Wednesday, August 15, 2012 7:29:26 AM
A Tax Plan That Defies the Rules of Math
Hieronymus
By DAVID FIRESTONE
Published: August 11, 2012
IN May of 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president on a platform of extravagant tax cuts for all, his campaign did something that would be considered remarkable today: it submitted his tax plan to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, to see how much all those tax cuts would cost the Treasury.
The bipartisan committee ran through the details provided by the campaign and predicted that the tax plan would cost about $1.3 trillion [ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/03/us/2000-campaign-money-issues-spate-numerical-sparring-highlights-fiscal-focus.html?pagewanted=all ] over nine years, an underestimate but a clear sign of its high price tag. With the budget in surplus at the time, Mr. Bush didn’t dispute that cost, and never tried to pretend that the cuts would be free. Within a decade, in fact, they would turn out to be the biggest factor in the huge deficit he created.
Twelve years later, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, claims his far deeper tax cuts would have a price tag of exactly zero dollars. He has no intention of submitting his tax plan to the committee or anywhere else that might conduct a serious analysis, since he seems intent on running a campaign far more opaque than any candidate has in years.
He has made his economic plan the fundamental basis of his candidacy, and yet with the Republican convention just two weeks away, we know next to nothing of the plan’s details. The extreme cuts proposed by his new running mate, Paul Ryan, are far more hard-edged, making Mr. Romney’s mathematically impossible promises look vague and shopworn by comparison.
For example, Mr. Romney wants to keep all the Bush tax cuts, then cut taxes much further, particularly for the rich, but he says the plan won’t grow the deficit by a dime. He won’t say how he will accomplish this — there are no real numbers in his plan beyond a vague pledge to eliminate some loopholes. The Joint Committee would take one look at his substance-free plan and say, we can’t work with this.
Mr. Romney’s tax proposal is no different from any other aspect of his economic plan [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2011/09/believe-america-mitt-romneys-plan-jobs-and-economic-growth ]. He promises to cut nondefense spending by 5 percent, but won’t tell voters what programs that will affect. He wants to repeal all of President Obama’s regulations that burden the economy, but won’t say which ones. And he pledges to eliminate health care reform, but won’t discuss how or even whether he would replace it.
Earlier this month, a nonpartisan group of tax experts took matters into their own hands and tried to analyze the tax plan. What would happen, they asked, if you actually made all the cuts he has proposed [ http://www.mittromney.com/issues/tax ]? That would mean extending the Bush cuts, reducing income-tax rates by an additional 20 percent, and ending capital gains taxes for the middle class, the estate tax, the alternative minimum tax and the various taxes in health care reform, including the Medicare tax increase on high incomes. The experts at the Tax Policy Center estimated [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/1001628-Base-Broadening-Tax-Reform.pdf ] that this would cost $456 billion a year, starting in 2015.
But Mr. Romney said the cuts would be “revenue neutral” and cost nothing because they would be paid for by ending tax breaks and loopholes. He never identified those tax breaks, and now we know why — the experts concluded that there aren’t enough loopholes in the tax code to balance out the cuts. Following Mr. Romney’s plan would mean ending popular deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions, which would wind up raising taxes on the middle class, while the rich would still enjoy the benefits of an income-tax cut larger than the deductions they would lose.
Had Mr. Romney been the least bit serious about assembling a real tax plan, he would have known this. Instead, he hurriedly threw together his 20 percent tax-cut plan [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/romney-details-tax-overhaul-urging-lower-rates-and-fewer-deductions/ ] a week before the Arizona and Michigan primaries in February, at a time when Rick Santorum was proposing a similar idea. He said he wouldn’t touch middle-class tax breaks, and would “work with Congress [ http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/18/11757714-romneys-day-one-what-do-we-know-about-his-plan?lite ]“ to find offsets to the cuts.
“Work with Congress.” Would that be the same body that almost caused a government default last year? Given how dysfunctional Congress has become, the real question is what policies a president will demand of Congress, and how forcefully he will fight for them. Telling voters that Congress will decide which tax breaks to eliminate is saying that you don’t have the courage to make a choice.
On issue after issue, the dominant theme of Mr. Romney’s plan is a refusal to make real choices. He talks endlessly about his 59-point plan “to get America back to work,” but you can scrutinize all 160 pages of his economic booklet without finding any evidence of decision-making. A few examples:
He says he wants to cut nondefense spending by 5 percent, and cap federal spending at 20 percent of the economy, down from about 24 percent. But what would that actually mean in terms of programs cut and services reduced? The plan is silent. The programs he mentions cutting [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2011/11/romney-presents-plan-turn-around-federal-government ] are the comically minuscule national endowments for the arts and the humanities, foreign aid, family planning, Amtrak and a few others — all tattered Republican punching bags.
The plans Mr. Ryan submitted as House budget chairman — which are now Mr. Romney’s too — were never models of clarity, but they at least made his priorities quite stark: more than three-fifths of his cuts [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3723 ] would come from low-income programs like job training, Pell grants and food stamps. That’s not something Mr. Romney ever talked about on the stump, raising the question of whether the vice-presidential choice will end up defining the man at the top of the ticket better than Mr. Romney has himself.
Mr. Romney wants to offload federal responsibility for Medicaid and move it entirely to the states by turning it into a much cheaper block-grant program. He claims this approach would save $200 billion a year, but never mentions that this would force states to drop coverage for at least 14 million people when states are unable to keep up with rising medical costs, which would raise emergency costs at local hospitals. He says he supports Mr. Ryan’s plan to provide the elderly with a fixed amount to buy either traditional Medicare or private plans, but has also said he would issue his own Medicare plan [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/romney-talks-to-abc-news-about-health-care-jobs-ties-and-red-sox/ ] this fall, far too late.
Beyond his standard line about undoing financial reform and Mr. Obama’s “anti-carbon” agenda, Mr. Romney has also vowed to repeal any Obama regulation that might burden the economy, without telling us which ones. Could he mean the power-plant rule that keeps mercury out of children’s lungs [ http://epa.gov/mats/actions.html ], perhaps? Or the one requiring better brakes [ http://www.nhtsa.gov/Laws+&+Regulations/Brakes ] on big trucks? Or the one expanding disability protections [ http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/3-24-11.cfm ] to people with AIDS or autism? Don’t expect an answer.
The Romney campaign decided long ago that it didn’t need a real economic plan of its own when it could just bash the president’s. “As long as I continue to speak about the economy, I’m going to win [ ],” he said last month. Voters, he is saying, need not inquire further.
By David Firestone, a member of the New York Times editorial board.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/romneys-tax-plan-defies-the-rules-of-math.html [with comments]
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A Risky Rationale Behind Romney’s Choice of Ryan
August 11, 2012
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/a-risky-rationale-behind-romneys-choice-of-ryan/ [with comments]
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Romney and Ryan’s disdain for the working class
[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/toles-looks-to-election-2012/2011/04/04/AFIGBGdC_gallery.html ]
By Eugene Robinson, Published: August 13, 2012
Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate underscores the central question posed by this campaign: Should cold selfishness become the template for our society, or do we still believe in community?
