don’t. Familiar examples are the contrasts between neighboring countries sharing similar environments but with very different institutions. (Think of South Korea versus North Korea, or Haiti versus the Dominican Republic.) Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work. But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.
A different set of factors involves geography, which embraces many more aspects than the physical characteristics Mr. Romney dismissed. One such geographic factor is latitude, which has big effects on wealth and power today: tropical countries tend to be poorer than temperate-zone countries. Reasons include the debilitating effects of tropical diseases on life span and work, and the average lower productivity of agriculture and soils in the tropics than in the temperate zones.
A second factor is access to the sea. Countries without a seacoast or big navigable rivers tend to be poor, because transport costs overland or by air are much higher than transport costs by sea.
A third geographic factor is the history of agriculture. If an extraterrestrial had toured earth in the year 2000 B.C., the visitor would have noticed that centralized government, writing and metal tools were already widespread in Eurasia but hadn’t yet appeared in the New World, sub-Saharan Africa or Australia. That long head start would have let the visitor predict correctly that today, most of the world’s richest and most powerful countries would be Eurasian countries (and their overseas settlements in North America, Australia and New Zealand).
The reason is the historical effect of geography: 13,000 years ago, all peoples everywhere were hunter-gatherers living in sparse populations without centralized government, armies, writing or metal tools. These four roots of power arose as consequences of the development of agriculture, which generated human population explosions and accumulations of food surpluses capable of feeding full-time leaders, soldiers, scribes and inventors. But agriculture could originate only in those few regions endowed with many wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, like wild wheat, rice, pigs and cattle.
In short, geographic explanations and cultural-institutional explanations aren’t independent of each other. Of course, not all agricultural regions developed honest centralized government, but no nonagricultural region ever developed any centralized government, whether honest or dishonest. That’s why institutions promoting wealth today arose first in Eurasia, the area with the oldest and most productive agriculture.
What does this mean for Americans? Can we assume that the United States, blessed with temperate location and seacoasts and navigable rivers, will remain rich forever, while tropical or landlocked countries are doomed to eternal poverty?
Of course not. Some tropical and subtropical countries have become richer despite geographic limitations. They’ve invested in public health to overcome their disease burdens (Botswana and the Philippines). They’ve invested in crops adapted to the tropics (Brazil and Malaysia). They’ve focused their economies on sectors other than agriculture (Singapore and Taiwan).
Conversely, geographic advantages don’t guarantee permanent success, as the growing difficulties in Europe and America show. We Americans fail to provide superior education and economic incentives to much of our population. India, China and other countries that have not been world leaders are investing heavily in education, technology and infrastructure. They’re offering economic opportunities to more and more of their citizens. That’s part of the reason jobs are moving overseas. Our geography won’t keep us rich and powerful if we can’t get a good education, can’t afford health care and can’t count on our hard work’s being rewarded by good jobs and rising incomes.
Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the forthcoming book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? [ http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 ]”
*
Related
The Caucus: Romney’s Remarks About Palestinians Draw Criticism (July 30, 2012)
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/romney-comments-on-palestinians-draw-criticism/
Related in Opinion
Op-Ed Columnist: Why Not in Vegas? (August 1, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/opinion/friedman-why-not-in-vegas.html
Editorial: Mr. Romney Stumps in Israel (July 31, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/mitt-romney-stumps-in-israel.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/opinion/mitt-romneys-search-for-simple-answers.html [with comments]
===
Romney reiterates stance on 'culture'; Palestinians still furious
Mitt Romney visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City.
(Uriel Sinai / Getty Images)
August 01, 2012|By Maher Abukhater and Robin Abcarian
After a week abroad, Mitt Romney is back on American soil and has resumed his campaign schedule. But he wanted to clarify a remark that landed him in hot water with Palestinians on Monday.
He published an essay in the National Review Online on Tuesday, the day he flew home to Boston, defending himself against a controversy arising from remarks he made in Israel that infuriated Palestinians [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-brushes-off-missteps-third-controversy-mars-final-day-of-trip-20120731,0,7350786.story ].
In the essay, “Culture Does Matter [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/312830/culture-does-matter-mitt-romney ]," Romney reiterated some salient points of his speech to supporters at a fundraiser in Jerusalem.
“During my recent trip to Israel,” wrote the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, “I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy. But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture?”
Romney did not elaborate on which aspects of Palestinian culture he blames for the chasm between the per capita income of the two peoples, but he did, once again, raise the ire of Palestinians who believe that Israel’s economic success and the West Bank's economic struggles are not caused by cultural differences, but by Israel’s military occupation of the territory.
“The Israeli occupation and restrictions are responsible for the economic difficulties facing the Palestinians,” Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib said Wednesday in Ramallah. "This is not only the assessment of Palestinians, but also the conclusions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and all international organizations.”
(The World Bank and IMF have agreed that while the Palestinian economy is not strong enough to support a state, its greatest impediment is restrictions imposed by Israel that hamper investment by creating uncertainty and risk, according to the Associated Press [ http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/world-bank-palestinian-economy-unsustainable-168516 ].)
Khatib added: “Israel is profiting from the occupation of our land and we, in return, are not able to benefit from our own resources to develop our economy. And not only that, the Israeli restrictions on movement and trade through its control over the borders and the checkpoints also hamper our economic growth.
“All he had to do was read the many reports by the international organizations and he would have easily realized that Israel exploits the economy of the Palestinian territories for the benefit of its own economy while causing the deterioration in our own economy. It is as simple as that.”
Israel has maintained that its restrictions on Palestinians are based on security concerns.
As Romney may have discovered, the complex situation does not always lend itself to campaign-trail sound bites.
Still, Romney sacrifices little politically by praising Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. His intended audience, after all, comprises two important domestic political constituencies, conservative American Jews and evangelical Christians. Palestinian statehood does not rank as a pressing concern for these groups, which also appreciate Romney’s hard-line stance against Iran, Israel’s most potent adversary.
Should Romney win the presidency, however, he may have a diplomatic dilemma on his hands. But he will cross that checkpoint when he gets there.
Abukhater reported from Ramallah, Abcarian from Los Angeles.
Copyright 2012 Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/01/news/la-pn-romney-reiterates-stance-on-culture-palestinians-still-furious--20120801 [with comments]
===
Mitt Romney's Culture Problem
By Robert Wright
Aug 1 2012, 10:00 AM ET
At last Mitt Romney and Palestinians have found something they can agree on. And when you reflect on that something, I think you'll see more clearly why Romney keeps failing to get traction [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/us/politics/polls-give-obama-edge-in-pennsylvania-ohio-and-florida.html ] with American voters.
After going to Israel and offending Palestinians in the occupied territory by seeming to attribute [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/us/politics/romney-angers-palestinians-with-comments-in-israel.html?pagewanted=all ] their economic plight to "cultural" deficiencies, Romney decided to write a piece [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/312830/culture-does-matter-mitt-romney ] for National Review Online clarifying his point. And it turns out that when he talks about a culture conducive to prosperity he's largely talking about a culture featuring freedom. "The linkage between freedom and prosperity has a universal applicability," he writes.
I'm sure many Palestinians agree they could use more freedom, and that this would have economic benefits. West Bank Palestinians would like the freedom to transport goods directly from one town to another without taking bizarrely circuitous routes dictated by the existence of webs of illegal Israeli settlements -- and they'd like to be confident that, while they're en route, these roads won't suddenly be shut down by Israeli troops. Palestinian businesses (and residences) would like the freedom to control natural resources, so they could have running water seven days a week, rather than see the water siphoned off to fill swimming pools in those Israeli settlements.
And many West Bank Palestinians would like the freedom to vote for or against the Israeli governments that have imposed these and other conditions on them. That would be a manifestation of freedom known as "democracy."
I realize Mitt Romney doesn't care what Palestinians think of him, since they have no real constituency in America. But what is alarming--and I mean alarming from the point of view of Americans who might wind up being governed by this guy--is that he probably has no awareness of the stunning irony of going to Jerusalem, having a lovefest with Bibi Netanyahu, defender-in-chief of the Israeli occupation, and then preaching to Palestinians that they'd be better off if only they'd get themselves some freedom!
I mean, leave aside the left-right argument about whether Israeli or Palestinian leaders are more responsible for the failure to reach a two-state solution back when that was still possible. Do you have any idea how offensive Romney sounds to the vast majority of Palestinians who definitely can't be blamed for this failure to seize past moments?
I used to think the Democratic rap on Romney--that he's one of these rich people who just can't see the way life looks to less rich people--was just a clever and not wholly implausible talking point. But I'm starting to take it much more seriously. I think his gaffes abroad do bespeak an inability to put himself in the shoes of other people, whether Brits who are proud of their Olympic preparations or Palestinians who live under occupation.
I mean, gosh, why didn't those Palestinians have the wisdom to be born into a nice Mormon family--with nice Mormon culture--whose patriarch was head of American Motors? And, come to think of it, why didn't all those unemployed Americans exhibit similar foresight?
Mitt's a pretty smart guy, but there's one thing he just can't seem to wrap his mind around: not being Mitt. For the millions of American voters who aren't Mitt, that's something to think about.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/mitt-romneys-culture-problem/260583/ [with comments]
===
Here's a List of Countries With a Higher GDP Per Capita Than Israel
Mitt Romney applauds while speaking in Jerusalem.
If "culture makes all the difference" in explaining economic disparity, as Romney suggested of Israel and Palestine, then are Kuwaitis and Belgians culturally superior to Israelis?
Jul 31 2012
[...]
The 26 countries with higher GDP per capita than Israel, per IMF data:
• Luxembourg $113,533
• Qatar $98,329
• Norway $97,255
• Switzerland $81,161
• United Arab Emirates $67,008
• Australia $65,477
• Denmark $59,928
• Sweden $56,956
• Canada $50,436
• Netherlands $50,355
• Austria $49,809
• Finland $49,350
• Singapore $49,271
• United States $48,387
• Kuwait $47,982
• Ireland $47,513
• Belgium $46,878
• Japan $45,920
• France $44,008
• Germany $43,742
• Iceland $43,088
• United Kingdom $38,592
• New Zealand $36,648
• Brunei $36,584
• Italy $36,267
• European Union $35,116
• Hong Kong $34,049
• Spain $32,360
[...]
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/heres-a-list-of-countries-with-a-higher-gdp-per-capita-than-israel/260546/ [with comments]
===
Mitt Romney’s overseas jaunt v. Obama’s 2008 voyage: What a difference staffing makes
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his wife Ann board their charter plane in Israel.
(Charles Dharapak - AP)
By Emily Heil
Posted at 09:18 AM ET, 07/31/2012
Even before he was wheels-up for London, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s overseas trip was drawing comparisons [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-race-romneys-overseas-trip-recalls-obama-2008-globe-trotting-to-burnish-credentials/2012/07/20/gJQAlJcYyW_story.html ] to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 overseas trip.
Both were candidates looking to appear presidential and polish up their foreign-policy credentials.
But where Obama’s trip was smooth sailing (save a kerfuffle about a cancelled visit [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/obama-skips-visit-with-troops/ ] with wounded troops), Romney’s voyage [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/30/romney-praises-health-care-in-israel-where-strong-government-influence-has-driven-down-costs/ ] has been laden [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-olympic-stumbles-in-london/2012/07/27/gJQAiMZKEX_story.html ] with cringe-inducing gaffes [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-olympic-stumbles-in-london/2012/07/27/gJQAiMZKEX_story.html ].
So what’s the difference — other than four years and two vastly different candidates? Here’s one big distinction:the Obama campaign loaded up on staff firepower while the Romney camp had a relative ghost crew. Our colleague Philip Rucker noted the disparity in his story on Friday [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-looks-for-a-breakout-moment-in-israel-to-salvage-foreign-trip/2012/07/27/gJQAMHNaEX_story.html ] (in which he reported that Romney was looking for a “breakout moment” in Israel that would salvage the trip--a hope that wasn’t borne out this week when the GOP candidate managed to tick off Palestinians [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-olympic-stumbles-in-london/2012/07/27/gJQAiMZKEX_story.html ]).
“When Barack Obama traveled overseas as a candidate in 2008, it was an all-hands-on-deck event...By contrast, Romney’s top political advisers stayed home,” Rucker reported.
Just how lopsided were the staffs? We dug around for the rosters.
For his trip, Obama got assists from at least 14 top staffers and advisors, many of whom were heavy hitters with serious foreign policy and economic credentials. They included former National Security Advisor Tony Lake; former Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg; former White House and State Department official Greg Craig [ http://www.skadden.com/professionals/gregory-b-craig ]; former assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice [ http://usun.state.gov/leadership/c31461.htm ]; former National Security Council staffer Ivo Daalder [ http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/123509.htm ]; longtime diplomat and State Department official Dennis Ross [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/dennis-ross-tries-to-help-obama-salvage-the-policy-he-implemented/2012/01/08/gIQA8k62jP_blog.html ]; former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig [ http://www.cnas.org/danzig ]; former Under Secretary of Commerce Robert Shapiro [ http://cartermorse.com/our-team/advisory-board/workers-compensation ]; retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/us-ambassador-to-kenya-j-scott-gration-resigns-over-differences-with-washington/2012/06/29/gJQAMOQEBW_story.html ]; senior foreign policy advisor Denis McDonough [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/denis-mcdonough/gIQAt6rX9O_topic.html ]; foreign policy speechwriter Ben Rhodes [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ben-rhodes/gIQATbvW9O_topic.html ]; chief strategist David Axelrod; communications director Robert Gibbs; and spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
Romney, on the other hand, has only three senior staffers with him for the entire trip: policy director Lanhee Chen; foreign policy aide Alex Wong; and press secretary Andrea Saul.
Romney supplemented the trio at various stops along the way: in London, former senator Jim Talent [ http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/t/jim-talent ] (R-Mo.)and former Massachusetts lieutenant governor Kerry Healey [ http://www.iop.harvard.edu/Programs/Fellows-Study-Groups/Former-Fellows/Kerry_Healey ] met the gang; in Israel, former Council on Foreign Relations adjunct senior fellow Dan Senor [ http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/node/79 ] hopped on board; chief strategist Stuart Stevens [ http://www.ssg-dc.com/about-us/ ] joined for the Israel and Poland legs; and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Ian Brezinski [ http://www.acus.org/users/ian-brzezinski ] came to Poland.
So lest anyone question the power of staffing...
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/post/2012/07/30/gJQAbZnCLX_blog.html [with comments]
===
Fox News Host: Covering Romney’s International Trip Feels Like Being In ‘A Modified Petting Zoo’
By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jul 30, 2012 at 12:24 pm
Journalists following the Romney campaign on the road have voiced some gripes with how they are being treated. They have been asked to submit quotes for approval [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/news-organizations-push-back-against-quote-approval/ ], barred from asking questions [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/16/romney-aides-secret-service-block-press-from-event-rope-line/ ] on the rope line, and were temporarily barred from entering [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romney-bans-media-from-jerusalem-fundraiser-violating-pre-established-protocol/2012/07/28/gJQAAaeVGX_blog.html ] a fundraiser to which they’d been promised entry (after media outrage [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romney-opens-jerusalem-fundraiser-to-press-reversing-earlier-decision/2012/07/29/gJQAL0g6HX_blog.html ], the campaign reversed its decision).
Now, Fox News’ conservative host Greta Van Susteren has joined the chorus of journalists complaining about treatment from the Romney campaign. As she follows the campaign through Poland today, Van Susteren posted to her blog [ http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/2012/07/30/notes-from-travel-with-gov-romney-in-poland/ ] saying that the press has had no access to the candidate, and that she feels like she is in a petting zoo:
There has been no press access to Governor Romney since we landed in Poland. We (press) are in a holding pattern (I can’t help but feel a bit like the press is a modified petting zoo since we are trapped in a bus while Polish citizens take pictures of us.) Under the headline “Governor Romney won’t like this” we saw a big sign in the crowd for Rep Ron Paul.
The Romney campaign has granted some interviews to journalists, including Van Susteren herself [ http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/press-is-a-modified-petting-zoo-on-romney-foreign-trip-says-greta_b139551 ]. But he has been much more secretive than predecessors, including Obama who, when traveling abroad, held two press conferences, two appearances on Sunday talk shows, and several television and in-person interviews.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/07/30/606221/press-feels-like-a-modified-petting-zoo-on-romneys-international-trip/ [with comments]
===
Polish Solidarity Distances Itself From Romney: He ‘Supported Attacks On Trade Unions And Employees’ Rights’
Solidarity occupying an intersection in 1982
By Ali Gharib on Jul 31, 2012 at 9:15 am
Between annoying the British and alienating the Palestinians [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/30/604251/romney-statement-israel-palestinians-cultural-superiority/ ], Mitt Romney seems to have found trouble everywhere he went on his overseas campaign trip. Now, the Polish trade union Solidarity, once led by Romney’s host in Poland Lech Walesa, disavowed the GOP presidential hopeful because of his anti-union politics.
Romney went to Gdansk, Poland to meet with Walesa [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/79167.html ], who in 1980, led a workers’ strike in the Gdansk Shipyard and helped create the Solidarity trade union [ http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1060898.html ]. Solidarity became a thorn in the side of the Soviet-backed government, and Walesa eventually became a Nobel laureate and the first president of a free Poland. Walesa was reportedly miffed [ http://www.kansascity.com/2012/07/28/3730698/romney-trip-to-poland-wrapped.html ] when Obama wouldn’t grant him a private greeting, and invited Romney for a visit.
But Solidarity isn’t extending the same welcome. The group distanced itself in a statement [ ]:
Regretfully, we were informed by our friends from the American headquarters of (trade union federation) AFL-CIO, which represents more than 12 million employees … that Mitt Romney supported attacks on trade unions and employees’ rights.
Solidarity was not involved in organizing Romney’s meeting with Walesa and did not invite him to visit Poland.
Romney has staked out anti-union positions [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/23/1112926/-Do-You-Know-Of-Mitt-Romney-s-Anti-Union-Agenda ]. He supported right-to-work legislation [ http://news.yahoo.com/mitt-romney-touts-faults-unions-michigan-201200615.html ] and railed against unions [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/26/nation/la-na-romney-labor-20120226 ] in Michigan earlier this year: “I’ve taken on union bosses before. I’m happy to take them on again.” (HT: Muhammed Idrees Ahmad [ http://pulsemedia.org/about/muhammad-idrees-ahmad/ ])
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/31/611381/romney-solidarity-poland-distances/ [with comments]
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Mitt Romney: Michele Bachmann's Muslim Brotherhood Claims Are 'Not Part Of My Campaign'
By Sabrina Siddiqui
Posted: 08/03/2012 2:34 pm Updated: 08/03/2012 7:57 pm
Mitt Romney declined to speak out against Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and four other House Republicans on Friday for seeking to investigate whether Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Following a campaign event in Reno, Nev., a reporter asked the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for his reaction to both Bachmann's allegations against Abedin and a controversy surrounding Chick-Fil-A and gay marriage [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/chick-fil-a-companies-gay-marriage_n_1721682.html ].
“I’m not going to tell other people what things to talk about," Romney responded. "Those are not things that are part of my campaign [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMVjw4ebYEw (below)].”
Romney's response comes in the same week as Clinton's own response to the issue [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/hillary-clinton-huma-abedin_n_1721416.html ]. The secretary of state noted the duty of political leaders to speak out and protect diversity in their countries.
"I don't see enough of that. I want to see more of it," Clinton said. "We did see some of that in our own country. We saw Republicans stepping up and standing up against the kind of assaults that really have no place in our politics. So we have to set an example, there is no doubt about that. And we have to continue doing so."
This isn't the first time Romney has been reluctant to give his opinion on a controversial issue. In the wake of Donald Trump's renewed charges that President Barack Obama might not have been born in America, Romney told reporters he would not "repudiate [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/28/mitt-romney-will-not-repu_n_1551540.html ]" the billionaire and that he doesn't necessarily agree with everyone who supports his candidacy. Romney was also unwilling to condemn Rush Limbaugh [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/rush-limbaugh-sandra-fluke-david-axelrod_n_1323911.html ] for calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" earlier this year, merely responding that he would not have used the same language.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/03/mitt-romney-michele-bachmann-muslim-brotherhood_n_1738585.html [with comments]
===
Romney, GOP high-rollers to meet in Aspen
Romney plans to join mega-donors in Aspen for a retreat.
AP
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and WILLIAM BERGSTROM | 7/31/12 5:23 PM EDT Updated: 8/1/12 12:02 AM EDT
Mitt Romney will hold a fundraiser with some of the biggest donors in GOP politics in Aspen on Thursday night on the sidelines of a closed-door Republican Governors Association high-rollers event, sources tell POLITICO.
After attending public events during the day at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds [ http://www.chieftain.com/politics/romney-coming-to-colorado-on-thursday/article_94f4088a-db34-11e1-b114-0019bb2963f4.html ] and Basalt High School, Romney plans to join mega-donors in town for a retreat hosted by the RGA’s so-called Executive Roundtable program, which will draw some of the biggest names in GOP politics, including several high-powered governors, a top adviser to Romney, Karl Rove, and other representatives of deep-pocketed political spenders, including a top lieutenant of the Koch brothers.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is planning to attend a Romney fundraiser [ http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/07/gov_christie_adds_romney_fundr.html ] around the big-donor gathering, though it’s not clear if that’s the fundraiser Romney plans to attend, which sources say is set to be held at the Little Nell resort, described on its website [ http://www.thelittlenell.com/ ] as Aspen’s only five-star, five-diamond hotel. Romney’s campaign declined to comment on the Aspen visit.
The Executive Roundtable event, set for Aspen’s St. Regis Hotel, features a roster of attendees [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120731_aspen_attendee_list_2012.html ], obtained by POLITICO, that reads like a who’s who of the most influential players in GOP politics.
Expected guests include Ed Gillespie, listed on the roster as a senior adviser to Romney’s campaign, as well Rove, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Steven Law – all of whom help run the Crossroads groups that aim to spend as much as $300 million boosting Romney and other Republican candidates.
Also attending is Kevin Gentry, a top aide to the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77453.html ], who are angling to direct nearly $400 million to a range of outside groups [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html ] ahead of the 2012 election.
The roundtable typically convenes four times a year for retreats that feature a few panels [ http://www.politico.com/politicoinfluence/0711/politicoinfluence55.html ] on policy areas bracketed by a pair of dinners at which donors can get up-close-and-personal with the governors.
This year’s confab, which begins Wednesday, will be interrupted that night by a little-publicized, but technically public, “Conversation with Republican Governors” hosted the Aspen Institute [ http://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/2012/08/01/mccloskey-speaker-series-conversation-republican-governors-moderated-walter-isaacs ] featuring Christie and Govs. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Bob McDonnell of Virginia, Matt Mead of Wyoming and Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Those governors will be joined in the closed-door RGA meetings by Govs. Jan Brewer of Arizona, Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Gary Herbert of Utah, Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Rick Perry of Texas.
In addition to access to the panels, sources tell POLITICO that donors will be able to partake in special perks such as a hike with McDonnell and trap shooting with Mead.
McDonnell, who is planning to leave Richmond midday Wednesday and return to Virginia on Friday, is scheduled to speak on a panel about the American economy and the job-creation successes of Republican-led states, according to a spokesman.
RGA spokesman Mike Schrimpf said the meeting is “focused on the economy and the future of Obamacare,” among other subjects.
While the general purpose of the roundtable meetings is to discuss policy, sideline conversations at such gatherings tend to be heavy on politics. And that’s particularly likely with a presidential election looming and a guest list featuring top operatives including Rove, Gillespie, Law and Phil Musser, a former RGA director [ http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/musser_phil.html ] who helped run the presidential campaign of former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who – along with Jindal – is commonly mentioned as a leading candidate to be Romney’s vice presidential running mate [ http://www.politico.com/2012-election/vp-watch/ ].
And one source with knowledge of the event conceded politics won’t be far from the fore. “With the presidential election and other elections coming up in November, and having Rove and Gillespie on the program, it will give attendees the added benefit of having that political dimension,” said the source.
But some political conversations could be forbidden by campaign laws prohibiting folks advising independent political groups – like Rove and Law – from discussing spending strategy with representatives of the campaigns they are seeking to help, like Gillespie.
Many of the more than 200 donors scheduled to attend are major contributors to the Romney campaign, as well as the Crossroads groups and the pro-Romney Restore Our Future Super PAC.
Take retired mutual fund guru Foster Friess, who co-hosted a Romney fundraiser, last month donated $100,000 to Restore Our Future [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78785.html ] and has suggested he would give to Crossroads [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75000.html ].
Other attendees include Oklahoma energy investor Joe Craft – who has donated $1.25 million to Crossroads, $500,000 to Restore Our Future and $10,000 to Romney’s campaign – and California investor B. Wayne Hughes, whose family has donated $4.8 million to Crossroads and $60,000 to the RGA.
Then there’s GOP rainmaker Fred Malek, who is on Romney’s national finance committee and also helps run a pair of outside groups aiming to spend more than $30 million [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65858.html ] boosting GOP House candidates, the American Action Network and the Congressional Leadership Fund.
Malek also happens to be the chair of the RGA roundtable, which is part of an RGA effort to cultivate major individual donors, rather than the corporate donors upon whom the group traditionally relied. It requires members to contribute a minimum of $25,000 a year to the group and has grown from about 20 members three years ago to at least 600 members.
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/79228.html [with comments]
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Barack Obama App Innovates While Mitt Romney App Collects Data
07/31/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/barack-obama-app-mitt-romney-app_n_1723365.html [with comments]
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Ultra-high-net-worth individuals by country, 2011
James Davies, Rodrigo Lluberas and Anthony Shomocks, Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, 2011
None of our main global competitors give the ultrarich such a sweet deal.
By Josh Harkinson | Mon Jul. 30, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
The tax plan passed by Senate Democrats [ http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2012/07/25/senate_rejects_gop_tax_cuts_in_showdown_with_dems/ ] on Wednesday isn't really about taxing the rich; it's about taxing the megarich. As Timothy Noah has explained [ http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/104971/more-middle-class-taxes ] in The New Republic, the plan would actually reduce taxes on a lot of fairly rich people by renewing the (supposedly temporary) Bush-era tax cuts for everyone except those who make more than $250,000 a year. Even then, Democrats are only proposing a higher marginal tax rate, which means that even people raking in far more than $250,000 will still pay lower taxes on their first quarter million in annual earnings. Crunch the numbers, and it turns out that the biggest losers under the Senate plan are couples who earn more than $1 million a year [ http://www.offthechartsblog.org/new-analysis-confirms-high-income-taxpayers-benefit-from-middle-class-tax-cuts/ ]—mostly multimillionaires and billionaires.
While the Senate tax plan could certainly go further in taxing the rich, focusing on the megawealthy makes sense considering how much of our economy is now controlled by them. According to the Internal Revenue Service, there are 66,000 taxpayers who individually control $20 million or more in assets, and all these people put together are worth $4 trillion—more than the net worth of 70 percent of the US population.
The investment bank Credit Suisse, for its part, classifies "ultra high net worth individuals" as people with at least $50 million in assets—and according to the bank's 2011 Global Wealth Databook, more of these UNHWIs live in the United States than anywhere else in the world (see chart above).
So perhaps America has lots of multimillionaires because it's a prosperous country? That's certainly a factor—but not the only one. Compared to the superrich in the six other countries with the most multimillionaires, American tycoons grab a disproportionately large share of the economic pie:
Percent of Income Earned by Top 0.1% of Taxpayers
Source: The Paris School of Economics World Top Incomes Database (missing years reflect lack of current data)
Yet despite raking in such a large share of the national income, our nation's über-wealthy pay very little in taxes by global standards:
Top Income Tax Rates in the 6 Countries With the Most Ultra-High-Net-Worth Citizens
Global Finance Magazine, 2009
But don't higher tax rates at the top slow economic growth? Apparently not, considering the growth rates of our tax-happy competitors.
Change in Gross Domestic Product, 2011
CIA World Factbook
So why hasn't Congress already raised taxes on the rich? Perhaps because the superwealthy have raised a lot more political money than the rest of us.
- Percent of donations to super-PACs this year that come from just 196 Americans: 80 [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/big-campaign-spending-government-by-the-1/259599/ ]
- Amount the Koch brothers and their foundations plan to spend to defeat Obama: $395 million [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-billion-dollar-mitt-machine-20120530 ]
- Total money raised by John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign: $384 million [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_for_the_2008_United_States_presidential_election ]
- Number of billionaires who've made donations to Mitt Romney's super-PAC, Restore Our Future: 32 [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/06/13/sheldon-adelson-tops-romney-donor-list-that-now-includes-32-billionaires/ ]
- Percentage of Americans who give more than $10,000 in any election cycle: 0.01 [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/big-campaign-spending-government-by-the-1/259599/ ]
Copyright ©2012 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress (emphasis in original)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/charts-how-americas-billionaires-get-off-tax-rich-congress [with comments]
===
Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem
Charles Murray examines the cloud now hanging over American business—and what today's capitalists can do about it.
By CHARLES MURRAY
Updated July 30, 2012, 1:20 a.m. ET
Mitt Romney's résumé at Bain should be a slam dunk. He has been a successful capitalist, and capitalism is the best thing that has ever happened to the material condition of the human race. From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with only the thinnest film of wealth on top. Then came capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn't take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased.
Capitalism has lifted the world out of poverty because it gives people a chance to get rich by creating value and reaping the rewards. Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?
Yet it hasn't worked out that way for Mr. Romney. "Capitalist" has become an accusation. The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer.
What happened to turn the mood of the country so far from our historic celebration of economic success?
Two important changes in objective conditions have contributed to this change in mood. One is the rise of collusive capitalism. Part of that phenomenon involves crony capitalism, whereby the people on top take care of each other at shareholder expense (search on "golden parachutes").
But the problem of crony capitalism is trivial compared with the collusion engendered by government. In today's world, every business's operations and bottom line are affected by rules set by legislators and bureaucrats. The result has been corruption on a massive scale. Sometimes the corruption is retail, whereby a single corporation creates a competitive advantage through the cooperation of regulators or politicians (search on "earmarks"). Sometimes the corruption is wholesale, creating an industrywide potential for profit that would not exist in the absence of government subsidies or regulations (like ethanol used to fuel cars and low-interest mortgages for people who are unlikely to pay them back). Collusive capitalism has become visible to the public and increasingly defines capitalism in the public mind.
Another change in objective conditions has been the emergence of great fortunes made quickly in the financial markets. It has always been easy for Americans to applaud people who get rich by creating products and services that people want to buy. That is why Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were American heroes a century ago, and Steve Jobs was one when he died last year.
When great wealth is generated instead by making smart buy and sell decisions in the markets, it smacks of inside knowledge, arcane financial instruments, opportunities that aren't accessible to ordinary people, and hocus-pocus. The good that these rich people have done in the process of getting rich is obscure. The benefits of more efficient allocation of capital are huge, but they are really, really hard to explain simply and persuasively. It looks to a large proportion of the public as if we've got some fabulously wealthy people who haven't done anything to deserve their wealth.
The objective changes in capitalism as it is practiced plausibly account for much of the hostility toward capitalism. But they don't account for the unwillingness of capitalists who are getting rich the old-fashioned way—earning it—to defend themselves.
I assign that timidity to two other causes. First, large numbers of today's successful capitalists are people of the political left who may think their own work is legitimate but feel no allegiance to capitalism as a system or kinship with capitalists on the other side of the political fence. Furthermore, these capitalists of the left are concentrated where it counts most. The most visible entrepreneurs of the high-tech industry are predominantly liberal. So are most of the people who run the entertainment and news industries. Even leaders of the financial industry increasingly share the politics of George Soros. Whether measured by fundraising data or by the members of Congress elected from the ZIP Codes where they live, the elite centers with the most clout in the culture are filled with people who are embarrassed to identify themselves as capitalists, and it shows in the cultural effect of their work.
Another factor is the segregation of capitalism from virtue. Historically, the merits of free enterprise and the obligations of success were intertwined in the national catechism. McGuffey's Readers, the books on which generations of American children were raised, have plenty of stories treating initiative, hard work and entrepreneurialism as virtues, but just as many stories praising the virtues of self-restraint, personal integrity and concern for those who depend on you. The freedom to act and a stern moral obligation to act in certain ways were seen as two sides of the same American coin. Little of that has survived.
To accept the concept of virtue requires that you believe some ways of behaving are right and others are wrong always and everywhere. That openly judgmental stand is no longer acceptable in America's schools nor in many American homes. Correspondingly, we have watched the deterioration of the sense of stewardship that once was so widespread among the most successful Americans and the near disappearance of the sense of seemliness that led successful capitalists to be obedient to unenforceable standards of propriety. Many senior figures in the financial world were appalled by what was going on during the run-up to the financial meltdown of 2008. Why were they so silent before and after the catastrophe? Capitalists who behave honorably and with restraint no longer have either the platform or the vocabulary to preach their own standards and to condemn capitalists who behave dishonorably and recklessly.
And so capitalism's reputation has fallen on hard times and the principled case for capitalism must be made anew. That case has been made brilliantly and often in the past, with Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" being my own favorite. But in today's political climate, updating the case for capitalism requires a restatement of old truths in ways that Americans from across the political spectrum can accept. Here is my best effort:
The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.
"Lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole" is produced by a relatively small set of important achievements that we can rightly attribute to our own actions. Arthur Brooks, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has usefully labeled such achievements "earned success." Earned success can arise from a successful marriage, children raised well, a valued place as a member of a community, or devotion to a faith. Earned success also arises from achievement in the economic realm, which is where capitalism comes in.
Earning a living for yourself and your family through your own efforts is the most elemental form of earned success. Successfully starting a business, no matter how small, is an act of creating something out of nothing that carries satisfactions far beyond those of the money it brings in. Finding work that not only pays the bills but that you enjoy is a crucially important resource for earned success.