Romney wanted the election to be seen as a referendum on the success or failure of President Obama’s economic policies. Instead, he has revealed that the campaign is really a choice between two starkly different philosophies. One could be summed up as: “We’re all in this together.” The other: “I’ve got mine.”
This is not about free enterprise, and it’s not about personal liberty; those fundamental principles are unquestioned. But for at least the past 100 years, we have understood capitalism and freedom to exist within a larger context — a complicated, real-world, human context. Some people begin life at a disadvantage, and it’s in the national interest to open doors of opportunity for them. Some people make mistakes, and it’s in the national interest to create second chances. Some people are too young, too old or too infirm to care for themselves, and it’s in the national interest to secure their welfare.
This sense of the balance between individualism and community fueled the American Century. Romney and Ryan apparently don’t believe in it.
It is well known that Ryan, at least for most of his career, has been enamored of the ideas of Ayn Rand, the novelist (“Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead”) whose interminable books tout self-interest as the highest, noblest human calling and equate capitalist success with moral virtue. Ryan now disavows Rand’s worldview, primarily because she was an atheist, but he lavishly praised her ideas as recently as 2009.
What about Romney? While he has never pledged allegiance to the Cult of Rand, his view of society seems basically the same.
At least three times in recent days, as part of his response to President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” peroration, Romney has told campaign audiences variations of the following: “When a young person makes the honor roll, I know he took a school bus to get to the school, but I don’t give the bus driver credit for the honor roll.”
When he delivered that line in Manassas on Saturday with Ryan in tow, Romney drew wild applause. He went on to say that a person who gets a promotion and raise at work, and who commutes to the office by car, doesn’t owe anything to the clerk at the motor vehicles department who processes driver’s licenses.
What I hear Romney saying, and I suspect many others will also hear, is that the little people don’t contribute and don’t count.
I don’t know whether Romney’s sons ever rode the bus to school. I do know that for most parents, it matters greatly who picks up their children in the morning and drops them off in the afternoon.
It may not be the driver’s job to help with algebra homework, but he or she bears enormous responsibility for safely handling the most precious cargo imaginable. A good bus driver gets to know the children, maintains order and discipline, deals with harassment and bullying. Romney may not realize it, but a good driver plays an important role in ensuring a child’s physical and emotional well-being — and may, in fact, be the first adult to whom the child proudly displays a report card with all A’s.
School bus drivers don’t make a lot of money. Nor, for that matter, do the clerks who help keep unqualified drivers and unsafe vehicles off the streets. But these workers are not mere cogs in a machine designed to service those who make more money. They are part of a community.
The same is true of teachers, police officers, firefighters and others whom Romney and Ryan dismiss as minions of “big government” rather than public servants.
And what do the Republicans offer their supposed heroes, the entrepreneurs who start small businesses? The few who succeed wildly would be rewarded with tax cuts so huge that they, like Romney, might one day have a dressage horse competing in the Olympics. Most of those who just manage to scrape by, or whose businesses fail, could look forward to only as much health care in their senior years as they are able to afford, and not one bit more.
This is a campaign Democrats should relish. The United States became the world’s dominant economic, political and military power by recognizing that we are all in this together. School bus drivers, too.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/romney-and-ryan-are-overlooking-the-underclass/2012/08/13/63e917ea-e579-11e1-8f62-58260e3940a0_story.html [with comments]
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The Poor Get Poorer: How Ryan's Budgets Would Affect Ours
Aug 13 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/the-poor-get-poorer-how-ryans-budgets-would-affect-ours/261043/ [with comments]
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Is Medicaid Doomed? How Ryan's Plan Would Affect America's Very Poorest
(Reuters)
He doesn't just want to trim America's insurance program for the poor. He wants to bulldoze the whole thing and replace it with something more modest.
By Jordan Weissmann
Aug 14 2012, 8:30 AM ET
Democrats are giddy to attack Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms, but it's his plan for Medicaid that will have the fastest and most massive impact on the U.S. health care. How massive? Think 44 million additional Americans without health insurance, in a worst case scenario.
If that number leaves you a bit dizzy, or skeptical, it's a testament to how radically Ryan would like to reshape the federal program that's responsible for insuring low-income Americans, and which also happens to be at the heart of Obamacare's attempt to expand health coverage. In the most recent budget proposal, Ryan pledged to cut Medicaid spending by $810 billion dollars over ten years. But forget the precise dollar figures for a moment. Romney's new running-mate doesn't just want to trim the program. He wants to bulldoze the whole thing, then build a more modest replacement in its place.
Think of Medicaid as the quiet giant of domestic spending -- smaller and less gabbed about than Medicare, but just as important to a big swath of the country. Under the program's complex rules, the federal government and states split the cost of insuring Americans who generally live in poverty, or close to it, with Washington paying the lion's share. Currently, it covers more than 62 million people, the majority of whom are either children or parents, although most of its funding goes to the old and disabled. In 2010 [ http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=636&cat=4 ], the price tag was roughly $263 billion for the feds and $125 billion for the states. Much of that spending pays for basic services such as drugs and doctor's visits, but a large chunk is devoted to long-term care, such as nursing homes for the elderly poor.
Before Obamacare, Washington kept its checkbook for Medicaid fairly wide open. The federal government set the minimum guidelines for who had to be covered by the program, but states could be more generous if they chose, so long as they stayed within certain guidelines. Some (think New York) tried to provide coverage to as many of their residents as possible. Others (think Florida) shot for far fewer. Health care reform opened up the checkbook even further. By expanding the program to cover childless, able-bodied adults for the first time, it lifted some of the last meaningful limits on Medicaid's largesse, other than the desire of states to shoulder their portion of the expense.
Under Ryan's proposal, Washington's open-ended commitment to helping the poor get care would be history. Instead of offering them unlimited funding, the federal government would hand each state a fixed sum of money -- or a "block grant" -- to cover the poor and uninsured as they saw fit. On its own, that change wouldn't necessarily devastate the program. But here's the key detail, the trick that yields all those budget savings conservatives are after: The grants would be indexed to grow much slower than healthcare costs.
The point is to make them stingier over time. Conservatives hope that will force states to find new efficiencies. More likely, it will just lead them to insure fewer residents, offer less generous coverage, or both. In essence, every state would have to act more like Florida, and less like New York. The graph below, from a study [ http://www.kff.org/medicaid/upload/8185.pdf ] published last year by the Urban Institute and the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows the growing gap between Ryan's spending for Medicaid, and the program's growth with or without Obamacare.
Even without conservatives looking to slash the program, Medicaid is about to begin a somewhat awkward transition phase. Credit the Supreme Court. The health reform law attempted to guarantee insurance to an additional 17 million Americans by requiring states to cover any adult living on less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $31,000 for a family of four today. But in its decision upholding most of the law, the justices ruled that states could choose to opt out of the new mandate. Governors in some of the states which would have had to add the most residents to their rolls, such as Texas and Florida, have already said they won't take part.