Making a living, starting a business and finding work that you enjoy all depend on freedom to act in the economic realm. What government can do to help is establish the rule of law so that informed and voluntary trades can take place. More formally, government can vigorously enforce laws against the use of force, fraud and criminal collusion, and use tort law to hold people liable for harm they cause others.
Everything else the government does inherently restricts economic freedom to act in pursuit of earned success. I am a libertarian and think that almost none of those restrictions are justified. But accepting the case for capitalism doesn't require you to be a libertarian. You are free to argue that certain government interventions are justified. You just need to acknowledge this truth: Every intervention that erects barriers to starting a business, makes it expensive to hire or fire employees, restricts entry into vocations, prescribes work conditions and facilities, or confiscates profits interferes with economic liberty and usually makes it more difficult for both employers and employees to earn success. You also don't need to be a libertarian to demand that any new intervention meet this burden of proof: It will accomplish something that tort law and enforcement of basic laws against force, fraud and collusion do not accomplish.
People with a wide range of political views can also acknowledge that these interventions do the most harm to individuals and small enterprises. Huge banks can, albeit at great expense, cope with the Dodd-Frank law's absurd regulatory burdens; many small banks cannot. Huge corporations can cope with the myriad rules issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and their state-level counterparts. The same rules can crush small businesses and individuals trying to start small businesses.
Finally, people with a wide range of political views can acknowledge that what has happened incrementally over the past half-century has led to a labyrinthine regulatory system, irrational liability law and a corrupt tax code. Sweeping simplifications and rationalizations of all these systems are possible in ways that even moderate Democrats could accept in a less polarized political environment.
To put it another way, it should be possible to revive a national consensus affirming that capitalism embraces the best and most essential things about American life; that freeing capitalism to do what it does best won't just create national wealth and reduce poverty, but expand the ability of Americans to achieve earned success—to pursue happiness.
Reviving that consensus also requires us to return to the vocabulary of virtue when we talk about capitalism. Personal integrity, a sense of seemliness and concern for those who depend on us are not "values" that are no better or worse than other values. Historically, they have been deeply embedded in the American version of capitalism. If it is necessary to remind the middle class and working class that the rich are not their enemies, it is equally necessary to remind the most successful among us that their obligations are not to be measured in terms of their tax bills. Their principled stewardship can nurture and restore our heritage of liberty. Their indifference to that heritage can destroy it.
Mr. Murray is the author of "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 [ http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421 ]" and the W.H. Brady Scholar [sic - Blithering Idiot] at the American Enterprise Institute [ http://www.aei.org/scholar/charles-murray/ ].
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More from Charles Murray
Why Economics Can't Explain Our Cultural Divide (3/16/12)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281582403394206.html [fifth item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73504847 ]
The New American Divide (1/21/12)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html
*
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443931404577549223178294822.html [with comments]
--
Inside a Russian Billionaire's $300 Million Yacht [video]
Travel
4/15/2010 7:00:00 PM 3:55
Designed by Philippe Starck, the "A" has quickly become the most loved and loathed ship on the sea. WSJ's Robert Frank takes an exclusive tour of Andrey Melnichenko's 394-foot mega-yacht.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://live.wsj.com/video/inside-a-russian-billionaire-300-million-yacht/B91C478A-E6BB-4FCA-BD8C-61A1E79AB0B0.html#!B91C478A-E6BB-4FCA-BD8C-61A1E79AB0B0
===
HSBC Apologizes for Compliance Failures
Jul 30, 2012
HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), the British bank accused of helping drug lords in Mexico launder money, apologized to investors for compliance failings and set aside $2 billion more to cover the costs of fines and redress.
The lender made a $1.3 billion provision in the first half to compensate British clients wrongly sold payment-protection insurance and derivatives, London-based HSBC said in a statement yesterday as it posted an 8.3 percent drop in net income. It also made a $700 million provision for U.S. fines after a Senate committee found the bank gave terrorists, drug cartels and criminals access to the U.S. financial system. That sum may increase, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver said.
“Regulatory and compliance events in the first six months of the year overshadowed financial performance,” Chairman Douglas Flint said in a statement yesterday. “HSBC has made mistakes in the past, and for them I am very sorry.”
HSBC is trying to estimate the costs of four scandals to hit the bank in the past year: the mis-selling of loan insurance as well as derivatives to individual customers; allegations that traders tried to rig Libor; and a Senate report that found the bank worked with firms linked to terrorism and hid transactions that bypassed sanctions against Iran.
Enforcement action “is completely at the discretion of the Department of Justice,” Gulliver told reporters yesterday. The provision is “a best estimate based on the information we have today. The actual number could be materially higher.”
[...]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-30/hsbc-profit-beats-estimates-on-income-from-asset-sales.html [with comments]
===
Very Sad Graph: How Much Americans Have Left to Spend After Essentials, Today
By Derek Thompson
Aug 1 2012, 4:10 PM ET
Depends on how much there is. For those making $16,000 a year, more than half of it goes to housing and utilities. But those making $160,000 a year still have almost two thirds of their disposable income left over after those monthly bills.
Planet Money [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/01/157664524/how-the-poor-the-middle-class-and-the-rich-spend-their-money ] graphs one of our favorite topics: How families spend money. Here are their numbers rendered slightly differently:
The results aren't so surprising: Poor people spend more of their money on essentials than richer people (and these numbers don't account for dramatic geographical differences). But how much is left over?
After essentials -- housing, transportation (incl. gas), food, utilities, and clothes -- the poor have 15% of their disposable income left over, and the $150K+ crowd has about 40%. This next graph uses those figures to tell how much disposable income a typical person making $17,500, $60,000 or $150,000 has left, after the essentials are taken care of:
This graph doesn't include a few categories you might argue are essential: food at restaurants (which is somewhere between elective and essential), health care (which is essential, but spiky) and education (which is practically essential, but specific to certain years). After those categories, the poorest group has spent 98% of their income, leaving them with $367 for the year -- or a dollar per day.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/very-sad-graph-how-much-americans-have-left-to-spend-after-essentials-today/260606/ [with comments]
===
The Man Who Saved Capitalism
Milton and Rose Friedman
Corbis
Milton Friedman, who would have turned 100 on Tuesday, helped to make free markets popular again in the 20th century. His ideas are even more important today.
By STEPHEN MOORE
Updated August 1, 2012, 2:14 p.m. ET
It's a tragedy that Milton Friedman—born 100 years ago on July 31—did not live long enough to combat the big-government ideas that have formed the core of Obamanomics. It's perhaps more tragic that our current president, who attended the University of Chicago where Friedman taught for decades, never fell under the influence of the world's greatest champion of the free market. Imagine how much better things would have turned out, for Mr. Obama and the country.
Friedman was a constant presence on these pages until his death in 2006 at age 94. If he could, he would surely be skewering today's $5 trillion expansion of spending and debt to create growth—and exposing the confederacy of economic dunces urging more of it.
In the 1960s, Friedman famously explained that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." If the government spends a dollar, that dollar has to come from producers and workers in the private economy. There is no magical "multiplier effect" by taking from productive Peter and giving to unproductive Paul. As obvious as that insight seems, it keeps being put to the test. Obamanomics may be the most expensive failed experiment in free-lunch economics in American history.
Equally illogical is the superstition that government can create prosperity by having Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke print more dollars. In the very short term, Friedman proved, excess money fools people with an illusion of prosperity. But the market quickly catches on, and there is no boost in output, just higher prices.
Next to Ronald Reagan, in the second half of the 20th century there was no more influential voice for economic freedom world-wide than Milton Friedman. Small in stature but a giant intellect, he was the economist who saved capitalism by dismembering the ideas of central planning when most of academia was mesmerized by the creed of government as savior.
Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for 1976—at a time when almost all the previous prizes had gone to socialists. This marked the first sign of the intellectual comeback of free-market economics since the 1930s, when John Maynard Keynes hijacked the profession. Friedman's 1963 book "A Monetary History of the United States," written with Anna Schwartz (who died on June 21), was a masterpiece and changed the way we think about the role of money.
More influential than Friedman's scholarly writings was his singular talent for communicating the virtues of the free market to a mass audience. His two best-selling books, "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962) and "Free to Choose" (1980), are still wildly popular. His videos on YouTube on issues like the morality of capitalism are brilliant and timeless.
In the early 1990s, Friedman visited poverty-stricken Mexico City for a Cato Institute forum. I remember the swirling controversy ginned up by the media and Mexico's intelligentsia: How dare this apostle of free-market economics be given a public forum to speak to Mexican citizens about his "outdated" ideas? Yet when Milton arrived in Mexico he received a hero's welcome as thousands of business owners, students and citizen activists hungry for his message encircled him everywhere he went, much like crowds for a modern rock star.
Once in the early 1960s, Friedman wrote the then-U.S. ambassador to New Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith, that he would be lecturing in India. By all means come, the witty but often wrong Galbraith replied: "I can think of nowhere your free-market ideas can do less harm than in India." As fate would have it, India did begin to embrace Friedmanism in the 1990s, and the economy began to soar. China finally caught on too.
Friedman stood unfailingly and heroically with the little guy against the state. He used to marvel that the intellectual left, which claims to espouse "power to the people," so often cheers as states suppress individual rights.
While he questioned almost every statist orthodoxy, he fearlessly gored sacred cows of both political parties. He was the first scholar to sound the alarm on the rotten deal of Social Security for young workers—forced to pay into a system that will never give back as much as they could have accumulated on their own. He questioned the need for occupational licenses—which he lambasted as barriers to entry—for everything from driving a cab to passing the bar to be an attorney, or getting an M.D. to practice medicine.
He loved turning the intellectual tables on liberals by making the case that regulation often does more harm than good. His favorite example was the Food and Drug Administration, whose regulations routinely delay the introduction of lifesaving drugs. "When the FDA boasts a new drug will save 10,000 lives a year," he would ask, "how many lives were lost because it didn't let the drug on the market last year?"
He supported drug legalization (much to the dismay of supporters on the right) and was particularly proud to be an influential voice in ending the military draft in the 1970s. When his critics argued that he favored a military of mercenaries, he would retort: "If you insist on calling our volunteer soldiers 'mercenaries,' I will call those who you want drafted into service involuntarily 'slaves.'"
By the way, he rarely got angry and even when he was intellectually slicing and dicing his sparring partners he almost always did it with a smile. It used to be said that over the decades at the University of Chicago and across the globe, the only one who ever defeated him in a debate was his beloved wife and co-author Rose Friedman.
The issue he devoted most of his later years to was school choice for all parents, and his Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice is dedicated to that cause. He used to lament that "we allow the market, consumer choice and competition to work in nearly every industry except for the one that may matter most: education."
As for congressional Republicans who are at risk of getting suckered into a tax-hike budget deal, they may want to remember another Milton Friedman adage: "Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with."
No doubt because of his continued popularity, the left has tried to tie Friedman and his principles of free trade, low tax rates and deregulation to the global financial meltdown in 2008. Economist Joseph Stiglitz charged that Friedman's "Chicago School bears the blame for providing a seeming intellectual foundation" for the "idea that markets are self-adjusting and the best role for government is to do nothing." Occupy Wall Street protesters were often seen wearing T-shirts which read: "Milton Friedman: Proud Father of Global Misery."
The opposite is true: Friedman opposed the government spending spree in the 2000s. He hated the government-sponsored enterprises like housing lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In a recent tribute to Friedman in the Journal of Economic Literature, Harvard's Andrei Shleifer describes 1980-2005 as "The Age of Milton Friedman," an era that "witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. As the world embraced free-market policies, living standards rose sharply while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined."
Well over 200 million were liberated from poverty thanks to the rediscovery of the free market. And now as the world teeters close to another recession, leaders need to urgently rediscover Friedman's ideas.
I remember asking Milton, a year or so before his death, during one of our semiannual dinners in downtown San Francisco: What can we do to make America more prosperous? "Three things," he replied instantly. "Promote free trade, school choice for all children, and cut government spending."
How much should we cut? "As much as possible."
Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board [and another blithering idiot].
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.\
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444226904577558882802335216.html [with embedded video "Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on Milton Friedman's legacy", a thriller no doubt, and comments]
===
One In Four American Workers Will Be In Low-Wage Jobs For The Next Decade
By Travis Waldron on Aug 2, 2012 at 9:30 am
The share of the economy made up by low-wage jobs has grown since the Great Recession, and according to one new study, it won’t shrink in the future even as the economy continues to recover. The number of Americans working in low-wage jobs — those that pay wages equal to or below the poverty line — will remain steady over the next decade [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/02/news/economy/low-pay-jobs/index.htm ], according to the Economic Policy Institute, as CNNMoney reports:
Some 28% of workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs in 2020, roughly the same percentage as in 2010, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
The study defines low-paying jobs as those with wages at or below what full-time workers must earn to live above the poverty level for a family of four. In 2011, this was $23,005, or $11.06 an hour.
The study is the latest to detail the growth of low-wage occupations in the United States. A recent report from the National Employment Law Project found that more than one in four [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/24/573671/one-in-four-private-sector-workers-earn-less-than-10-an-hour/ ] private sector workers now make less than $10 an hour, an even lower threshold than was used in the EPI study. The five industries that are comprised mostly of low-wage workers, meanwhile, are growing faster than the overall American economy.
While the number of low-wage jobs has increased, so has the gap [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/05/03/475952/ceo-pay-faster-worker-pay/ ] between low-wage workers and the executives who employ them. The federal minimum wage would need to be raised by more than $3 an hour [ http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm/ ] to match the buying power it had in 1968, and overall wages in the U.S. have been virtually stagnant for decades, even as pay for chief executives has risen exponentially. At the 50 companies that employ the largest number of low-wage workers, chief executives made an average of $9.4 million [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/24/573671/one-in-four-private-sector-workers-earn-less-than-10-an-hour/ ] last year.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/08/02/627021/workers-low-wage-jobs/ [with comments]
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The Case for Lying to Yourself
Some Self-Deception Can Boost Power and Influence; Starts as Young as Age 3
By Sue Shellenbarger
July 30, 2012, 7:02 p.m. ET
Lying to yourself—or self-deception, as psychologists call it—can actually have benefits. And nearly everybody does it, based on a growing body of research using new experimental techniques.
Self-deception isn't just lying or faking, but is deeper and more complicated, says Del Paulhus, psychology professor at University of British Columbia and author of a widely used scale to measure self-deceptive tendencies. It involves strong psychological forces that keep us from acknowledging a threatening truth about ourselves, he says.
Believing we are more talented or intelligent than we really are can help us influence and win over others, says Robert Trivers, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and author of "The Folly of Fools," a 2011 book on the subject. An executive who talks himself into believing he is a great public speaker may not only feel better as he performs, but increase "how much he fools people, by having a confident style that persuades them that he's good," he says.
Researchers haven't studied large population samples to compare rates of self-deception or compared men and women, but they know based on smaller studies that it is very common. And scientists in many different disciplines are drawn to studying it, says Michael I. Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. "It's also one of the most puzzling things that humans do."
Researchers disagree over what exactly happens in the brain during self-deception. Social psychologists say people deceive themselves in an unconscious effort to boost self-esteem or feel better. Evolutionary psychologists, who say different parts of the brain can harbor conflicting beliefs at the same time, say self-deception is a way of fooling others to our own advantage.
In some people, the tendency seems to be an inborn personality trait. Others may develop a habit of self-deception as a way of coping with problems and challenges.
Behavioral scientists in recent years have begun using new techniques in the laboratory to predict when and why people are likely to deceive themselves. For example, they may give subjects opportunities to inflate their own attractiveness, skill or intelligence. Then, they manipulate such variables as subjects' mood, promises of rewards or opportunities to cheat. They measure how the prevalence of self-deception changes.
In an unpublished study earlier this year, young women were asked to stand in front of a sheet of brown paper and sketch outlines of their bodies. Some were then asked to read a story about dating to put them in a romantic mood. The others were asked to read about buildings and architecture, says Carrie Keating, a psychology professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., who led the research.
When the women were asked later to outline their bodies again, those who had read about dating sketched themselves as slimmer, with narrower waists, compared with their earlier drawings, reflecting an effort to "block out any negative information about their bodies" and succeed at the dating game, Dr. Keating says. The women who read about buildings didn't much change their sketches.
As early as age 3, children have what researchers call a "positivity bias"—a tendency to see themselves as smart regardless of their abilities, and to exaggerate positive traits in others, says a 2010 study in the journal Child Development Perspectives. By adolescence, one-fourth of college-bound students rate themselves in the top 1% in their ability to get along with others, research shows.
In a separate study, female students who take leadership positions on campus score higher on measures of self-deception, based on recent research by Dr. Keating. Women who aspire to leadership may have to "conveniently forget about some negatives," such as the fact that "women who behave in a dominant fashion may be perceived as more masculine," Dr. Keating says.
Many people have a way of "fooling their inner eye" to believe they are more successful or attractive than they really are, Dr. Trivers says. When people are asked to choose the most accurate photo of themselves from an array of images that are either accurate, or altered to make them look up to 50% more or less attractive, most choose the photo that looks 20% better than reality, research shows.
Many people deceive themselves to avoid making difficult changes. For years, Greg Duval piled on pounds while telling himself "I just needed to go for a run" to take off extra weight, he says. A former high-school quarterback, "I had that 'man up' mentality: 'Guys don't need personal trainers,'" says Mr. Duval, a Dallas sales executive. The rationale helped him feel as if he was in control, but gave him an excuse to put off exercise. Recently, as he approached age 50, he decided, "No more playing games with myself," he says. Working with a trainer, Mallory Mansour Dubuclet, he has taken off 53 pounds since last winter. In the realm of health and fitness, Ms. Dubuclet says, "many people kid themselves about how much they can eat, or how much exercise they are doing."
It takes a certain amount of self-discipline to keep self-deception from becoming a hindrance on the job or in relationships. Getting too wrapped up in achievements or public image is one danger sign. Dodging a chronic problem by telling yourself you'll solve it in the future is another.
The trick, Dr. Norton says, is finding the line. While "a little bit of self-deception isn't an unhealthy thing, a lot is an extremely unhealthy thing." Benefits tend to come, research shows, when people simply block out negative thoughts, envision themselves enjoying future successes or take an optimistic view of their abilities—all of which tend to improve performance or persuasive ability.
For some people, self-deception becomes a habit, spinning out of control and providing a basis for more lies. In research co-written by Dr. Norton and published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, college students who were given an answer key to an intelligence test, allowing them to cheat, scored higher than a control group. They later predicted, however, that they also would score higher on a second test without being allowed to cheat. They were "deceiving themselves into believing their strong performance was a reflection of their ability," the study says.
Giving them praise, a certificate of recognition, made the self-deception even worse: The students inflated their predicted future scores even more.
Just as phony war heroes come to believe they actually won medals for valor, cheaters come to believe their own lies, Dr. Norton says. "They forget very quickly," he says, "that there were situational factors that propelled them forward."
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How Honest Are You With Yourself?
Answer on a seven-point scale, with 1 being 'not true,' 4 being 'somewhat true,' and 7 being 'very true.'
1. My first impressions are always right.
2. I don't care to know what other people really think of me.
3. Once I've made up my mind, other people can seldom change my opinion.
4. I am fully in control of my own fate.
5. I never regret my decisions.
6. I am a completely rational person.
7. I am very confident of my judgments.
— ANSWER KEY: For each question, give yourself one point for answering 6 or 7. The higher your score, the more self-deceptive you tend to be.
— SOURCE: Del Paulhus, University of British Columbia
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Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443343704577548973568243982.html [with embedded video and audio, and comments]
===
Romney’s World
Mitt Romney meets with Prime Minister David Cameron at 10 Downing Street on July 26, 2012
Photograph by David Bebber/AFP/GettyImages.
Mitt’s insults, mistakes, and blunders abroad aren’t gaffes. They actually represent his true worldview.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, July 27, 2012, at 4:21 PM ET
Mitt Romney’s not-so-excellent adventure abroad (“Romneyshambles [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9432463/Romneyshambles-Democrats-seize-on-Mitt-Romneys-gaffes.html ],” the Brits are calling it) has been many things: shabby, hilarious, scandalous, an enlivening hoot to a dreary election season. One thing it shouldn’t be, though, is surprising.
Charles Krauthammer, the right-wing commentator who usually finds every excuse to attack Barack Obama—he took Obama’s blinking during a tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin as a sign of appeasement—pronounced himself befuddled by the GOP candidate’s flare of incompetence.
These sorts of trips, Krauthammer said on Fox News [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/27/charles-krauthammer-romney-london-olympics_n_1709599.html ] Thursday night, are easy. You express solidarity with the allies, listen, nod your head, and say nice things or nothing at all. Instead, Romney questioned his hosts’ ability to run the Olympics, raised doubts about Londoners’ community spirit, and violated protocol by publicly mentioning a meeting with the head of MI-6. “It’s unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible,” Krauthammer, normally a paragon of self-confidence, sputtered. “I’m out of adjectives … I don’t get it.”
The thing that Krauthammer doesn’t get is that Romney is not the sort of businessman—that his brand of capitalism is not the sort of enterprise—that requires even the most elementary understanding of diplomacy, courtesy, or sensitivity to other people’s values, lives, or perceptions.
The American capitalists-turned-statesmen of an earlier generation—Douglas Dillon, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze—took risks, built institutions, helped rebuild postwar Europe, befriended their foreign counterparts: in short, they cultivated an internationalist sensibility at their core. Whatever you think of their politics or Cold War policies generally (and there is much to criticize), financiers formed an American political elite in that era because finance (through the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, the IMF, and so forth) was so often the vehicle of American expansionism.
By contrast, private-equity firms, such as Bain Capital, where Romney made his fortune, tend to view their client companies as cash cows, susceptible to cookie-cutter formulas from which the firms’ partners reap lavish fees, almost regardless of the outcome. Their ends and means breed an insularity, a sense of entitlement, a disposition to view all the world’s entities through a single prism and to appraise them along a single scale.
How Romney should have behaved in London may have been obvious to Charles Krauthammer, who studies politics; it would have been obvious to politically ambitious businessmen from more traditional lines of work or from an earlier era. But as we have been graced to see this week, it is not necessarily obvious to Romney himself.
Already, Romney’s surrogates back home are spinning with frantic intensity. In the face of merrily savage media coverage of the candidate’s remarks and British officials’ rejoinders, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/jindal-defends-romney-over-olympics-snafu/ ] said, with as much nonchalance as he could muster, “The reality is, we’re not worried about overseas headlines … I think the focus needs to continue to be on what’s happening here at home. That’s what’s important to voters.”
This may be, but why then did Romney go abroad in the first place? It wasn’t to watch his wife’s horse trot and dance in the Olympics’ dressage competition (as he scoffed [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/romney-puts-horse-sized-distance-between-himself-and-dressage/ ] in another head-shaking remark, certain to anger a large number of wives who feel their husbands don’t take their interests seriously). The intent, obviously, was to demonstrate his comfort and capabilities on the world scene—a demonstration that, at least so far, has gone about as well as North Korea’s last few missile tests. And London, his first stop, was supposed to be the easy part of the trip, the place where the white, patrician candidate could forge bonds through, as one of his spokesmen put it, their common “Anglo-Saxon heritage.”
Not only did Romney fail at that no-brainer, he also put a foot through stateside customs. Before leaving on his overseas tour, he said that he would not criticize the current president on foreign soil, a long-standing, universally respected tradition in American politics. But then he spoke at an exclusive, closed-door fundraising dinner (tickets went for $50,000 to $70,000 apiece) sponsored by Barclays bank, which is currently in the middle of a whopping financial crisis. Eleven members of Parliament wrote a letter to the bank’s board members, demanding that they stop swelling Romney’s war chest and instead focus on repairing their own problems. Will Americans express outrage at this whiff of foreign influence? Obama catches hell when he raises money from Hollywood movie stars. What would happen if he flew to London or Paris and raised money from European movie stars (who don’t have as much influence as, say, European bankers).
Had Romney’s handlers dipped into their candidate’s biography, they might have put the kibosh on this trip from the get-go. Joshua Keating [ http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/07/26/romney_book_britain_is_a_tiny_island_that_makes_stuff_nobody_wants ], a blogger at Foreign Policy, dug up the following passage from Romney’s 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312609809 ]:
England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions.
Nice. Anglo-Saxon heritage indeed. Presidential material? Get serious [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/06/mitt_romney_s_foreign_policy_ideas_can_t_be_taken_seriously_.single.html ].
© 2012 The Slate Group, LLC
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/07/mitt_romney_s_insults_and_mistakes_while_at_the_london_olympics_aren_t_gaffes_as_much_as_a_fair_representation_of_his_worldview_.html [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/07/mitt_romney_s_insults_and_mistakes_while_at_the_london_olympics_aren_t_gaffes_as_much_as_a_fair_representation_of_his_worldview_.single.html ] [with comments]
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Romney's CEO style rankled Mass. lawmakers
By ANDREW MIGASTEVE LeBLANC
Thursday, Aug. 2, 2012 - 2012-08-02 06:48:23 GMT
BOSTON (AP) — What worked for Mitt Romney in the corporate boardroom didn't fly in the more raucous corridors of the Massachusetts Legislature.
Now the Republican candidate for president, Romney took over as governor in 2003 after a long, successful career as CEO at the private equity firm Bain Capital.
But his top-down, corporate management style soon rankled Democrats who overwhelmingly controlled the state House and Senate and saw themselves as an equal partner in the government. His approach jolted a clubby political culture where schmoozing over after-hours drinks and cutting backroom deals are well-worn pathways to success.
Unlike his three GOP gubernatorial predecessors, the politically inexperienced Romney was never at ease in the chummy world of trading favors for votes. He bypassed rank-and-file Democrats and dealt mostly with the party's legislative leaders during his four-year term, though he did work with Democrats to pass the state's health care overhaul.
Romney's mostly fraught relations with state lawmakers could provide insight into how he'd handle a Congress that might still be politically divided if he becomes president.
He so far has embraced his party's conservative leadership in Congress — a break with recent GOP nominees, who had kept some distance. That plays to the conservative GOP base, but many independent voters view the congressional GOP with suspicion.
These days, Romney the candidate puts a positive spin on his Massachusetts record, holding it up as proof that he can bridge Washington's bitter partisan divides.
"I began a relationship with the speaker of the House and the Senate president that was personal," he said of his governorship in a recent NBC News interview. "We respected each other. We often disagreed. But we found common ground from time to time."
Some Democratic lawmakers accused Romney of being aloof, unapproachable and not much interested in working with them to build the kind of friendships and alliances that are needed to help pass legislation. They say Romney's legislative agenda on big issues like transportation and higher education fizzled as a result.
"He didn't get that government was not a business," said state Rep. Cory Atkins, a Democrat elected in 1999.
A notable exception was Romney's work with Democratic leaders to craft a landmark health care bill, which then launched his 2008 presidential bid. Romney's signature legislative success got a big boost from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, then the state's most powerful Democrat and a passionate advocate for universal health care.
Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom stressed Romney's ability to work with Democrats to solve the state's economic woes.
"Working on a bipartisan basis, Mitt Romney balanced the budget without raising taxes, created tens of thousands of new jobs and lowered the unemployment rate to 4.7 percent," Fehrnstrom said by email. "Working together with Democrats in the Legislature, Mitt Romney left Massachusetts in better shape than he found it."
While he did not raise state income or sales taxes, Romney and Democratic lawmakers raised hundreds of millions of dollars in new and higher fees on everything from marriage licenses to real estate transactions.
Former House Speaker Tom Finneran, a Democrat, recalled being "summoned" along with fellow legislative leaders by Romney for a meeting on the state's fiscal crisis early in Romney's term. Romney delivered a PowerPoint presentation brimming with numbers and charts on his plan for fixing the budget. Finneran said it quickly became apparent that Romney was issuing marching orders, not seeking their advice.
"Initially his sense was, 'I have been elected governor, I am the CEO here and you guys are the board of directors and you monitor the implementation of what I say,'" Finneran said. "That ruffled the feathers of legislators who see themselves as an equal branch (of government)."
Finneran said that, while he grew to respect Romney, "you have to work to have a conversation with him."
Romney supporters say he ran for governor as an outsider vowing to "clean up the mess" on Beacon Hill, and governed accordingly. They say Democratic leaders ruled with such an iron hand that there was no need for Romney to cultivate rank-and-file lawmakers who rarely strayed from their party's line.
Democrats portrayed Romney as being out of touch.
"He made no effort to get acquainted with lawmakers," said Tom Birmingham, a former state Senate president who left just before Romney took office. "To call him disengaged would be charitable."
Romney's GOP predecessors enjoyed smoother relations with the Legislature.
Bill Weld ran as an outsider, but he quickly developed an inside game working with Democrats. Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift had served in the Legislature, so they had plenty of allies and knew how to work across the aisle.
Weld's goofy personal charm and fondness for after-hours drinks also made him especially popular with lawmakers.
"You could negotiate anything with Weld," said Birmingham. "It was a game to him."
Republican state Sen. Robert Hedlund said Romney doesn't get enough credit for refusing to cut deals with Democrats.
"Some administrations used capital projects like goodies, handing them out like candy," said Hedlund. "Not Romney."
Romney often opted for confrontation over compromise. He issued more than 800 vetoes, but they were routinely overturned by lawmakers irked at what they saw as grandstanding by the governor.
In an ad during the 2008 presidential primary, Romney boasted: "I like vetoes. I vetoed hundreds of spending appropriations as governor. And, frankly, I can't wait to get my hands on Washington."
"If you're a Republican governor in Massachusetts, you have to work around the Legislature and use the bully pulpit," said Richard Tisei, a former state Senate minority leader running for Congress this year. "On big issues that mattered like health care and the fiscal crisis, Romney did work with the other side of the aisle."
On the health care bill that laid the foundation for his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, Romney aggressively courted Democrats. The law since has become a political liability for him.
He reached for compromises with top Democrats, particularly Kennedy, whom he had unsuccessfully challenged in a Senate race in 1994. Kennedy, who died in 2009, had the strong personal and political ties to state legislators that Romney lacked. Democrats marveled over how engaged Romney was, even showing up on a Sunday at the homes of top legislative leaders to try to break a key logjam on the bill.
In a rare moment of unity, Romney, Kennedy and leading Democrats were all handshakes and smiles as they shared the stage at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall for the bill signing ceremony in 2006.
"My son said that having Sen. Kennedy and me together like this on this stage behind the same piece of landmark legislation will help slow global warming," Romney joked to Kennedy, who was instrumental in shepherding the bill through the Legislature. "That's because hell has frozen over."
"My son said something, too," Kennedy retorted. "When Kennedy and Romney support a piece of legislation, usually one of them hasn't read it."
Miga reported from Washington.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://news.findlaw.com/apnews/e44ba0e326324ee1abbf565708b9b527 [also at e.g. (and image from) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/mitt-romney-massachusetts-legislature_n_1732249.html (with comments)]
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AdWatch: Ad glosses over Romney's Mass. record
July 31, 2012 3:10 PM
WASHINGTON (AP) — TITLE: "Believe In Our Future"
LENGTH: 60 seconds.
AIRING: Mitt Romney's campaign did not disclose where the ad is running.
KEY IMAGES: Opens with Romney getting into a dark-colored SUV. "My own experience was I got the chance to start my own business," he says, looking from the driver's seat to a camera behind him. "I know what it's like to hire people and to wonder whether you're going to be able to make ends meet down the road. Freedom and enterprise are what create jobs, not government."
Images of Romney greeting people and a tableau of American flags follow, as Romney touts his work running the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City: "I came in and found that we had not only a scandal to deal with, but also a financial crisis to deal with. By the time the games were over, we had about a hundred million dollars that we put into an endowment there for the future of Olympic sport."
Next, Romney cites his fiscal stewardship as Massachusetts governor. "The real experience was in Massachusetts," he says. "I found a budget that was badly out of balance. We cut our spending. Our Legislature was 85 percent Democrat and every one of the four years I was governor, we balanced the budget."
There's also a scene of Romney giving a speech in a small-town setting: "I want to use those experiences to help Americans have a better future. We believe in our future. We believe in ourselves. We believe the greatest days of America are ahead."
ANALYSIS: The ad released by Romney's campaign and the Republican National Committee attempts to paint a positive picture for the many voters who still don't know much about him. It highlights his success in business, credits him for saving the troubled Olympics and solving a state's budget crisis, and suggests he'll be able to fix the nation's struggling economy.
But the ad doesn't tell the full story of how he handled the fiscal crisis when he took over as Massachusetts governor in 2003.
Romney's claim that he erased a $3 billion budget shortfall without raising taxes ignores important facts. While he didn't raise state income or sales taxes, he and Democratic lawmakers raised hundreds of millions of dollars through new and higher fees on everything from marriage licenses to real estate transactions to gun licenses. It was a way for Romney to boost state revenue and ease the budget squeeze while technically sticking to his pledge not to raise taxes.
Under Romney, the state also raised an additional $350 million to $375 million annually for three years by closing what his administration called business tax "loopholes." Many business executives saw the moves as tax increases just the same. Romney also got a boost from a massive $1.1 billion package of tax hikes passed by the Democrat-controlled Legislature the year before he took office. The increased revenue in his first year as governor helped cut the deficit nearly in half.
Romney's boast about balancing the state budget every year in office also ignores that state law requires a yearly balanced budget.
He also trumpets having started his own business, but doesn't mention the name of the private venture capital firm he co-founded, Bain Capital. The Obama campaign has attacked Romney's Bain ties for weeks, saying in one ad that Romney's companies were "pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low-wage countries."
The full extent to which Romney-owned companies have outsourced is not clear. But there's no question that Bain invested in businesses that moved jobs overseas to cut costs — a trend that began in the 1990s and which many U.S. companies followed. Romney insists job outsourcing was not a Bain policy when he was in charge.