Still, the Urban Institute's analysis gives us a sense of how many people would stand to lose their government care under Ryan's plan. Even if you ignore the effects of repealing Obamacare, his austere budget would still knock anywhere between 14 million and 27 million people out of the program. When you consider those who would lose coverage granted under health care reform, the total rises to between 31 and 44 million. In the end, we're talking about a potential cut of up to half the program.
What happens to those who get shut out of Medicaid? It's pretty bleak. "A small sliver will be able to get onto private plans," says the Urban Institute's John Holahan. "They may have given up private plans because Medicaid was more generous and the premiums were lower. But by and large, more people will become uninsured. I'd be hard pressed to conclude anything else."
Another, perhaps starker way to envision this change is to look at the amount of our national wealth that would be dedicated to covering the poor. Under Obamacare, the government would, by 2023, spend about 3 percent of our gross domestic product on Medicaid, the related Children's Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for low-middle income Americans to buy private insurance on health exchanges, according to the Congressional Budget Office [ http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-20-Ryan_Specified_Paths_2.pdf ]. Under Ryan's plan, we'd spend a smidgen more than 1 percent.
All of this may seem perfectly reasonable if you view Medicaid as a broken program in which spending has simply grown out of control. Ryan -- and those who sympathize with him -- certainly do. In his view, Medicaid has grown through the years because states get rewarded for adding more residents to their rolls by getting back more in federal dollars than they spend.
But you can also look at it this way: Since the early 1970s, the number of Americans in poverty has been on a staggered rise. Thanks to its dramatic upward swoop over the past ten years, it's now back at highs not seen since 1993. Meanwhile, Medicaid spending per patient has slowed to a modest 3 percent a year, less than the average for healthcare costs overall.
You could say Medicaid is growing unsustainably because of a damaged incentive system. Or you could say our safety net has simply expanded because we need it now more than ever. If Ryan one day cuts it down to size, millions of Americans will certainly fall through. And nobody quite knows what will catch them if they do.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/is-medicaid-doomed-how-ryans-plan-would-affect-americas-very-poorest/261070/ [with comments]
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Billionaire ER Offers 5-Star Suite, Armored SUV
Aug. 14, 2012 (Bloomberg) -- For the billionaire who has it all, Bloomberg's Stephanie Ruhle takes us for a tour through a "ready room" hospital. This ER in waiting is a state of the art, multi-million dollar private hospital available to the mega-rich on a luxury yacht, private plane, or even in their homes. It is all a service of Guardian 24/7, founded by a group of former White House doctors, who beam the world's top specialists right into your room.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/billionaire-er-offers-5-star-suite-armored-suv-_1mlx4iyQVu1oxVHWQAePA.html
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GOP memo: ‘Don’t say entitlement reform’
8/13/12
It only took two hours after the Paul Ryan vice presidential announcement for Republican congressional candidates to get their talking points on how to spin the Ryan budget and Medicare attacks.
“Do not say: ‘entitlement reform,’ ‘privatization,’ ‘every option is on the table,’” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in an email memo. “Do say: ‘strengthen,’ ‘secure,’ ‘save,’ ‘preserve, ‘protect.’”
[...]
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79673.html [with comments]
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Mr. Ryan’s Cramped Vision
Editorial
Published: August 11, 2012
Mitt Romney’s safe and squishy campaign just took on a much harder edge. A candidate of no details — I’ll cut the budget but no need to explain just how — has named a vice-presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, whose vision is filled with endless columns of minus signs. Voters will now be able to see with painful clarity just what the Republican Party has in store for them.
As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan has drawn a blueprint of a government that will be absent when people need it the most. It will not be there when the unemployed need job training, or when a struggling student needs help to get into college. It will not be there when a miner needs more than a hardhat for protection, or when a city is unable to replace a crumbling bridge.
And it will be silent when the elderly cannot keep up with the costs of M.R.I.’s or prescription medicines, or when the poor and uninsured become increasingly sick through lack of preventive care.
More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan, and eagerly accepted by the Tea Party-driven House, come from programs for low-income Americans. That means billions of dollars lost for job training for the displaced, Pell grants for students and food stamps for the hungry. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops raised their voices in protest [ http://www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-063.cfm ] at the shredding of the nation’s moral obligations.
Mr. Ryan’s budget “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment,” the bishops wrote in an April letter to the House. “These cuts are unjustified and wrong.”
Mr. Ryan responded that he was helping the poor by eliminating their dependence on the government. And yet he has failed to explain how he would make them self-sufficient — how, in fact, a radical transformation of government would magically turn around an economy that is starving for assistance. At a time when state and local government layoffs are the principal factor in unemployment, the Ryan budget would cut aid to desperate governments by at least 20 percent [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3816 ], far below historical levels, on top of other cuts to mass transit and highway spending.
Those are the kinds of reductions voters of all income levels would actually feel. People might nod their heads at Mr. Romney’s nostrums of smaller government, but they are likely to feel quite different when they realize Mr. Ryan plans to take away their new sewage treatment plant, the asphalt for their streets, and the replacements for retiring police officers and firefighters.
All of this will be accompanied, of course, by even greater tax giveaways to the rich, and extravagant benefits to powerful military contractors. Business leaders will be granted their wish for severely diminished watchdogs over the environment, mine safety and food quality.
Mr. Romney had already praised the Ryan budget as “excellent work [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/opinion/a-cruel-republican-budget.html ],” but until Saturday the deliberate ambiguity of his own plans gave him a little room for distance, an opportunity to sketch out a more humane vision of government’s role. By putting Mr. Ryan’s callousness on his ticket, he may have lost that chance.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/paul-ryans-cramped-vision.html [with comments]
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The Romney-Ryan Plan for America
Editorial
Published: August 12, 2012
Less than 24 hours after Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, his campaign was already trying to distance itself from Mr. Ryan’s politically toxic budget plan. His budget is not ours, the campaign said [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/11/romney-camp-prepares-medicare-defense-after-ryan-pick/ ]; Mr. Romney “will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.”
It’s no wonder that Mr. Romney does not want to take full responsibility for his running mate’s ideas. Mr. Romney hasn’t issued a real budget plan and appears to have no interest in doing so before the election, perhaps for fear that voters might realize how little they would like it. Mr. Ryan, on the other hand, has assembled two spending plans, both of which were passed by the House. While the country is fortunate they were never enacted, they reveal Republican priorities in a way that Mr. Romney up to now has avoided.
Most voters know little about Mr. Ryan. Those who have heard of him are probably most familiar with his Medicare plan, which would turn the program into a voucher system that would pay beneficiaries a fixed amount for their medical care, leaving them on their own if the voucher did not cover their costs.