As the ad claims, Romney led the revival of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games, which had become mired in a bid-rigging scandal and financial troubles. The Olympics produced a $100 million surplus after Romney trimmed the budget, boosted revenue and worked to repair the committee's reputation with sponsors. The games also were boosted by unprecedented federal support, in large part due to security concerns after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
© 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57483686/adwatch-ad-glosses-over-romneys-mass-record/
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New Analysis Shows Romney Tax Plan Would Raise Taxes On Middle Class Families By More Than $2,000
By Pat Garofalo on Aug 1, 2012 at 10:45 am
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has been promising [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/06/17/501037/romney-tax-plan-key/ ] that he will cut taxes “across the board,” while also instituting tax reform that will not add to the nation’s deficit [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/22/430396/romney-tax-cut-rich/ ]. But a new report from the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution shows that this is much easier said than done.
In fact, if Romney were to actually implement his plan to reduce tax rates by 20 percent while eliminating tax deductions in order to pay for it, taxpayers with more than $200,000 would certainly see a tax cut. But everyone else — 95 percent of Americans — will see their taxes increase [ http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/8/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney.pdf ]. And this result occurs even assuming that Romney would eliminate tax deductions so as to make the tax as progressive as possible:
To estimate how average household tax burdens among different income groups would change as a result of this shift, we assume that the available tax expenditures are curtailed “from the top down” in order to make the tax plan as progressive as possible…Even after eliminating all available tax expenditures for households earning more than $200,000, this group still faces a net tax break. Americans making over $1 million would see an increase in after-tax income of 4.1 percent (an $87,000 tax cut), those making between $500,000 and $1 million would see an increase of 3.2 percent (a $17,000 tax cut), and those making between $200,000 and $500,000 would see an increase of 0.8 percent (a $1,800 tax cut).
Because taxpayers above $200,000 as a group have received a net tax cut, revenue neutrality requires that taxpayers below $200,000—about 95 percent of the population—experience a tax increase.
Here’s how the plan would affect the average taxpayer in each income group. As the column labeled “revenue neutral” shows, all taxpayers making less than $200,000 would see their taxes go up by hundreds [id.], if not thousands, of dollars. In particular, families with children would see their taxes go up by $2,041, on average:
Again, this analysis assumes that deductions are eliminated in a way that would make the tax code as progressive as possible, so its likely that, in practice, Romney’s plan would look even worse. To this point, Romney has refused to specify which deductions he would limit or eliminate.
On several occasions [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/22/430396/romney-tax-cut-rich/ ], Romney has denied that his tax plan would provide a big tax break to the wealthy. But as this analysis shows, even giving him all of the benefit of the doubt when it comes to eliminating deductions, the plan is still a massive tax break for the rich.
Update
The Romney campaign is pushing back on the Tax Policy Center’s study by claiming that TPC is a “liberal” group, due to the fact that one of its analysts used to work for the Obama administration. However, when TPC analyzed Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) tax plan during the GOP presidential primaries, the Romney camp called it an “objective, third party analysis [ http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/romney-camp-cited-same-think-tank-they-now ].”
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/08/01/620561/tpc-romney-study-taxes/ [with comments]
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How Romney Could Raise Taxes on 95% of the Country—in 1 Tall Graph
By Derek Thompson
Aug 1 2012, 10:48 AM ET
Mitt Romney's tax plan could force 95 percent of the country to pay more, while cutting taxes for the "1%" by tens of thousands of dollars, according to a new analysis from the Tax Policy Center and the Brookings Institution.
The Romney plan begins by cutting marginal rates by 20 percent and eliminating the estate tax and Alternative Minimum Tax, which would decrease federal tax revenue by $360 billion by 2015. This report considered what would happen if Romney eliminated tax expenditures to make his plan revenue-neutral, so that it wouldn't blow an enormous hole in our budget. Here's what they found: The revenue-neutral Romney plan would raise taxes on a typical family by more than $600. A household making between half-a-million and $1 million would get a tax cut equal to almost twice the disposable income [ http://www.thedeal.com/magazine/ID/039853/2011/the-end-of-mass-media.php ] of the poorest 20 percent.
Think about this plan as two steps. Step one, Romney's intended tax cuts, digs a hole. Step two is filling that hole by cutting tax spending, like the mortgage interest deduction and child tax credit. Even with a careful pruning of tax spending, the inevitable result is to massively swing the burden of taxes toward the "bottom 95%" because the top benefits so much from Romney's step one.
There are two reasons why this analysis might understate exactly how regressive the Romney plan is. First, the researchers started by eliminating tax expenditures for the highest-income groups and worked their way down. But it's impossible to expect Congress would completely eliminate all tax expenditures above a certain level. Second, the analysis doesn't include possible cuts to government spending, which tends to benefit low- and middle-income households more than tax expenditures. If Romney leaves military spending levels near their current share of GDP, the cuts would focus even more on programs that provide services or cash to the poor, sick, and elderly. That's not me being hyperbolic: Poor, sick, and old is simply where the vast majority of non-combat government spending goes.
We can argue over methodology and details, but there are a few things that can't be debated away. First, the Romney plan and the Obama plan both use the Bush tax cuts as a canvas, but from there, they paint very different pictures. Obama begins by raising taxes at the top, and Romney begins by cutting tax rates that benefit the top. Second, there's no getting around the fact that Romney's plan would make the tax code less progressive. "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.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/how-romneys-could-raise-taxes-on-95-of-the-country-in-1-tall-graph/260585/ [with comments]
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Romney Tax Plan on Table. Debt Collapses Table.
By Ezra Klein
Aug 2, 2012 12:10 PM CT
I can describe Mitt Romney’s tax policy promises in two words: mathematically impossible.
Those aren’t my words. They’re the words of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/ ], which has conducted the most comprehensive analysis to date of Romney’s tax plan and which bent over backward to make his promises add up. They’re perhaps the two most important words that have been written during this U.S. presidential election.
If you were to distill the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign to a few sentences, you could hardly do better than this statement of purpose from the speech [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2012/02/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-detroit-michigan ] Romney delivered in Detroit, outlining his plan for the economy: “I believe the American people are ready for real leadership. I believe they deserve a bold, conservative plan for reform and economic growth. Unlike President Obama, I actually have one -- and I’m not afraid to put it on the table.”
The truth is that Romney is afraid to put his plan on the table. He has promised to reduce the deficit, but refused to identify the spending he would cut. He has promised to reform the tax code, but refused to identify the deductions and loopholes he would eliminate. The only thing he has put on the table is dessert: a promise to cut marginal tax rates by 20 percent across the board and to do so without raising the deficit or reducing the taxes paid by the top 1 percent.
The Tax Policy Center took Romney at his word. They also did what he hasn’t done: They put his plan on the table.
Favorable Conditions
To help Romney, the center did so under the most favorable conditions, which also happen to be wildly unrealistic. The analysts assumed that any cuts to deductions or loopholes would begin with top earners, and that no one earning less than $200,000 would have their deductions reduced until all those earning more than $200,000 had lost all of their deductions and tax preferences first. They assumed, as Romney has promised, that the reforms would spare the portions of the tax code that privilege saving and investment. They even ran a simulation in which they used a model developed, in part, by Greg Mankiw, one of Romney’s economic advisers, that posits “implausibly large growth effects” from tax cuts.
The numbers never worked out. No matter how hard the Tax Policy Center labored to make Romney’s promises add up, every simulation ended the same way: with a tax increase on the middle class. The tax cuts Romney is offering to the rich are simply larger than the size of the (non-investment) deductions and loopholes that exist for the rich. That’s why it’s “mathematically impossible” for Romney’s plan to produce anything but a tax increase on the middle class.
The Romney campaign offered two responses to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis, one more misleading than the other.
First, the campaign called the analysis “just another biased study from a former Obama staffer.” That jab refers to Adam Looney, one of the study’s three co-authors, who served in a staff role on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. But the Tax Policy Center is directed by Donald Marron, who was one of the principals on George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. Calling the Tax Policy Center biased simply isn’t credible -- a point underscored by the fact that the Romney campaign referred to the group’s work as “objective, third-party analysis” during the primary campaign.
Then the Romney campaign said, “The study ignores the positive benefits to economic growth from both the corporate tax plan and the deficit reduction called for in the Romney plan.” There’s a reason the study ignores those “positive benefits”: Romney has called for a revenue-neutral corporate tax plan that brings the rate down from 35 percent to 25 percent while also promising to balance the budget. He has not said how he will achieve either goal. Until he does, those positive benefits -- if they exist -- are impossible to calculate.
Regressive Cuts
If Romney tries to pay for his tax cuts by reducing spending, the results, as the Tax Policy Center notes, would be even more regressive. Romney has promised to increase defense spending and hold benefits steady for the current generation of seniors. The only remaining big spending programs are those that help the poor; that’s where Romney’s cuts would have to be concentrated. Paying for tax cuts for the rich by curtailing programs for the poor is even more of a reverse-Robin Hood act than paying for tax cuts for the rich by cutting the tax expenditures (deductions and the like) of the middle class.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities produced its own analysis of Romney’s plan, based on an assumption that Romney pays for half of his tax cuts through spending cuts. The conclusion: By 2022, Romney would need to cut all non-defense, non-Social Security programs by 49 percent. That is not plausible, to say the least.
The Romney campaign has not provided good answers to the questions raised by its own math. But we already knew the Romney campaign didn’t have good answers. If Romney had good answers, he would have made good on his rhetoric and put his plans on the table.
It would be great if Romney could fulfill his promise to cut taxes by trillions of dollars, increase defense spending, keep entitlement spending on pretty much its current path for the next decade, and balance the budget. But as Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University economist, put it in a pithy tweet [ https://twitter.com/tylercowen/status/230805948132892673 ] (though perhaps “pithy tweet” is a tautology), “The proposed Romney fiscal policy just doesn’t make any sense.”
This is not a surprise. Even some Republican policy experts admit in private that Romney’s promises simply don’t add up. To twist Abraham Lincoln’s famous formulation, the Romney campaign has decided it’s better to remain silent and be thought evasive than to reveal your plan and remove all doubt that you’re cutting taxes on the rich while increasing the deficit, raising taxes on the middle class and cutting programs for the poor.
Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, the Tax Policy Center’s analysis has removed all doubt. Romney needs to come up with a way to make his promises mathematically possible -- and quick.
(Ezra Klein is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on this article: Ezra Klein in Washington at wonkbook@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.net.
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-02/romney-tax-plan-on-table-debt-collapses-table-.html [with comments]
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'He's asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a big tax cut'
Published on Aug 1, 2012 by dkostv
Obama on Romney: 'He's asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a big tax cut'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV8b48KA3xI [via http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/01/1115720/-Obama-slams-Romney-tax-plan-Asking-you-to-pay-more-so-that-people-like-him-can-get-a-big-tax-cut (with comments)] [shorter excerpt from BarackObamadatcom at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dyV0-Mz_2E ]
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"Stretch" - Obama for America TV Ad
Published on Aug 2, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Learn more: http://OFA.BO/AHWfiR
You work hard, stretch every penny, but chances are you pay a higher tax rate than him: Mitt Romney made $20 million dollars in 2010, but paid only 14% in taxes—probably less than you.
Now he has a plan that will give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2000 dollars a year. Mitt Romney's middle class tax increase: he pays less, you pay more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1D1jI61ckY
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Obama's New Ad Jumps on Study of Romney's Tax Plan
[the ad just above embedded]
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign released a new ad based on a study of Mitt Romney’s tax plan.
By Laura Meckler
August 2, 2012
It took President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign less than 24 hours to turn a new study on Mitt Romney’s tax plan into a TV advertisement. Mr. Obama seized on the study a day earlier on the stump in Ohio. The new ad takes the matter a step further, linking Mr. Romney’s personal fortune to his tax plan.
The spot first points out that Mr. Romney made $20 million in 2010 but paid just an effective tax rate of just 14%. “Probably less than you,” the announcer says.
“Now he has a plan,” the ad continues, “that would give millionaires another tax break.” That’s a reference to Mr. Romney’s promise to reduce income tax rates across the board by 20%, which would deliver large benefits to those at the top of the income scale because they pay the most in taxes. It would also cut tax rates for lower-income taxpayers. Mr. Romney has said he will offset the cost of this tax plan, estimated at about $5 trillion over 10 years, by ending various deductions and other tax breaks, but he hasn’t identified them.
The new study by the Tax Policy Center concludes that even if his plan was written to deliver as many benefits as possible to those earning lower incomes, it would still “provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.”
The ad concludes: “Mitt Romney’s middle class tax increase. He pays less. You pay more.”
On Wednesday, the Romney campaign complained that the study was not objective because one of the co-authors used to work for the Obama White House and that it did not take into account the growth effects of lowering the corporate tax rate, as he also proposes. The Obama campaign countered that another co-author worked in the George H.W. Bush White House. In general, the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institute and the Urban Institute, is viewed as nonpartisan, and the Romney campaign cited their work last November as “objective” and “nonpartisan.”
The study was written by Samuel Brown, a Brookings research associate and former Federal Reserve analyst; William Gale, a Brookings scholar and former senior economist in Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; and Adam Looney, policy director for the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project and a former senior economist for Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Despite the back-and-forth over the authors of the report, the staff economists on the Council of Economic Advisers are nonpartisan and often work for administrations that are not aligned with their personal politics.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://stream.wsj.com/story/campaign-2012-continuous-coverage/SS-2-9156/SS-2-40553/ [with comments]
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President Obama on Mitt Romney's Tax Hike - Orlando, FL
Published on Aug 2, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Share this: http://OFA.BO/MZyHjW
Tweet this: http://OFA.BO/ewnVBX
In Orlando, FL President Obama spoke on Romney's middle class tax increase and shared how his plan will keep strengthening middle class families.
President Obama was in Orlando, FL to discuss the choice in this election between two fundamentally different visions of how to grow the economy, create middle-class jobs and pay down the debt.
The President believes the only way to create an economy built to last is to build it from the middle out, not the top down. He highlighted the stark contrast between his plan to provide tax relief for middle class families and Mitt Romney's tax plan, which a new report by the independent, nonpartisan Tax Policy Center shows that his $5 trillion tax plan would require hiking taxes on middle class families to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
President Obama's plan to prevent a tax hike on the middle class enacts spending cuts and reforms and asks the wealthiest to pay their fair share again so we can reduce our deficit in a balanced way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGngljoM4U
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"Balanced" - Obama for America TV Ad
Published on Aug 2, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Learn more: http://OFA.BO/GZxA4m
"The choice on debt.
Mitt Romney's plan: huge tax cuts for millionaires, tax breaks for oil companies and corporations that ship jobs overseas, adding trillions to the deficit.
President Obama's plan: a balanced approach that asks the wealthy to pay a little more, eliminates tax breaks for outsourcing and oil subsidies, cuts government spending, and reduces the deficit by four trillion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=civrt8Vl35c
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‘Americans Are Overtaxed’ and Other Federal Budget “Myths”
By Aaron Task | Daily Ticker – Wed, Aug 1, 2012
You're probably aware the U.S. government spends a lot of money and more than it brings in. But few Americans have a really good understanding of how the budget works, where the money comes from and where it goes.
In Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget [ http://www.amazon.com/Red-Ink-High-Stakes-Politics-Federal/dp/0770436145 ], Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel shines a light on the federal budget and seeks to clear up some of the "myths and unrealities," including:
Politicians Choose How the Money Is Spent: Over 60% of the federal budget -- $3.6 trillion in fiscal 2011 -- is on "autopilot," Wessel notes, citing Social Security checks, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies and veterans benefits that occur "without a vote of Congress."
All the Money Goes to Foreign Aid and Government Workers: Foreign aid is typically less than 2% of the budget -- "it's a pittance," Wessel says, and firing all federal employees wouldn't even cut the deficit in half.
Uncle Sam Keeps Reaching in Our Pockets: "It's not the case that people are paying more and more in taxes," Wessel says. "People are feeling the pain because wages aren't going up, that's for sure. But the fraction of paychecks that go to fed government in taxes have been steadily going down since early 1980s." (As an aside, he notes there were $1.1 trillion of tax breaks and loopholes in the code nearly as much as the $1.3 trillion the IRS collected last year.)
Another big myth about the budget, Wessel says, is that it can't be tamed.
"It's hard but not impossible," he says. "But if you're going to do something on the deficit there's only a few big levers to push: taxes, defense and entitlements. Everything else is just completely detail."
Like many D.C. pundits, Wessel has very little faith the politicians currently in Congress can work together to find a solution to America's problem of spending more than we bring in.
"At the moment, especially now before the election, if you're even seen talking to someone on the other side of the aisle you're seen as a traitor," he laments.
And like most non-partisan economists, Wessel believes the best way to address the budget deficit is through a combination of higher taxes and less spending.
"There's a view you can do this without raising taxes," he says, citing House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's plan. "Basically that requires people to take...much more belt tightening than in my judgment they're willing to take."
Citing Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf, Wessel says the problem is "the American people want more in benefits then they're willing to send to Washington in taxes."
And maybe that's the biggest budget myth of all: That we can have our cake, eat it too and not pay for it.
Copyright © 2012 Yahoo! Inc.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/americans-overtaxed-other-federal-budget-myths-171349674.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Promises 'Millions' Of Jobs -- But Offers No Data To Back It Up
Presumptive Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, talks about jobs during a campaign stop July 19 in Roxbury, Mass.