This notion so alarmed the public last year that Mr. Ryan was forced to backtrack and leave the existing Medicare system as an option. Even so, the plan would leave older Americans on average with $6,400 in extra costs [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/a-closer-look-at-the-ryan-budget/ ] by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Even less familiar to voters are Mr. Ryan’s plans for the rest of the federal budget, which if anything are worse than his Medicare proposal. By cutting $6 trillion from federal spending over the next 10 years, he would eliminate or slash so many programs that the federal government would be unrecognizable. That has long been a goal of the Tea Party ideologues who support Mr. Ryan fervently, but it is not one shared by anywhere near a majority of Americans.
As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan drew a blueprint for a government that would be absent when people needed it the most. Medicaid, food stamps, and other vital programs would be offloaded to the states, but the states would not be given the resources to run them. The federal government simply would not be there to help the unemployed who need job training, or struggling students who seek college educations. Washington would be unable to respond when a city cannot properly treat its sewage, or when the poor and uninsured overload emergency rooms as clinics close.
More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan come from programs for low-income Americans. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops protested the proposal as failing to meet society’s moral obligations, saying the plans “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors.”
To Mr. Ryan, the poor will benefit when they no longer rely on government handouts. But his plans contain no pathway to self-reliance for the tens of millions of people who are either poor, unemployed or uninsured. In his world, they will be entirely on their own, or will rely on charity.
He certainly can’t pretend to turn around the economy by eliminating the deficit. Mr. Ryan’s budget would not reach a surplus for 30 years, according to the C.B.O., because he would cut taxes, largely for the rich and for corporations, by $4 trillion. That’s even more than Mr. Romney’s extravagant tax giveaways, because Mr. Ryan would erase all capital gains taxes. Since investments are the principal income generators for Mr. Romney and millions of other high earners, Mr. Romney made the more prudent choice to cut capital gains taxes only for the middle class.
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There may be other differences between the two men on the Republican ticket, but Mr. Romney’s deliberate obfuscations of his plans will make them difficult to discern. Up to now, for example, their Medicare plans have been identical, but Mr. Romney has also said he would issue his own Medicare plan [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/romney-talks-to-abc-news-about-health-care-jobs-ties-and-red-sox/ ] at some point this fall, keeping voters in the dark.
Whatever his political considerations were, Mr. Romney made a clear statement in choosing the most extreme of the vice-presidential possibilities, both in Mr. Ryan’s economic views and his positions on social issues, like his opposition to contraception coverage under the health care reform law for employees of religiously affiliated institutions, repeal of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy, and sensible gun control. More than any small differences that eventually develop between the men, it is their shared and troubling goals that bind them together.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/opinion/the-romney-ryan-plan-for-america.html [with comments]
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The Ryan Pick Confirms: This Election Is More About the Past Than the Future
The Republican VP nominee is young, but the political debate between now and November is largely about how far back into history we want America to go.
Aug 13 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-ryan-pick-confirms-this-election-is-more-about-the-past-than-the-future/261032/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan? Seriously?
August 8, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169285/paul-ryan-seriously [with comments]
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Economists to Romney campaign: That’s not what our research says
Posted by Ezra Klein on August 8, 2012 at 11:58 am
On Tuesday, the Romney campaign responded to the fire it’s taking from economic analysts by unleashing some artillery of their own. They released a paper by four decorated economists associated with the campaign — Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, John Taylor, and Kevin Hassett — that tried to lend some empirical backing to “The Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth, and Jobs.”
Hubbard, Mankiw, Taylor and Hassett make three main points: The first is that this recovery has been terribly slow, even by the standards of post-financial crisis recoveries. The second is that the Obama administration made a grievous error by relying on stimulus. And the third is that Romney’s tax and economic plans would usher in an era of rapid growth that would both be good for the country and provide the boost to revenues and employment necessary to make their numbers work out.
Each of these sections include supporting documents from independent economists. And so I contacted some of the named economists to ask what they thought of the Romney campaign’s interpretation of their research. In every case, they responded with a polite version of Marshall McLuhan’s famous riposte. The Romney campaign, they said, knows little of their work. Or of their policy proposals.
“This recession is really quite different,” Bordo said. But he didn’t see government policy as the obvious cause. “We found that a lot of the difference between what would’ve been predicted by the normal behavior of recessions and what we observed now is explained by the collapse of residential investment. Put another way, if residential investment were what it was in a normal recovery, we would have recovered already.”
That is to say, what Bordo found was fairly consistent with the rest of the literature on this topic: Recessions associated with a housing bust tend to have very slow recoveries. That’s rather different than the Romney campaign’s interpretation of Bordo’s paper, which is that the features of this particular recession couldn’t explain the slow recovery, and thus you had to conclude that “America took a wrong turn in economic policy in the past three years.”
The Romney campaign then turns to the Obama administration’s response to the recession. “The negative effect of the administration’s ‘stimulus’ policies has been documented in a number of empirical studies,” they write. When Dylan Matthews surveyed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/08/the-romney-campaign-says-stimulus-doesnt-work-here-are-the-studies-they-left-out/ ] the literature, he found 15 studies, of which 13 found the stimulus had a positive effect. But the Romney campaign only names two studies. One is by John Taylor, a Stanford economist who advises Romney and is, as luck would have it, one of the economists the Romney campaign tapped to coauthor this brief. That leaves one study that is not by a Romney-affiliated economist: Amir Sufi and Atif Mian’s look [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w16351 ] at the “Cash for Clunkers” program.
Sufi, an economist at the University of Chicago, is quick to point out that his paper did not show a negative effect for “the administration’s stimulus policies.” His paper was just about Cash for Clunkers. “This was a $4 billion program. It’s nothing, basically. We weren’t saying anything specific about broader stimulus programs, we were just looking at these programs to bring forward purchases of durable goods.”
So I asked Sufi what he thought of the stimulus more broadly. “Most of the research is pretty positive on stimulus,” he said. In particular, he pointed to a paper [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w17391.pdf ] from Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson that used “cross-sectional data that seems to indicate the fiscal multiplier is quite large when you’re in a recession.”
I also asked him whether he thought the Romney campaign was right that this recovery was unusually slow in a way that was best explained by policy failures. “I strongly believe the evidence shows these private debt overhangs are always longer, the recoveries always slower,” he said. So that’s two strikes for the Romney campaign.
The key argument the Romney campaign makes for their candidate’s plan comes toward the end, when they try and answer the criticism of the vague tax-reform proposal. ”The Romney tax reform plan will increase GDP growth by between 0.5 percent and 1 percent per year over the next decade,” Romney’s economists write. “These long-run gains from tax and budget reform have been the subject of significant study by economists, as documented in the Appendix.”
So I turned to the appendix. Of the four studies mentioned, two of them are co-authored by Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach. When I looked deeper into the studies, however, they didn’t seem all that applicable to Romney’s tax plan. The Romney campaign, for instance, was using an estimate from a simulation [ http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~auerbach/ftp/taxreform/flatfinal.pdf ] Auerbach ran in which he replaced the income tax with a consumption tax. If the Romney campaign proposed such a policy, that would be very big news. But they have not proposed such a policy.
So I e-mailed Auerbach the relevant quote from the Romney campaign’s paper, and added two questions: “Given what we know and don’t know of the Romney plan, is it reasonable to attach these kinds of dynamic estimates to it? Do you think that reporters like me should assume that the 0.5-1% gdp boost is a reliable base case?”
His response came quickly. “I did not see the [Romney campaign's] paper, but from your description the basic answer to both of your questions is ‘no’,” he replied. His paper looked at “a much bigger tax change than Romney is proposing.” It also “assumed that all tax changes were revenue-neutral on an annual basis; the size of the Romney tax cuts makes this a questionable assumption.”
So, that’s three economists named in the Romney paper, not one of whom would sign on to the interpretation the Romney paper gave to their work.
There are interesting criticisms of the Obama campaign buried in the work of the economists the Romney campaign cited — the problem is that the Romney campaign doesn’t have the standing to make them.
Both Sufi and Bordo agree that the housing market was at the core of this recession, and of the sluggish recovery that has succeeded it. So one possible criticisms — which I’m sympathetic to — is that the Obama administration bobbled the single most significant policy question related to the recovery: What to do about housing.
But Sufi and Bordo disagree on what should have been done. “If the problem is housing, then the market needs to clear, and when the market needs to clear, it needs minimal amount of government intervention,” says Bordo. But when I probed whether Bordo was implicitly criticizing the Obama administration’s housing policies, he essentially shrugged. “We didn’t have massive government intervention in it anyway,” he says.
Sufi’s argument leads to a clearer critique of the Obama administration. He points to a Bloomberg column [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-08/household-debt-is-at-heart-of-weak-u-s-economy-business-class.html ] where he argued that “in both the data and the theory, the critical problem is the high level of debt in the household sector. So why doesn’t macroeconomic policy directly combat this problem?” Sufi goes on to advocate a program of debt forgiveness, though he admits that designing such a program effectively is very difficult. But while the Obama administration has been tepidly supportive of plans to reduce principal for underwater borrowers, the Romney campaign opposes it.
Indeed, the Romney campaign doesn’t have a housing policy at all. “Housing” isn’t one of the issues on their Web site. The word is only mentioned twice in their 160-page economic plan [ http://www.mittromney.com/jobs ]. There are no recommendations in this paper. Indeed, Hubbard, one of the authors of this paper and a key adviser to Romney, has advocated a large program to encourage mortgage refinancing in the past, but Romney hasn’t embraced it [ http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2012/08/06/will-romney-back-refinancing-proposals-supported-by-adviser/ ].
Indeed, as Nick Timiraos notes [ http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2012/08/06/will-romney-back-refinancing-proposals-supported-by-adviser/ ], Romney’s comments on housing have been self-contradictory. At one point, his position was, “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” Later, he said, “The idea that somehow this is going to cure itself by itself is probably not real. There’s going to have to be a much more concerted effort to work with the lending institutions and help them take action, which is in their best interest and the best interest of the homeowners.” But the campaign never released a formal policy resolving these tensions.
Meanwhile, Auerbach added another interesting wrinkle to his analysis. “Our paper didn’t take into account business-cycle considerations,” he said. “To the extent that the Romney plan spurs a more rapid economic recovery from our current state of high unemployment, that could make a big difference in short-run growth estimates. These would basically be demand-side stimulus effects.” In other words, insofar as Romney’s tax cuts act as a Keynesian stimulus package, they could do more for the economy in the short-run than standard tax models would assume. But that requires assuming that Keynesian stimulus works, which would contradict the first section of the Romney campaign’s paper.
So even the studies that the Romney campaign’s economists handpicked to bolster their case don’t prove what the Romney campaign says they prove. And some of the key policy recommendations that flow from those studies are anathema to the Romney campaign. And in perhaps the key policy area highlighted by these studies, the Romney campaign doesn’t have a formal policy. If this is the best they can do in support of their economic plan, well, it’s not likely to quiet the critics.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/08/economists-to-romney-campaign-thats-not-what-our-research-says/ [with comments] [the Annie Hall YouTube, as embedded in the original, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpIYz8tfGjY ]
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Why America doesn't like Mitt Romney
August 14, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/14/opinion/granderson-romney-likeability/ [with comments]
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Paul Krugman: Paul Ryan Budget Proposal 'Just A Fantasy, Not A Serious Policy Proposal'
08/13/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/paul-krugman-paul-ryan_n_1772105.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan vision harks back to the days of Taft
August 14, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-days-of-taft-20120813,0,3544670.story [no comments yet]
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Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and the GOP's push for theocracy
8:00 a.m. EDT, August 14, 2012
Rep. Paul Ryan made a curious and troubling statement in his roll out as the Republican vice presidential candidate. He said "our rights come from God or nature, not from government." As a member of this government for the last dozen years, I am certain he bases this statement on something.
It is certainly not the Constitution. You know, that document that lays out how this government works. Nowhere in that document is God mentioned. It talks about the separation of church and state in the establishment of religion clause. Perhaps he would refer to the Declaration of Independence. That was a declaration of war against England, not a document of government. It said God has endowed us with certain inalienable rights. The word "certain" is important. It didn't say, endowed us with "every" right. Be that as it may, let's get back to what Mr. Ryan said.
"Our rights come from God, not from government". Really? Did the right to bear arms come from God? No, it is in that document of government called the Constitution. Did the right for African Americans and women to vote come from God? No, it is in the Constitution. If a woman is raped and gets pregnant with that rapist's baby, does the right for that woman to get an abortion come from God? No, it is legal due to a Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutional right to obtain such a procedure. On this one, Mitt Romney supports the resolution that would take away that right. And finally, does the right to avoid paying income taxes in this country by stuffing your money in a Swiss bank account come form God?
Paul Ryan in that short statement, makes it clear where Mitt Romney and the Republicans want to take this country. They want to take it toward a government of an "American Taliban" guided by some interpretation of the "inalienable rights" that "their" god has bestowed upon us. We should think long and hard of the implications of that statement.
Mel Mintz, Pikesville
Copyright © 2012, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/readersrespond/bs-ed-paul-ryan-constitution-letter-20120814,0,7601915.story [with comments]
*
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=54833454 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77589007 and preceding (and any future following),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78437534 and preceding and following
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The Real Ryan Record: 2 Minor Bills, Lots of High-Profile Talk, Gridlock
Ryan's legislative record shows him renaming post offices, honoring Ronald Reagan and Wisconsin, approving commemorative coins, and increasing the deficit.
Aug 13 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-real-ryan-record-2-minor-bills-lots-of-high-profile-talk-gridlock/261069/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan’s voting record: Big-spending conservatism
Ryan's voting record shows him to be far from a pure fiscal conservative
8/14/12
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79688.html [with comments]
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Paul Ryan Debt Ceiling Bill: Why Did He Advocate Killing The Grand Bargain?