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
by Jon Ward
Posted: 08/02/2012 1:04 pm Updated: 08/02/2012 2:28 pm
WASHINGTON -- Growth.
That's the word, and the concept, that Mitt Romney's campaign is emphasizing in response to the Obama campaign's new attacks [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/obama-hammers-romney-tax-plan-ohio/story?id=16906049 ] on Romney's tax plan.
President Obama is seizing on a new think-tank study [ http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/8/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney/01%20tax%20reform%20brown%20gale%20looney.pdf ] that says Romney's plan to cut tax rates for all brackets, lower the corporate rate, close loopholes and keep taxes low on investments, would require him to eliminate deductions and credits that benefit the lower- and middle-class, such as child credits and mortgage deductions.
The Romney campaign is not engaging on the same playing field. When asked Thursday in a conference call how much Rommey's plan might add to the deficit before the economic-growth it projected to create was factored in, along with closing loopholes and cutting spending, the campaign declined to provide specific numbers.
In a sense, the Romney campaign is handicapping itself, because Obama is now out on the campaign trail wielding specific numbers against Romney, whacking him over the head with lines like this: "The average middle-class family with children, according to this study, would be hit with a tax increase of more than $2,000."
"In order to afford just one $250,000 tax cut for somebody like Mr. Romney, 125 families like yours would have to pay another $2,000 in taxes each and every year," Obama told a crowd in Mansfield, Ohio, on Wednesday.
"Does that sound like a good plan for economic growth?" Obama asked the crowd, which screamed back, "No!"
The Obama campaign even put out a web-based "tax calculator [ http://www.barackobama.com/tax-calculator ]" on Thursday, where a user can plug in his or her income and other variables to see how much of a tax increase he or she might see if Romney is elected and implements his plan.
This is an effective attack by the president, even if he himself has endorsed many of the same elements of a broad-based tax reform plan as Romney, though there are significant differences between them.
But in response, the Romney campaign is refusing to engage in a number-by-number fight over how much its plan would impact the bottom line for each American. The campaign is instead banking on the idea that Americans are more concerned with results, specifically economic growth.
The Romney camp's retort, in a nutshell, is that Romney's plan would produce growth and jobs, and that Obama's plan would not because it is focused only on an ideological/political determination to make the wealthy pay more, and not on what would actually get the economy going.
Job growth, the Romney argument goes, is the best solution to help the middle class.
"The fact is that if you can create jobs then you're going to have an enormous positive impact on income distribution because people who don't have a job right now have an income of about zero," Romney economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on the conference call Thursday. "And if you give people with incomes of zero jobs, then their incomes go up a lot and the income distribution improves tremendously."
The Romney campaign was happy to be specific with one number on Thursday: the number of jobs that their plan would create. The only issue was that different advisers said different things.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443687504577562842656362660.html ], Romney economic adviser Glenn Hubbard said the Republican candidate's plan would create "about 12 million new jobs in a Romney first term, and millions more after that due to the plan's long-run growth effects."
But Hassett said Thursday that Romney's plan would result in "job creation of 5 to 10 million higher than baseline over a decade."
Hassett laid out the logic: "It's very easy to get millions and millions of jobs out of something like the Romney plan. And that contrasts a lot with what President Obama is proposing, which is basically just a hike of marginal tax rates. I don't think there's any economist on earth that would look at something like that and say it's a jobs plan."
But while Hassett said they had numbers to back this up, there was no such data offered on the call.
"What a small group of us have been doing is trying to establish what the economic science, the state of the art, would say that the Romney fiscal plan would do to the economy," Hassett said. "And I think what we've found is the numbers are striking and interesting and based on extremely strong science."
That, however, was the last mention of those numbers. And until such supporting data is offered, Romney's plan will be dismissed by many as vague reassurances rather than a credible proposal.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/mitt-romney-jobs_n_1733359.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney: Memories to Last a Lifetime
Published on Apr 11, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Tweet this: https://my.barackobama.com/romneymemoriesTWvid
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President Obama has his opponent: Mitt Romney. Here are some things we all need to remember about him—and make sure our friends know, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSh7G48_wOI
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Mitt Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
Published on May 18, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Facebook it: https://my.barackobama.com/romneywhatevervid
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Mitt Romney in February:
"I'm not sure which is worse; him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation"
Does he stand by his comment?
"I'm actually going to --I haven't, I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
What else does he stand by?
"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process let it run it's course and hit the bottom."
"Let Detroit go bankrupt."
"I will repeal Obamacare and I'll kill it dead on it's first day."
Reporter:
"Governor Romney, if you don't deport them, how do you send them home?"
Mitt Romney:
"Well the answer is self-deportation"
"Planned Parenthood, we're going to get rid of that."
"Corporations are people my friend."
"I was a severely conservative Republican governor."
"I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
Mitt Romney: "I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6wF7PTyEY
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Hold Mitt Romney accountable, join the Truth Team at BarackObama.com/TruthTeam
Published on Apr 3, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Join the Truth Team: https://my.barackobama.com/truthteamvid
Mitt Romney is lying about President Obama again.
Mitt Romney: "And the President said something very revealing yesterday. He said that in a perfect world, the government could spend a lot more money. I disagree."
President Obama: "Now, if this were a perfect world, we'd have unlimited resources. No one would ever have to pay any taxes, and we could spend as much as we wanted. But we live in the real world. We don't have unlimited resources. We have a deficit that needs to be paid down. And we also have to pay for investments that will help our economy grow and keep our country safe: education, research and technology, a strong military, and retirement programs like Medicare and Social Security. That means we have to make choices. When it comes to paying down the deficit and investing in our future, should we ask middle-class Americans to pay even more at a time when their budgets are already stretched to the breaking point? Or should we ask some of the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share? That's the choice."
Hold Mitt Romney accountable, join the Truth Team: https://my.barackobama.com/truthteamvid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH9pIDUshww
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Mitt Romney versus Reality
Published on Apr 4, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Are you in? https://my.barackobama.com/distortionvid
Mitt Romney: "The President has pledged to "transform America," and he has spent the last four years laying the foundation for a new Government-Centered Society."
President Obama: "I have never been somebody who believes that government can or should try to solve every problem."
Mitt Romney: "He saw free enterprise as the villain and not the solution."
President Obama: "I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history."
Mitt Romney: "When you attack business and vilify success, you're going to have less business and less success."
President Obama: "I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington."
Mitt Romney: "... tax increases become not only a necessity, but also a desired tool for social justice."
President Obama: "I've cut taxes for small business owners 17 times over the last three years."
Mitt Romney: "... government spending always increase because...well why not?"
President Obama: "As President I've eliminated dozens of programs that weren't working. And put annual domestic spending on a path to become the smallest share of the economy since Dwight Eisenhower held this office"
Mitt Romney: "If we become one of those societies that attack success, one outcome is certain -- there will be a lot less success."
President Obama: "In this country broad based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class."
Mitt Romney: "We'll stop the days of apologizing for success at home and never again apologize for America abroad."
President Obama: "I have no doubt that we will continue our long and prosperous journey as the greatest nation on Earth. Thank you. God bless you. God bless the United States of America."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=858vyozbpWc
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Mitt Romney versus Reality
Published on Apr 5, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
https://my.barackobama.com/distortionvid
Mitt Romney continues to distort reality in this latest installment of "Mitt Romney versus Reality"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM9DVC7kd7s
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Mitt Romney Versus Reality: Student Loans Edition
Published on Apr 25, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Are you in? https://my.barackobama.com/studentloantt5vid
Romney's budget plan cuts Pell Grants and locks in higher student loan rates. His advice for students?
"The best thing I can do for you is tell you to shop around."
Reality:
College would be more expensive under Mitt Romney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwI2dvvN4oM
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Mitt Romney Versus Reality: Global Edition
Published on Apr 26, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Are you in? https://my.barackobama.com/globalttvid
Mitt Romney continues to distort reality in this global edition of "Mitt Romney versus Reality"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrfxymxuyxA
===
Charles Hill: The Empire Strikes Back
Ken Fallin
One of American's foremost strategists [sic - blithering idiots] says the era of liberal democracy is in jeopardy, and the historical norm of dominance by great powers will return if the U.S. fails to lead.
By ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Updated July 27, 2012, 6:53 p.m. ET
Yale Prof. Charles Hill is often called a "conservative." But he is one of the foremost students and advocates of what he calls the "liberal" ("in the finest sense of the word") world order. And he is worried that Americans increasingly don't understand how special the modern era has been or their own crucial role in developing and securing it.
To some, the Obama's administration's desire to "lead from behind" and seek United Nations approval for actions abroad represents an appropriate retreat to a more humble American posture. Mr. Hill, by contrast, sees the possible end of a great era of human rights and democracy promotion the likes of which the planet has never seen.
Our world has "been increasingly tolerant and increasingly trying to eradicate racism and increasingly trying to expand freedom. And it can come to an end," he says.
What might replace it? "Spheres of influence." Or to use a more archaic term, "empire."
Mr. Hill is the all-too-rare professor with an extensive background outside of academia. He made his career in the U.S. foreign service working on China and the Middle East, among other issues. He has advised secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and served as a policy consultant to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali. His ability to combine real-world experience with appreciation of the intellectual currents animating history—Dickens comes up during our discussion of the anti-slavery movement in 19th-century Britain—has made his courses some of the most popular at Yale.
So what makes our era unique and valuable? And how did we get here? To understand the road we've travelled, we have to go back—a long way.
"The way the world through almost all of history has been ordered is through empires. The empire was the normal unit of rule. So it was the Chinese empire, the Mughal empire, the Persian empire, and the Roman empire, the Mayan empire."
What changed this was the Thirty Years War in Europe in the 17th century. "That was a war between the Holy Roman Empire and states, and states were new. They had come forward in northern Italy in the Renaissance and now they were taking hold in what we think of as a state-sized entity. The Netherlands and Sweden and France were among these. . . . France was both an empire and a state—and the key was when [Cardinal] Richelieu took France to the side of the states, which was shocking because France was Catholic and the empire was Catholic and the states were Protestant."
Our modern concept that war should be governed by law dates from the era. "It was so awful that it produced Grotius," the Dutch philosopher of international law.
It also produced the Treaty of Westphalia. "What they did in creating something to prevent another Thirty Years War, they put in place what would develop into the international state system. . . . This is a work of genius, probably inadvertent in some sense," Mr. Hill says. "To be a good member of the international club you had to follow minimal procedures. . . . You could be Catholic or Protestant, but you had to be a state. So the state then replaces the empire as the fundamental unit of world affairs."
The next major event is the Congress of Vienna in 1814, when the powers that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte put their own stamp on the system. Meanwhile, the procedural norms for membership in the international club—such as hosting and protecting ambassadors—are being supplemented by more substantive and moral-sounding requirements.
"The Ottomans are an empire and there's kind of a back and forth across the 19th century—it's kind of a precursor to the Turkish thing of the 20th century—of European statesmen saying, well, yeah, you can come in to it but you have polygamy, you have slavery, so you can't be all the way in," the 76-year-old Mr. Hill says.
"My view is that every major modern war has been waged against this international system. That is, the empire strikes back. World War I is a war of empires which comes to its culmination point when a state gets into it. That's the United States." And then we get something very interesting added: "That's Woodrow Wilson and [the promotion of] democracy."
"World War II, and I think this is uncomprehended although it's perfectly clear, . . . World War II is a war of empires against the state system. It's Hitler's Third Reich. It's Imperial Japan." The Axis goal "is to establish an empire. The Nazi empire would be Europe going eastward into the Slavic lands. The Japanese empire in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as they called it."
Is the story uncomplicated? Of course not. One of the most important developments was the rise of the British navy—the "empire" on which "the sun never set"—in the mid-19th century. But that so-called empire arguably was the global rules-based system, committed to abolishing slavery and to free trade and free movement on the seas.
So too for the United States, as it assumed responsibility for protecting the air and sea lanes while the British pulled back after World War II. "The grand strategy of the U.S. since Harry Truman," says Mr. Hill, has been the establishment of a rules-based system built on institutions like the U.N. and NATO. It's a system designed to protect the rights of states to Wilsonian "self determination," not to subject them to the will of the strongest.
Mr. Hill is neither a U.N. basher nor romantic about the institution. "The U.N. is a very useful organization. Its usefulness goes up or down" depending on "whether it is used within the boundaries it was designed to be used. . . . When the states themselves don't want to get involved and hand something over to the U.N., then it always goes wrong." He cites Bosnia, and now Syria, as examples.
On former Secretary-General Kofi Annan's mission in Syria: "What he's doing is very detrimental. By its own design it can't do anything but serve as a kind of rescue mission for Bashar Assad." Mr. Annan "takes a U.N. approach to this that says what you want to do is stop the fighting. Well, if you stop the fighting you're serving Assad."
And then there is the misimpression that the U.N. is itself a global governing body, rather than an instrument of the state system.
"Model U.N. is very deleterious. It has been educating now two or more generations of high school and college students about a U.N. that isn't really the U.N. Now when people talk about the U.N. they talk about something that doesn't exist. They talk about it as though it's a kind of untethered international governing body," he says. "So you've got 4,000 high-school students coming in for a weekend at Yale" and "you give them 45 minutes for a little problem like Iran's nuclear program, and they solve it! And they wonder why, if we solved it this morning before lunch, why can't you solve it?"
The U.N. works, Mr. Hill says, when states take charge. "The point is not that the U.S. has to act unilaterally. . . . The point is will the U.S. take a leading role?" he says. "The whole system has been defended by the leadership of the U.S. and its allies. And the idea of open expression and open trade is the American way of seeing the world improve itself in the future. If America is not gonna do that, nobody else is gonna do it. And that's what's happening now."
Mr. Hill sees two very different kinds of challenges to the liberal, state-based world order. One, the aggressive kind, is exemplified by China. The other, very different, can be seen in the European Union.
China has been a believer in the international system in recent decades, he says. It has seen advantages in the doctrine of state equality (which it uses to defend against human-rights complaints) and has gained from the liberalization of trade. But as the U.S. pulls back—a shrinking Navy, President Obama's foreign policy—things are starting to change.
The Chinese are talking about how they used to approach the world in the dynastic era, says Mr. Hill. "'[We] know that states are not equal and therefore we need a world order in which that reality is recognized.' This meme is getting around in China and is what accounts for statements starting two years ago as regards the South China Sea to Vietnam or the Philippines saying openly 'We are a big power and you're not a big power and therefore you should follow what we say.'"
The problem of the European Union, by contrast, is not the over-assertion of state power but the abdication of it without a suitable replacement. Of the current troubles in Europe, Mr. Hill says, "They took away the sovereign powers of the states" but they "didn't take enough power to Brussels to be able to run the Continent under crisis situations."
Why did Europe do that? Mr. Hill suggests that German and other war guilt was a big factor. "It so sickened the European intelligentsia" that "it was almost as though they said, yes, Europe has been the cause of all the world's problems. Napoleon and colonialism and imperialism and Stalin and Marx and Lenin and Hitler and the Holocaust. But no more. Now we're going to be the most moral people in the world. And the Americans who have been causing these problems along with us? They represent the past, we represent the future."
In short, "the European vision is we're just going to be nice" and "people will follow our lead. The Chinese view is why should we not do what we want to do with these little people who used to pay us tribute?"
What amazes Mr. Hill is how much of a break the Obama foreign policy represents compared with the bipartisan consensus stretching back to Truman. That culminated in President George W. Bush's second inaugural address, which he likens to an "emancipation proclamation for the world." But, he says, "The democracy wave that began 20 years ago [at the end of the Cold War] is now turning backward." Why? "The conduct of the Obama administration."
So the future is still very much a choice, not an inevitability, I ask.
"Absolutely. It's been a choice," he says. "I'm not so sure now that people even see the choice because the mentalities are shifting. . . . What I'm beginning to see is that when you try to explain something like this to someone, they don't have any idea what you're talking about. They just don't get it. But you wrecked your educational system the way we have. I'm talking about fourth grade, not higher education."
He talks about his aunt, who was principal of a middle school. The library was "incredible." Students read "Tacitus or Horace or Caesar's 'Gallic Wars.' Now we don't teach that. And we don't teach American history."
I ask about other possible future spheres of influence if the international system breaks down. If Europe doesn't get its act together, "the sphere of influence is going to be run from Moscow," Mr. Hill says. "There is an Indian sphere of influence" and "you look this way to Bali and this way to Zanzibar." Is Brazil a power of the future? "As they say, it always will be," he chuckles, alluding to a well-known joke about the country.
But the message remains dead serious. The "battle" for liberal democracy and some semblance of international order "has been being won because the U.S. has been putting out the effort for it," he says. "And now we're not."
Mr. Pollock is the Journal's editorial features editor [and yet another blithering idiot].
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443343704577552821956795292.html [with copmments]
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Mitt Romney, at fundraiser in Israel, describes spiritual impact of visit
Mitt Romney pauses in prayer as he visits the Western Wall, Judaism holiest prayer site, on July 29. View more photos in London and Israel of Romney’s overseas trip.