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/paul-ryan-debt-ceiling-bill-grand-bargain_n_1773971.html [with comments]
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Paul Ryan’s Liberal Fan Club
August 12, 2012
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/paul-ryans-liberal-fan-club/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan, Black Panther?
Eldridge Cleaver, 1968.
Library of Congress
A catchphrase was born in this 1967 poster.
Courtesy of Charles Rosner
By ADAM GOODHEART, PETER MANSEAU and TED WIDMER
August 12, 2012, 6:42 pm
Did Paul Ryan quote a famous 1960s Black Panther Party slogan in his speech [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/08/excerpts-from-rep-paul-ryans-speech-joining-romney-ticket.html ] on Saturday announcing his candidacy for vice president on the Republican ticket?
For a moment, it sounded that way. Recalling words of advice offered by his late father, Mr. Ryan said, “I still remember a couple of things he would say that have really stuck with me. ‘Son, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.’ Regrettably, President Obama has become part of the problem, and Mitt Romney is the solution.”
Give Mr. Ryan credit for making the Republicans’ big tent a little bigger. The slogan “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” served as a mantra of sorts for Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information for the Black Panthers, the extreme black nationalist group. Cleaver was an unlikely public figure who had emerged from the Los Angeles ghetto with a long criminal record and a penchant for provocative statements. An ex-con who had done time for a series of rapes, he called for armed resistance to government authorities and urged black G.I.s in Vietnam [ http://www.hippy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=74 ] to kill their white officers. With Cleaver’s name attached, the phrase appeared on banners, buttons [ http://ronwade.freeservers.com/garyhartline2009-1x8.jpg ]
and picket signs at demonstrations well into the 1970s, and was picked up by other radical leftist leaders.
It’s perhaps unlikely that Mr. Ryan’s father, a lawyer in Janesville, Wisc., was present at a political gathering in 1968 when the Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, urging his followers to smash “the American Empire,” proclaimed:
Everyone falls into two categories. You are either part of the problem – or part of the solution. Being part of the solution means you’re willing to grab a shotgun and take to the barricades, killing if necessary. Being part of the problem means you’re on the other side of the shotgun. There is no in-between.
The Panthers, it turns out, may themselves have been borrowing from an earlier, more mainstream usage of the phrase, in a 1967 poster campaign created by an advertising firm in Washington. The ads promoted Volunteers in Service to America, commonly known as VISTA, the anti-poverty service program begun as one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Mr. Ryan, who has built his career [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/paul-ryans-cramped-vision.html ] on opposing federal aid to low-income Americans, would hardly find this much more palatable.
Charlie Rosner, the graphic designer and copywriter who wrote the text for the VISTA posters and claims credit for coining the famous slogan, recalled yesterday in a phone interview that the campaign was a rush job in response to an offer of free ad space on the sides of Washington’s mail trucks. The promotion included several different catchphrases; Mr. Rosner’s own favorite was “Not exactly the sort of work your mother had in mind for you.”
But Mr. Rosner, a registered Democrat who describes himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative,” has no plans to try to collect usage fees from Mr. Ryan, or from anyone else. “Certain pieces of the lingo sort of become the property of nobody,” he said. “This one seems to have the half life of Strontium-90 [ http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/radionuclides/strontium.html ]. It’s terrific that he’s using it; it’s a pretty decent set of words to live by.”
Some might also see Mr. Ryan’s usage of the phrase as an example of how today’s conservative leaders have adopted many of the attitudes and tactics of what was once the new left. Just as the gentler liberalism of the early 1960s hardened into the militancy of the Black Panthers, so, too, Republicans like Mr. Ryan have increasingly adopted a “you’re either with us or against us” stance.
Mitt Romney and his new running mate might find comfort in another odd twist of history. Eldridge Cleaver eventually fled the United States after a shootout in which two policemen were wounded. But he later returned, having pleaded guilty to lesser charges – and, before his death [ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/us/eldridge-cleaver-black-panther-who-became-gop-conservative-is-dead-at-62.html%20?pagewanted=all ] in 1998, became a Republican and a Mormon.
Adam Goodheart is the director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, where Peter Manseau is a scholar in residence and Ted Widmer, a former presidential speechwriter, was the founding director. Kathy Thornton and Katie Tabeling, student associates at the center, contributed research.
Historically Corrected is a project of students and faculty at Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience [ http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu/ ]. To learn more, click here [ http://www.washcoll.edu/historically-corrected/ ].
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/paul-ryan-black-panther/ [with comments]
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Ryan Ranks as Top House Fundraiser With Backing by Banks
August 11, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-11/ryan-ranks-as-top-house-fundraiser-with-backing-by-banks.html [with comments]
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Ryan to meet with Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas
August 14, 2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57493156-503544/ryan-to-meet-with-sheldon-adelson-in-las-vegas/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan Las Vegas Fundraiser: Press Banned From Covering Event
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/paul-ryan-las-vegas-fundraiser-press-banned_n_1776479.html [with comments]
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Ryan raises money, talks foreclosures in Las Vegas
Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan R-Wis., center, greets members of the Palo Verde High School band during a campaign event at Palo Verde High School on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012, in Las Vegas.
(Credit: AP Photo/David Becker)
By Rebecca Kaplan
August 14, 2012 9:45 PM
(CBS News) LAS VEGAS - Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan turned his attention to the fundraising portion of his new job Tuesday evening as he met with the Romney campaign's Nevada Finance Leadership at the Venetian Hotel. The hotel and casino is owned by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, who was reported to be meeting with Ryan.
Earlier in the day, Ryan spoke to more than 2,000 people at a high school gym here in a speech that the Romney campaign had said would focus on foreclosures. The Wisconsin congressman offered no policy prescriptions, telling attendees that they deserved better.
"Since the president took office, 8.5 million foreclosure filings. Home values down an average of 20,000 dollars. 11 million homes underwater. Nevada ranks 5th in foreclosures. The unemployment rate? I had to read this number three times. 11.6 percent in Nevada," Ryan said. "You deserve better than that. You deserve jobs in your economy, you deserve an america that's heading in the right direction."
Ryan's appearance bore similarities to an event earlier Tuesday in the Denver area in which he attacked the administration on energy without offering specific policy proposals apart from a promise to approve creation of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline
Ryan's event at the Venetian was closed to the news media. Romney generally has permitted coverage of fundraising events held in public venues, but an aide said the rule didn't apply in this case with Ryan because the event isn't a fundraiser.
Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57493356-503544/ryan-raises-money-talks-foreclosures-in-las-vegas/ [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Miami Campaign Event Held At Juice Shop Owned By Convicted Cocaine Trafficker (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/romney-event-host-drug-dealer-miami_n_1774246.html [with comments]
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Katey Sagal, The Former Peggy Bundy, Roasts Ann Romney As A Do-Nothing Mom (VIDEO)
08/13/2012
[...]
Sagal famously played Peggy Bundy on "Married... with Children." She spent her time snacking on bon-bons and buying new clothes instead of cleaning the house, caring for her kids or even remotely attempting to get a job.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/katey-sagal-ann-romney-do-nothing-mom_n_1773099.html [with comments]
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Paul Ryan's 'Path To Prosperity' Hurts Americans In These 10 Ways
#9: Poor Weather Forecasts
Ryan's proposed cuts to environment and natural resource programs could result in weather forecasts being only half as accurate, according to Third Way's budget expert, David Kendall. "For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday," he's quoted as saying in the Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/12/what-paul-ryans-budget-actually-cuts-and-by-how-much/ ].
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/paul-ryan-path-to-prosperity_n_1773623.html [with comments]
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Joe The Plumber: 'Put A Damn Fence On The Border Going To Mexico And Start Shooting'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/joe-the-plumber_n_1773590.html [with comments]
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GOP Voter ID Campaign Based On Bunk, Data Shows
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/gop-voter-id-data-voter_n_1773142.html [with comments]
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George R.R. Martin, 'Game Of Thrones' Author, Slams Republicans For 'Voter Suppression'
08/13/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/game-of-thrones-author-republicans_n_1773283.html [with comments]
Hieronymus
By DAVID FIRESTONE
Published: August 11, 2012
IN May of 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president on a platform of extravagant tax cuts for all, his campaign did something that would be considered remarkable today: it submitted his tax plan to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, to see how much all those tax cuts would cost the Treasury.
The bipartisan committee ran through the details provided by the campaign and predicted that the tax plan would cost about $1.3 trillion [ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/03/us/2000-campaign-money-issues-spate-numerical-sparring-highlights-fiscal-focus.html?pagewanted=all ] over nine years, an underestimate but a clear sign of its high price tag. With the budget in surplus at the time, Mr. Bush didn’t dispute that cost, and never tried to pretend that the cuts would be free. Within a decade, in fact, they would turn out to be the biggest factor in the huge deficit he created.
Twelve years later, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, claims his far deeper tax cuts would have a price tag of exactly zero dollars. He has no intention of submitting his tax plan to the committee or anywhere else that might conduct a serious analysis, since he seems intent on running a campaign far more opaque than any candidate has in years.
He has made his economic plan the fundamental basis of his candidacy, and yet with the Republican convention just two weeks away, we know next to nothing of the plan’s details. The extreme cuts proposed by his new running mate, Paul Ryan, are far more hard-edged, making Mr. Romney’s mathematically impossible promises look vague and shopworn by comparison.
For example, Mr. Romney wants to keep all the Bush tax cuts, then cut taxes much further, particularly for the rich, but he says the plan won’t grow the deficit by a dime. He won’t say how he will accomplish this — there are no real numbers in his plan beyond a vague pledge to eliminate some loopholes. The Joint Committee would take one look at his substance-free plan and say, we can’t work with this.
Mr. Romney’s tax proposal is no different from any other aspect of his economic plan [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2011/09/believe-america-mitt-romneys-plan-jobs-and-economic-growth ]. He promises to cut nondefense spending by 5 percent, but won’t tell voters what programs that will affect. He wants to repeal all of President Obama’s regulations that burden the economy, but won’t say which ones. And he pledges to eliminate health care reform, but won’t discuss how or even whether he would replace it.
Earlier this month, a nonpartisan group of tax experts took matters into their own hands and tried to analyze the tax plan. What would happen, they asked, if you actually made all the cuts he has proposed [ http://www.mittromney.com/issues/tax ]? That would mean extending the Bush cuts, reducing income-tax rates by an additional 20 percent, and ending capital gains taxes for the middle class, the estate tax, the alternative minimum tax and the various taxes in health care reform, including the Medicare tax increase on high incomes. The experts at the Tax Policy Center estimated [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/1001628-Base-Broadening-Tax-Reform.pdf ] that this would cost $456 billion a year, starting in 2015.
But Mr. Romney said the cuts would be “revenue neutral” and cost nothing because they would be paid for by ending tax breaks and loopholes. He never identified those tax breaks, and now we know why — the experts concluded that there aren’t enough loopholes in the tax code to balance out the cuts. Following Mr. Romney’s plan would mean ending popular deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions, which would wind up raising taxes on the middle class, while the rich would still enjoy the benefits of an income-tax cut larger than the deductions they would lose.
Had Mr. Romney been the least bit serious about assembling a real tax plan, he would have known this. Instead, he hurriedly threw together his 20 percent tax-cut plan [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/romney-details-tax-overhaul-urging-lower-rates-and-fewer-deductions/ ] a week before the Arizona and Michigan primaries in February, at a time when Rick Santorum was proposing a similar idea. He said he wouldn’t touch middle-class tax breaks, and would “work with Congress [ http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/18/11757714-romneys-day-one-what-do-we-know-about-his-plan?lite ]“ to find offsets to the cuts.
“Work with Congress.” Would that be the same body that almost caused a government default last year? Given how dysfunctional Congress has become, the real question is what policies a president will demand of Congress, and how forcefully he will fight for them. Telling voters that Congress will decide which tax breaks to eliminate is saying that you don’t have the courage to make a choice.
On issue after issue, the dominant theme of Mr. Romney’s plan is a refusal to make real choices. He talks endlessly about his 59-point plan “to get America back to work,” but you can scrutinize all 160 pages of his economic booklet without finding any evidence of decision-making. A few examples:
He says he wants to cut nondefense spending by 5 percent, and cap federal spending at 20 percent of the economy, down from about 24 percent. But what would that actually mean in terms of programs cut and services reduced? The plan is silent. The programs he mentions cutting [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2011/11/romney-presents-plan-turn-around-federal-government ] are the comically minuscule national endowments for the arts and the humanities, foreign aid, family planning, Amtrak and a few others — all tattered Republican punching bags.
The plans Mr. Ryan submitted as House budget chairman — which are now Mr. Romney’s too — were never models of clarity, but they at least made his priorities quite stark: more than three-fifths of his cuts [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3723 ] would come from low-income programs like job training, Pell grants and food stamps. That’s not something Mr. Romney ever talked about on the stump, raising the question of whether the vice-presidential choice will end up defining the man at the top of the ticket better than Mr. Romney has himself.
Mr. Romney wants to offload federal responsibility for Medicaid and move it entirely to the states by turning it into a much cheaper block-grant program. He claims this approach would save $200 billion a year, but never mentions that this would force states to drop coverage for at least 14 million people when states are unable to keep up with rising medical costs, which would raise emergency costs at local hospitals. He says he supports Mr. Ryan’s plan to provide the elderly with a fixed amount to buy either traditional Medicare or private plans, but has also said he would issue his own Medicare plan [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/romney-talks-to-abc-news-about-health-care-jobs-ties-and-red-sox/ ] this fall, far too late.