(Reuters/Jason Reed)
Video [embedded]
Mitt Romney tried to pull back from an adviser's suggestion that he favored new American aggression on Iran, distancing himself from comments that he would "respect" Israeli military action to prevent Tehran from gaining nuclear capability.
By Philip Rucker, Published: July 30, 2012
JERUSALEM — Mitt Romney held an intimate breakfast fundraiser here Monday with some of his campaign’s biggest benefactors, telling them about the spiritual impact his trip to Israel had had on him.
Seated around a U-shaped conference table with roughly 40 donors, with Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sheldon-adelson-and-newt-gingrich-one-gained-clout-from-friendship-the-other-funding/2012/01/11/gIQACvSrBQ_story.html ] immediately to his left, Romney said he was “overwhelmingly impressed with the hand of providence.”
“I come to this place, therefore, with a sense of profound humility, as I look around here at great people who’ve accomplished a great thing, and also a sense of spiritual connection, acknowledging the hand of providence in establishing this place and making it a holy city,” Romney said.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was expected to raise more than $1 million from the donors, who each were required to raise or donate $25,000 to $50,000 to attend the event. All of the donors are U.S. citizens, and many of them flew here from the United States to be with Romney during his 36-hour visit to Jerusalem.
Many of those in attendance at the posh King David Hotel are major bundlers for Romney’s campaign, raising tens of thousands of dollars from their business associates and friends. Adelson, for instance, has personally committed to giving tens of millions of dollars [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/romney-super-pac-raised-record-20-million-in-june/2012/07/16/gJQAF5ZJoW_blog.html ] to a pro-Romney super PAC.
Other donors in attendance included hedge fund executive Paul Singer [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pro-romney-super-pac-raised-179-million/2012/01/31/gIQA6kDzgQ_story.html ], beef industry executive John Miller, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and lawyer Philip Rosen.
Ann Romney and one of the couple’s sons, Josh, as well as Scott Romney, the candidate’s older brother, also attended, as did national finance chairman Spencer Zwick and his wife, Jenny, and Bob White, one of Romney’s closest friends and founding partner at Bain Capital.
Ann Romney told the donors that the trip to Israel was emotional for her family. She said Josh had never visited Israel before, and she told him at the beginning of the trip that he would be touched at some point — and he was.
“I think your heart would have to be made of stone not to feel what is still here,” Ann Romney said. “And it is a magical place, and it is a place which makes us turn to our inner soul and to our hearts ... So it is with quiet ears that we can hear and listen to all that is around us and of the beauty and all of the extraordinary history that’s here.”
In his remarks, Mitt Romney contrasted the gross domestic product of Israel with its neighbors in the Middle East.
“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” Romney said.
Romney cited two books that had influenced his thinking about foreign affairs — “Guns, Germs and Steel [ http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel--N-A-/dp/B008549FPO ]” by Jared Diamond and “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations [ http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Nations-Some-Rich/dp/0393318885 ]” by David Landes, and he gave a shout-out for “Start-up Nation [ http://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation-Israels-Economic-Miracle/dp/0446541478 ],” a book one of his senior foreign policy advisers, Dan Senor, wrote about entrepreneurship in Israel.
His comparison brought swift condemnation from Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who told the Associated Press the statement was “racist.”
“This man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation,” Erekat told AP. “It seems to me this man lacks information, knowledge, vision and understanding of this region and its people. He also lacks knowledge about the Israelis themselves. I have not heard any Israeli official speak about cultural superiority.”
Romney separately noted that Israel — which has universal health care — spends just 8 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, while the United States spends 18 percent. “We have to find ways,” he said, “not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to [fund] and manage our health-care costs.”
Romney also boasted of meeting the founder of Under Armour [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/horse-racing/in-sagamore-farm-kevin-plank-has-a-long-shot-with-pedigree/2011/05/16/AFK6824G_story.html ], Maryland native Kevin Plank, last week at the London Olympics. Romney spotted Plank wearing a pullover with the Under Armour logo, and soon discovered he was the founder of the business. Naturally, Romney asked how he had created the company.
“He said he was playing football and the cotton underwear that they would wear would get all moist and crinkled up and create pressure points and so forth, and he decided to go buy some stretchy fabric, cut it and sew it together, which he did and it was very comfortable,” Romney recalled.
Soon, Under Armour had 5,500 people working at the company and making uniforms for professional sports teams.
As Romney told the anecdote to the donors, however, he acknowledged that he had forgotten the founder’s name. So, he told the donors, he had his national finance chairman, Zwick, look him up on Google.
“The individual who was the founder of Under Armour is Kevin — Plake — is that it?” Romney said.
“Plank,” replied Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets.
“You know Kevin?” Romney asked.
“I know Kevin,” Johnson said.
“You know Kevin!” Romney replied. “Did he sell product to the New York Jets?”
“I have his products,” Johnson said.
“You have them!” Romney replied. “Are you wearing his productions — can you demonstrate?”
Johnson declined to provide a demonstration.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-fundraiser-in-israel-romney-describes-spiritual-impact-of-visit/2012/07/30/gJQAFXJpJX_story.html [with comments]
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Romney Doubles Down: Economically Successful Countries Are Culturally Superior
By Aviva Shen on Jul 30, 2012 at 3:09 pm
In a speech to wealthy donors in Tel Aviv over the weekend, Romney praised Israel’s “economic vitality” compared to the poor Palestinian economy. He attributed the economic success of the nation to a strong culture [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/30/604251/romney-statement-israel-palestinians-cultural-superiority/ ]:
I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. …
As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.
Palestinians took offense at Romney’s remarks, interpreting them to mean that Israel had the superior culture, and claimed that their economic development has been stymied by continued Israeli occupation. In response, the Romney campaign claimed the statement was “grossly mischaracterized” and chided the press for omitting the candidate’s full remarks. To contextualize Romney’s comparison — which actually underestimated the disparity between Israel’s GDP of US$31,000 to the West Bank and Gaza’s US$1,500 — the campaign offered his next line as proof that he did not target Palestinians: “And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States.”
This defense underscores the fundamental tone-deafness of the comparison. To give the full context, Romney discussed two economic theories, one attributing success to the physical characteristics of the land, while another attributes it to culture. He argued that the successes of Israel, the U.S. and Chile can be attributed to strong cultures; conversely, the geographically similar Palestinian, Ecuadorean and Mexican economies are the result of a poorer culture.
The “culture” argument doesn’t merely imply that poorer economies somehow deserve their fate due to an inferior value system. It makes generalizations about the characters of both populations. Abraham Diskin, a political scientist professor from Tel Aviv pointed out [ http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120730/DA0BABG02.html ], “You can understand this remark in several ways. You can say it’s anti-Semitic. ‘Jews and money.’”
Update
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended Romney [ http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/30/13034595-mccain-israeli-palestinian-differences-have-nothing-to-do-with-cultures ] in a news conference: “I am sure that Gov. Romney was not talking about difference in cultures, or difference in anybody superior or inferior.” McCain chalked up the difference in economies to regulations, saying, “It has nothing to do with culture.”
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/30/607231/romney-doubles-down-economically-successful-countries-are-culturally-superior/ [with comments]
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Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework
By JARED DIAMOND
Published: August 1, 2012
Los Angeles
MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.
It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel [ http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552 ],” as Mr. Romney described it [ http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/romney-israel-palestine-gdp-culture.php ] in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”
That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/mitt-romneys-2-favorite-books-that-explain-america-and-the-world/260519/ ] my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)
That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.
Just as a happy marriage depends on many different factors, so do national wealth and power. That is not to deny culture’s significance. Some countries have political institutions and cultural practices — honest government, rule of law, opportunities to accumulate money — that reward hard work. Others don’t. Familiar examples are the contrasts between neighboring countries sharing similar environments but with very different institutions. (Think of South Korea versus North Korea, or Haiti versus the Dominican Republic.) Rich, powerful countries tend to have good institutions that reward hard work. But institutions and culture aren’t the whole answer, because some countries notorious for bad institutions (like Italy and Argentina) are rich, while some virtuous countries (like Tanzania and Bhutan) are poor.
A different set of factors involves geography, which embraces many more aspects than the physical characteristics Mr. Romney dismissed. One such geographic factor is latitude, which has big effects on wealth and power today: tropical countries tend to be poorer than temperate-zone countries. Reasons include the debilitating effects of tropical diseases on life span and work, and the average lower productivity of agriculture and soils in the tropics than in the temperate zones.
A second factor is access to the sea. Countries without a seacoast or big navigable rivers tend to be poor, because transport costs overland or by air are much higher than transport costs by sea.
A third geographic factor is the history of agriculture. If an extraterrestrial had toured earth in the year 2000 B.C., the visitor would have noticed that centralized government, writing and metal tools were already widespread in Eurasia but hadn’t yet appeared in the New World, sub-Saharan Africa or Australia. That long head start would have let the visitor predict correctly that today, most of the world’s richest and most powerful countries would be Eurasian countries (and their overseas settlements in North America, Australia and New Zealand).
The reason is the historical effect of geography: 13,000 years ago, all peoples everywhere were hunter-gatherers living in sparse populations without centralized government, armies, writing or metal tools. These four roots of power arose as consequences of the development of agriculture, which generated human population explosions and accumulations of food surpluses capable of feeding full-time leaders, soldiers, scribes and inventors. But agriculture could originate only in those few regions endowed with many wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, like wild wheat, rice, pigs and cattle.
In short, geographic explanations and cultural-institutional explanations aren’t independent of each other. Of course, not all agricultural regions developed honest centralized government, but no nonagricultural region ever developed any centralized government, whether honest or dishonest. That’s why institutions promoting wealth today arose first in Eurasia, the area with the oldest and most productive agriculture.
What does this mean for Americans? Can we assume that the United States, blessed with temperate location and seacoasts and navigable rivers, will remain rich forever, while tropical or landlocked countries are doomed to eternal poverty?
Of course not. Some tropical and subtropical countries have become richer despite geographic limitations. They’ve invested in public health to overcome their disease burdens (Botswana and the Philippines). They’ve invested in crops adapted to the tropics (Brazil and Malaysia). They’ve focused their economies on sectors other than agriculture (Singapore and Taiwan).
Conversely, geographic advantages don’t guarantee permanent success, as the growing difficulties in Europe and America show. We Americans fail to provide superior education and economic incentives to much of our population. India, China and other countries that have not been world leaders are investing heavily in education, technology and infrastructure. They’re offering economic opportunities to more and more of their citizens. That’s part of the reason jobs are moving overseas. Our geography won’t keep us rich and powerful if we can’t get a good education, can’t afford health care and can’t count on our hard work’s being rewarded by good jobs and rising incomes.
Mitt Romney may become our next president. Will he continue to espouse one-factor explanations for multicausal problems, and fail to understand history and the modern world? If so, he will preside over a declining nation squandering its advantages of location and history.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the forthcoming book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? [ http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 ]”
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Related
The Caucus: Romney’s Remarks About Palestinians Draw Criticism (July 30, 2012)
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/romney-comments-on-palestinians-draw-criticism/
Related in Opinion
Op-Ed Columnist: Why Not in Vegas? (August 1, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/opinion/friedman-why-not-in-vegas.html
Editorial: Mr. Romney Stumps in Israel (July 31, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/mitt-romney-stumps-in-israel.html
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/opinion/mitt-romneys-search-for-simple-answers.html [with comments]
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Romney reiterates stance on 'culture'; Palestinians still furious
Mitt Romney visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City.
(Uriel Sinai / Getty Images)
August 01, 2012|By Maher Abukhater and Robin Abcarian
After a week abroad, Mitt Romney is back on American soil and has resumed his campaign schedule. But he wanted to clarify a remark that landed him in hot water with Palestinians on Monday.
He published an essay in the National Review Online on Tuesday, the day he flew home to Boston, defending himself against a controversy arising from remarks he made in Israel that infuriated Palestinians [ http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-brushes-off-missteps-third-controversy-mars-final-day-of-trip-20120731,0,7350786.story ].
In the essay, “Culture Does Matter [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/312830/culture-does-matter-mitt-romney ]," Romney reiterated some salient points of his speech to supporters at a fundraiser in Jerusalem.
“During my recent trip to Israel,” wrote the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, “I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy. But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture?”
Romney did not elaborate on which aspects of Palestinian culture he blames for the chasm between the per capita income of the two peoples, but he did, once again, raise the ire of Palestinians who believe that Israel’s economic success and the West Bank's economic struggles are not caused by cultural differences, but by Israel’s military occupation of the territory.
“The Israeli occupation and restrictions are responsible for the economic difficulties facing the Palestinians,” Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib said Wednesday in Ramallah. "This is not only the assessment of Palestinians, but also the conclusions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and all international organizations.”
(The World Bank and IMF have agreed that while the Palestinian economy is not strong enough to support a state, its greatest impediment is restrictions imposed by Israel that hamper investment by creating uncertainty and risk, according to the Associated Press [ http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/world-bank-palestinian-economy-unsustainable-168516 ].)
Khatib added: “Israel is profiting from the occupation of our land and we, in return, are not able to benefit from our own resources to develop our economy. And not only that, the Israeli restrictions on movement and trade through its control over the borders and the checkpoints also hamper our economic growth.
“All he had to do was read the many reports by the international organizations and he would have easily realized that Israel exploits the economy of the Palestinian territories for the benefit of its own economy while causing the deterioration in our own economy. It is as simple as that.”
Israel has maintained that its restrictions on Palestinians are based on security concerns.
As Romney may have discovered, the complex situation does not always lend itself to campaign-trail sound bites.
Still, Romney sacrifices little politically by praising Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. His intended audience, after all, comprises two important domestic political constituencies, conservative American Jews and evangelical Christians. Palestinian statehood does not rank as a pressing concern for these groups, which also appreciate Romney’s hard-line stance against Iran, Israel’s most potent adversary.
Should Romney win the presidency, however, he may have a diplomatic dilemma on his hands. But he will cross that checkpoint when he gets there.
Abukhater reported from Ramallah, Abcarian from Los Angeles.
Copyright 2012 Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/01/news/la-pn-romney-reiterates-stance-on-culture-palestinians-still-furious--20120801 [with comments]
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Mitt Romney's Culture Problem
By Robert Wright
Aug 1 2012, 10:00 AM ET
At last Mitt Romney and Palestinians have found something they can agree on. And when you reflect on that something, I think you'll see more clearly why Romney keeps failing to get traction [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/us/politics/polls-give-obama-edge-in-pennsylvania-ohio-and-florida.html ] with American voters.
After going to Israel and offending Palestinians in the occupied territory by seeming to attribute [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/us/politics/romney-angers-palestinians-with-comments-in-israel.html?pagewanted=all ] their economic plight to "cultural" deficiencies, Romney decided to write a piece [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/312830/culture-does-matter-mitt-romney ] for National Review Online clarifying his point. And it turns out that when he talks about a culture conducive to prosperity he's largely talking about a culture featuring freedom. "The linkage between freedom and prosperity has a universal applicability," he writes.
I'm sure many Palestinians agree they could use more freedom, and that this would have economic benefits. West Bank Palestinians would like the freedom to transport goods directly from one town to another without taking bizarrely circuitous routes dictated by the existence of webs of illegal Israeli settlements -- and they'd like to be confident that, while they're en route, these roads won't suddenly be shut down by Israeli troops. Palestinian businesses (and residences) would like the freedom to control natural resources, so they could have running water seven days a week, rather than see the water siphoned off to fill swimming pools in those Israeli settlements.
And many West Bank Palestinians would like the freedom to vote for or against the Israeli governments that have imposed these and other conditions on them. That would be a manifestation of freedom known as "democracy."
I realize Mitt Romney doesn't care what Palestinians think of him, since they have no real constituency in America. But what is alarming--and I mean alarming from the point of view of Americans who might wind up being governed by this guy--is that he probably has no awareness of the stunning irony of going to Jerusalem, having a lovefest with Bibi Netanyahu, defender-in-chief of the Israeli occupation, and then preaching to Palestinians that they'd be better off if only they'd get themselves some freedom!
I mean, leave aside the left-right argument about whether Israeli or Palestinian leaders are more responsible for the failure to reach a two-state solution back when that was still possible. Do you have any idea how offensive Romney sounds to the vast majority of Palestinians who definitely can't be blamed for this failure to seize past moments?
I used to think the Democratic rap on Romney--that he's one of these rich people who just can't see the way life looks to less rich people--was just a clever and not wholly implausible talking point. But I'm starting to take it much more seriously. I think his gaffes abroad do bespeak an inability to put himself in the shoes of other people, whether Brits who are proud of their Olympic preparations or Palestinians who live under occupation.
I mean, gosh, why didn't those Palestinians have the wisdom to be born into a nice Mormon family--with nice Mormon culture--whose patriarch was head of American Motors? And, come to think of it, why didn't all those unemployed Americans exhibit similar foresight?
Mitt's a pretty smart guy, but there's one thing he just can't seem to wrap his mind around: not being Mitt. For the millions of American voters who aren't Mitt, that's something to think about.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/mitt-romneys-culture-problem/260583/ [with comments]
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Here's a List of Countries With a Higher GDP Per Capita Than Israel
Mitt Romney applauds while speaking in Jerusalem.
If "culture makes all the difference" in explaining economic disparity, as Romney suggested of Israel and Palestine, then are Kuwaitis and Belgians culturally superior to Israelis?
Jul 31 2012
[...]
The 26 countries with higher GDP per capita than Israel, per IMF data:
• Luxembourg $113,533
• Qatar $98,329
• Norway $97,255
• Switzerland $81,161
• United Arab Emirates $67,008
• Australia $65,477
• Denmark $59,928
• Sweden $56,956
• Canada $50,436
• Netherlands $50,355
• Austria $49,809
• Finland $49,350
• Singapore $49,271
• United States $48,387
• Kuwait $47,982
• Ireland $47,513
• Belgium $46,878
• Japan $45,920
• France $44,008
• Germany $43,742
• Iceland $43,088
• United Kingdom $38,592
• New Zealand $36,648
• Brunei $36,584
• Italy $36,267
• European Union $35,116
• Hong Kong $34,049
• Spain $32,360
[...]
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/heres-a-list-of-countries-with-a-higher-gdp-per-capita-than-israel/260546/ [with comments]
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Mitt Romney’s overseas jaunt v. Obama’s 2008 voyage: What a difference staffing makes
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his wife Ann board their charter plane in Israel.
(Charles Dharapak - AP)
By Emily Heil
Posted at 09:18 AM ET, 07/31/2012
Even before he was wheels-up for London, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s overseas trip was drawing comparisons [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-race-romneys-overseas-trip-recalls-obama-2008-globe-trotting-to-burnish-credentials/2012/07/20/gJQAlJcYyW_story.html ] to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 overseas trip.
Both were candidates looking to appear presidential and polish up their foreign-policy credentials.
But where Obama’s trip was smooth sailing (save a kerfuffle about a cancelled visit [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/obama-skips-visit-with-troops/ ] with wounded troops), Romney’s voyage [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/30/romney-praises-health-care-in-israel-where-strong-government-influence-has-driven-down-costs/ ] has been laden [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-olympic-stumbles-in-london/2012/07/27/gJQAiMZKEX_story.html ] with cringe-inducing gaffes [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-olympic-stumbles-in-london/2012/07/27/gJQAiMZKEX_story.html ].
So what’s the difference — other than four years and two vastly different candidates? Here’s one big distinction:the Obama campaign loaded up on staff firepower while the Romney camp had a relative ghost crew. Our colleague Philip Rucker noted the disparity in his story on Friday [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-looks-for-a-breakout-moment-in-israel-to-salvage-foreign-trip/2012/07/27/gJQAMHNaEX_story.html ] (in which he reported that Romney was looking for a “breakout moment” in Israel that would salvage the trip--a hope that wasn’t borne out this week when the GOP candidate managed to tick off Palestinians [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-olympic-stumbles-in-london/2012/07/27/gJQAiMZKEX_story.html ]).
“When Barack Obama traveled overseas as a candidate in 2008, it was an all-hands-on-deck event...By contrast, Romney’s top political advisers stayed home,” Rucker reported.
Just how lopsided were the staffs? We dug around for the rosters.
For his trip, Obama got assists from at least 14 top staffers and advisors, many of whom were heavy hitters with serious foreign policy and economic credentials. They included former National Security Advisor Tony Lake; former Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg; former White House and State Department official Greg Craig [ http://www.skadden.com/professionals/gregory-b-craig ]; former assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice [ http://usun.state.gov/leadership/c31461.htm ]; former National Security Council staffer Ivo Daalder [ http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/123509.htm ]; longtime diplomat and State Department official Dennis Ross [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/dennis-ross-tries-to-help-obama-salvage-the-policy-he-implemented/2012/01/08/gIQA8k62jP_blog.html ]; former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig [ http://www.cnas.org/danzig ]; former Under Secretary of Commerce Robert Shapiro [ http://cartermorse.com/our-team/advisory-board/workers-compensation ]; retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/us-ambassador-to-kenya-j-scott-gration-resigns-over-differences-with-washington/2012/06/29/gJQAMOQEBW_story.html ]; senior foreign policy advisor Denis McDonough [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/denis-mcdonough/gIQAt6rX9O_topic.html ]; foreign policy speechwriter Ben Rhodes [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ben-rhodes/gIQATbvW9O_topic.html ]; chief strategist David Axelrod; communications director Robert Gibbs; and spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
Romney, on the other hand, has only three senior staffers with him for the entire trip: policy director Lanhee Chen; foreign policy aide Alex Wong; and press secretary Andrea Saul.
Romney supplemented the trio at various stops along the way: in London, former senator Jim Talent [ http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/t/jim-talent ] (R-Mo.)and former Massachusetts lieutenant governor Kerry Healey [ http://www.iop.harvard.edu/Programs/Fellows-Study-Groups/Former-Fellows/Kerry_Healey ] met the gang; in Israel, former Council on Foreign Relations adjunct senior fellow Dan Senor [ http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/node/79 ] hopped on board; chief strategist Stuart Stevens [ http://www.ssg-dc.com/about-us/ ] joined for the Israel and Poland legs; and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Ian Brezinski [ http://www.acus.org/users/ian-brzezinski ] came to Poland.
So lest anyone question the power of staffing...
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/post/2012/07/30/gJQAbZnCLX_blog.html [with comments]
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Fox News Host: Covering Romney’s International Trip Feels Like Being In ‘A Modified Petting Zoo’
By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jul 30, 2012 at 12:24 pm
Journalists following the Romney campaign on the road have voiced some gripes with how they are being treated. They have been asked to submit quotes for approval [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/news-organizations-push-back-against-quote-approval/ ], barred from asking questions [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/16/romney-aides-secret-service-block-press-from-event-rope-line/ ] on the rope line, and were temporarily barred from entering [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romney-bans-media-from-jerusalem-fundraiser-violating-pre-established-protocol/2012/07/28/gJQAAaeVGX_blog.html ] a fundraiser to which they’d been promised entry (after media outrage [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romney-opens-jerusalem-fundraiser-to-press-reversing-earlier-decision/2012/07/29/gJQAL0g6HX_blog.html ], the campaign reversed its decision).
Now, Fox News’ conservative host Greta Van Susteren has joined the chorus of journalists complaining about treatment from the Romney campaign. As she follows the campaign through Poland today, Van Susteren posted to her blog [ http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/2012/07/30/notes-from-travel-with-gov-romney-in-poland/ ] saying that the press has had no access to the candidate, and that she feels like she is in a petting zoo:
There has been no press access to Governor Romney since we landed in Poland. We (press) are in a holding pattern (I can’t help but feel a bit like the press is a modified petting zoo since we are trapped in a bus while Polish citizens take pictures of us.) Under the headline “Governor Romney won’t like this” we saw a big sign in the crowd for Rep Ron Paul.
The Romney campaign has granted some interviews to journalists, including Van Susteren herself [ http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/press-is-a-modified-petting-zoo-on-romney-foreign-trip-says-greta_b139551 ]. But he has been much more secretive than predecessors, including Obama who, when traveling abroad, held two press conferences, two appearances on Sunday talk shows, and several television and in-person interviews.
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/07/30/606221/press-feels-like-a-modified-petting-zoo-on-romneys-international-trip/ [with comments]
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Polish Solidarity Distances Itself From Romney: He ‘Supported Attacks On Trade Unions And Employees’ Rights’
Solidarity occupying an intersection in 1982
By Ali Gharib on Jul 31, 2012 at 9:15 am
Between annoying the British and alienating the Palestinians [ http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/30/604251/romney-statement-israel-palestinians-cultural-superiority/ ], Mitt Romney seems to have found trouble everywhere he went on his overseas campaign trip. Now, the Polish trade union Solidarity, once led by Romney’s host in Poland Lech Walesa, disavowed the GOP presidential hopeful because of his anti-union politics.
Romney went to Gdansk, Poland to meet with Walesa [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/79167.html ], who in 1980, led a workers’ strike in the Gdansk Shipyard and helped create the Solidarity trade union [ http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1060898.html ]. Solidarity became a thorn in the side of the Soviet-backed government, and Walesa eventually became a Nobel laureate and the first president of a free Poland. Walesa was reportedly miffed [ http://www.kansascity.com/2012/07/28/3730698/romney-trip-to-poland-wrapped.html ] when Obama wouldn’t grant him a private greeting, and invited Romney for a visit.
But Solidarity isn’t extending the same welcome. The group distanced itself in a statement [ ]:
Regretfully, we were informed by our friends from the American headquarters of (trade union federation) AFL-CIO, which represents more than 12 million employees … that Mitt Romney supported attacks on trade unions and employees’ rights.
Solidarity was not involved in organizing Romney’s meeting with Walesa and did not invite him to visit Poland.
Romney has staked out anti-union positions [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/23/1112926/-Do-You-Know-Of-Mitt-Romney-s-Anti-Union-Agenda ]. He supported right-to-work legislation [ http://news.yahoo.com/mitt-romney-touts-faults-unions-michigan-201200615.html ] and railed against unions [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/26/nation/la-na-romney-labor-20120226 ] in Michigan earlier this year: “I’ve taken on union bosses before. I’m happy to take them on again.” (HT: Muhammed Idrees Ahmad [ http://pulsemedia.org/about/muhammad-idrees-ahmad/ ])
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/31/611381/romney-solidarity-poland-distances/ [with comments]
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Mitt Romney: Michele Bachmann's Muslim Brotherhood Claims Are 'Not Part Of My Campaign'
By Sabrina Siddiqui
Posted: 08/03/2012 2:34 pm Updated: 08/03/2012 7:57 pm
Mitt Romney declined to speak out against Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and four other House Republicans on Friday for seeking to investigate whether Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Following a campaign event in Reno, Nev., a reporter asked the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for his reaction to both Bachmann's allegations against Abedin and a controversy surrounding Chick-Fil-A and gay marriage [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/chick-fil-a-companies-gay-marriage_n_1721682.html ].
“I’m not going to tell other people what things to talk about," Romney responded. "Those are not things that are part of my campaign [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMVjw4ebYEw (below)].”
Shortly after the GOP lawmakers announced their inquiry in a letter to the State Department in July, a number of Republican members of Congress condemned the allegations against Abedin. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called their claims [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/18/john-mccain-michele-bachmann-muslim_n_1683277.html ] "an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman," while House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said such allegations are "pretty dangerous [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/19/huma-abedin-michele-bachmann_n_1686557.html ]."
Romney's response comes in the same week as Clinton's own response to the issue [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/hillary-clinton-huma-abedin_n_1721416.html ]. The secretary of state noted the duty of political leaders to speak out and protect diversity in their countries.
"I don't see enough of that. I want to see more of it," Clinton said. "We did see some of that in our own country. We saw Republicans stepping up and standing up against the kind of assaults that really have no place in our politics. So we have to set an example, there is no doubt about that. And we have to continue doing so."
This isn't the first time Romney has been reluctant to give his opinion on a controversial issue. In the wake of Donald Trump's renewed charges that President Barack Obama might not have been born in America, Romney told reporters he would not "repudiate [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/28/mitt-romney-will-not-repu_n_1551540.html ]" the billionaire and that he doesn't necessarily agree with everyone who supports his candidacy. Romney was also unwilling to condemn Rush Limbaugh [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/rush-limbaugh-sandra-fluke-david-axelrod_n_1323911.html ] for calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" earlier this year, merely responding that he would not have used the same language.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/03/mitt-romney-michele-bachmann-muslim-brotherhood_n_1738585.html [with comments]
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Romney, GOP high-rollers to meet in Aspen
Romney plans to join mega-donors in Aspen for a retreat.
AP
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and WILLIAM BERGSTROM | 7/31/12 5:23 PM EDT Updated: 8/1/12 12:02 AM EDT
Mitt Romney will hold a fundraiser with some of the biggest donors in GOP politics in Aspen on Thursday night on the sidelines of a closed-door Republican Governors Association high-rollers event, sources tell POLITICO.
After attending public events during the day at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds [ http://www.chieftain.com/politics/romney-coming-to-colorado-on-thursday/article_94f4088a-db34-11e1-b114-0019bb2963f4.html ] and Basalt High School, Romney plans to join mega-donors in town for a retreat hosted by the RGA’s so-called Executive Roundtable program, which will draw some of the biggest names in GOP politics, including several high-powered governors, a top adviser to Romney, Karl Rove, and other representatives of deep-pocketed political spenders, including a top lieutenant of the Koch brothers.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is planning to attend a Romney fundraiser [ http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/07/gov_christie_adds_romney_fundr.html ] around the big-donor gathering, though it’s not clear if that’s the fundraiser Romney plans to attend, which sources say is set to be held at the Little Nell resort, described on its website [ http://www.thelittlenell.com/ ] as Aspen’s only five-star, five-diamond hotel. Romney’s campaign declined to comment on the Aspen visit.
The Executive Roundtable event, set for Aspen’s St. Regis Hotel, features a roster of attendees [ http://images.politico.com/global/2012/07/120731_aspen_attendee_list_2012.html ], obtained by POLITICO, that reads like a who’s who of the most influential players in GOP politics.
Expected guests include Ed Gillespie, listed on the roster as a senior adviser to Romney’s campaign, as well Rove, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Steven Law – all of whom help run the Crossroads groups that aim to spend as much as $300 million boosting Romney and other Republican candidates.
Also attending is Kevin Gentry, a top aide to the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77453.html ], who are angling to direct nearly $400 million to a range of outside groups [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76849.html ] ahead of the 2012 election.
The roundtable typically convenes four times a year for retreats that feature a few panels [ http://www.politico.com/politicoinfluence/0711/politicoinfluence55.html ] on policy areas bracketed by a pair of dinners at which donors can get up-close-and-personal with the governors.
This year’s confab, which begins Wednesday, will be interrupted that night by a little-publicized, but technically public, “Conversation with Republican Governors” hosted the Aspen Institute [ http://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/2012/08/01/mccloskey-speaker-series-conversation-republican-governors-moderated-walter-isaacs ] featuring Christie and Govs. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Bob McDonnell of Virginia, Matt Mead of Wyoming and Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Those governors will be joined in the closed-door RGA meetings by Govs. Jan Brewer of Arizona, Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Gary Herbert of Utah, Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Rick Perry of Texas.
In addition to access to the panels, sources tell POLITICO that donors will be able to partake in special perks such as a hike with McDonnell and trap shooting with Mead.
McDonnell, who is planning to leave Richmond midday Wednesday and return to Virginia on Friday, is scheduled to speak on a panel about the American economy and the job-creation successes of Republican-led states, according to a spokesman.
RGA spokesman Mike Schrimpf said the meeting is “focused on the economy and the future of Obamacare,” among other subjects.
While the general purpose of the roundtable meetings is to discuss policy, sideline conversations at such gatherings tend to be heavy on politics. And that’s particularly likely with a presidential election looming and a guest list featuring top operatives including Rove, Gillespie, Law and Phil Musser, a former RGA director [ http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/musser_phil.html ] who helped run the presidential campaign of former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who – along with Jindal – is commonly mentioned as a leading candidate to be Romney’s vice presidential running mate [ http://www.politico.com/2012-election/vp-watch/ ].
And one source with knowledge of the event conceded politics won’t be far from the fore. “With the presidential election and other elections coming up in November, and having Rove and Gillespie on the program, it will give attendees the added benefit of having that political dimension,” said the source.
But some political conversations could be forbidden by campaign laws prohibiting folks advising independent political groups – like Rove and Law – from discussing spending strategy with representatives of the campaigns they are seeking to help, like Gillespie.
Many of the more than 200 donors scheduled to attend are major contributors to the Romney campaign, as well as the Crossroads groups and the pro-Romney Restore Our Future Super PAC.
Take retired mutual fund guru Foster Friess, who co-hosted a Romney fundraiser, last month donated $100,000 to Restore Our Future [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78785.html ] and has suggested he would give to Crossroads [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75000.html ].
Other attendees include Oklahoma energy investor Joe Craft – who has donated $1.25 million to Crossroads, $500,000 to Restore Our Future and $10,000 to Romney’s campaign – and California investor B. Wayne Hughes, whose family has donated $4.8 million to Crossroads and $60,000 to the RGA.
Then there’s GOP rainmaker Fred Malek, who is on Romney’s national finance committee and also helps run a pair of outside groups aiming to spend more than $30 million [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65858.html ] boosting GOP House candidates, the American Action Network and the Congressional Leadership Fund.
Malek also happens to be the chair of the RGA roundtable, which is part of an RGA effort to cultivate major individual donors, rather than the corporate donors upon whom the group traditionally relied. It requires members to contribute a minimum of $25,000 a year to the group and has grown from about 20 members three years ago to at least 600 members.
© 2012 POLITICO LLC
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/79228.html [with comments]
===
Barack Obama App Innovates While Mitt Romney App Collects Data
07/31/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/barack-obama-app-mitt-romney-app_n_1723365.html [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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