Beyond his standard line about undoing financial reform and Mr. Obama’s “anti-carbon” agenda, Mr. Romney has also vowed to repeal any Obama regulation that might burden the economy, without telling us which ones. Could he mean the power-plant rule that keeps mercury out of children’s lungs [ http://epa.gov/mats/actions.html ], perhaps? Or the one requiring better brakes [ http://www.nhtsa.gov/Laws+&+Regulations/Brakes ] on big trucks? Or the one expanding disability protections [ http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/3-24-11.cfm ] to people with AIDS or autism? Don’t expect an answer.
The Romney campaign decided long ago that it didn’t need a real economic plan of its own when it could just bash the president’s. “As long as I continue to speak about the economy, I’m going to win [ ],” he said last month. Voters, he is saying, need not inquire further.
By David Firestone, a member of the New York Times editorial board.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/opinion/sunday/romneys-tax-plan-defies-the-rules-of-math.html [with comments]
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A Risky Rationale Behind Romney’s Choice of Ryan
August 11, 2012
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/a-risky-rationale-behind-romneys-choice-of-ryan/ [with comments]
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Romney and Ryan’s disdain for the working class
[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/toles-looks-to-election-2012/2011/04/04/AFIGBGdC_gallery.html ]
By Eugene Robinson, Published: August 13, 2012
Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate underscores the central question posed by this campaign: Should cold selfishness become the template for our society, or do we still believe in community?
Romney wanted the election to be seen as a referendum on the success or failure of President Obama’s economic policies. Instead, he has revealed that the campaign is really a choice between two starkly different philosophies. One could be summed up as: “We’re all in this together.” The other: “I’ve got mine.”
This is not about free enterprise, and it’s not about personal liberty; those fundamental principles are unquestioned. But for at least the past 100 years, we have understood capitalism and freedom to exist within a larger context — a complicated, real-world, human context. Some people begin life at a disadvantage, and it’s in the national interest to open doors of opportunity for them. Some people make mistakes, and it’s in the national interest to create second chances. Some people are too young, too old or too infirm to care for themselves, and it’s in the national interest to secure their welfare.
This sense of the balance between individualism and community fueled the American Century. Romney and Ryan apparently don’t believe in it.
It is well known that Ryan, at least for most of his career, has been enamored of the ideas of Ayn Rand, the novelist (“Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead”) whose interminable books tout self-interest as the highest, noblest human calling and equate capitalist success with moral virtue. Ryan now disavows Rand’s worldview, primarily because she was an atheist, but he lavishly praised her ideas as recently as 2009.
What about Romney? While he has never pledged allegiance to the Cult of Rand, his view of society seems basically the same.
At least three times in recent days, as part of his response to President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” peroration, Romney has told campaign audiences variations of the following: “When a young person makes the honor roll, I know he took a school bus to get to the school, but I don’t give the bus driver credit for the honor roll.”
When he delivered that line in Manassas on Saturday with Ryan in tow, Romney drew wild applause. He went on to say that a person who gets a promotion and raise at work, and who commutes to the office by car, doesn’t owe anything to the clerk at the motor vehicles department who processes driver’s licenses.
What I hear Romney saying, and I suspect many others will also hear, is that the little people don’t contribute and don’t count.
I don’t know whether Romney’s sons ever rode the bus to school. I do know that for most parents, it matters greatly who picks up their children in the morning and drops them off in the afternoon.
It may not be the driver’s job to help with algebra homework, but he or she bears enormous responsibility for safely handling the most precious cargo imaginable. A good bus driver gets to know the children, maintains order and discipline, deals with harassment and bullying. Romney may not realize it, but a good driver plays an important role in ensuring a child’s physical and emotional well-being — and may, in fact, be the first adult to whom the child proudly displays a report card with all A’s.
School bus drivers don’t make a lot of money. Nor, for that matter, do the clerks who help keep unqualified drivers and unsafe vehicles off the streets. But these workers are not mere cogs in a machine designed to service those who make more money. They are part of a community.
The same is true of teachers, police officers, firefighters and others whom Romney and Ryan dismiss as minions of “big government” rather than public servants.
And what do the Republicans offer their supposed heroes, the entrepreneurs who start small businesses? The few who succeed wildly would be rewarded with tax cuts so huge that they, like Romney, might one day have a dressage horse competing in the Olympics. Most of those who just manage to scrape by, or whose businesses fail, could look forward to only as much health care in their senior years as they are able to afford, and not one bit more.
This is a campaign Democrats should relish. The United States became the world’s dominant economic, political and military power by recognizing that we are all in this together. School bus drivers, too.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/romney-and-ryan-are-overlooking-the-underclass/2012/08/13/63e917ea-e579-11e1-8f62-58260e3940a0_story.html [with comments]
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The Poor Get Poorer: How Ryan's Budgets Would Affect Ours
Aug 13 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/the-poor-get-poorer-how-ryans-budgets-would-affect-ours/261043/ [with comments]
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Is Medicaid Doomed? How Ryan's Plan Would Affect America's Very Poorest
(Reuters)
He doesn't just want to trim America's insurance program for the poor. He wants to bulldoze the whole thing and replace it with something more modest.
By Jordan Weissmann
Aug 14 2012, 8:30 AM ET
Democrats are giddy to attack Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms, but it's his plan for Medicaid that will have the fastest and most massive impact on the U.S. health care. How massive? Think 44 million additional Americans without health insurance, in a worst case scenario.
If that number leaves you a bit dizzy, or skeptical, it's a testament to how radically Ryan would like to reshape the federal program that's responsible for insuring low-income Americans, and which also happens to be at the heart of Obamacare's attempt to expand health coverage. In the most recent budget proposal, Ryan pledged to cut Medicaid spending by $810 billion dollars over ten years. But forget the precise dollar figures for a moment. Romney's new running-mate doesn't just want to trim the program. He wants to bulldoze the whole thing, then build a more modest replacement in its place.
Think of Medicaid as the quiet giant of domestic spending -- smaller and less gabbed about than Medicare, but just as important to a big swath of the country. Under the program's complex rules, the federal government and states split the cost of insuring Americans who generally live in poverty, or close to it, with Washington paying the lion's share. Currently, it covers more than 62 million people, the majority of whom are either children or parents, although most of its funding goes to the old and disabled. In 2010 [ http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=636&cat=4 ], the price tag was roughly $263 billion for the feds and $125 billion for the states. Much of that spending pays for basic services such as drugs and doctor's visits, but a large chunk is devoted to long-term care, such as nursing homes for the elderly poor.
Before Obamacare, Washington kept its checkbook for Medicaid fairly wide open. The federal government set the minimum guidelines for who had to be covered by the program, but states could be more generous if they chose, so long as they stayed within certain guidelines. Some (think New York) tried to provide coverage to as many of their residents as possible. Others (think Florida) shot for far fewer. Health care reform opened up the checkbook even further. By expanding the program to cover childless, able-bodied adults for the first time, it lifted some of the last meaningful limits on Medicaid's largesse, other than the desire of states to shoulder their portion of the expense.
Under Ryan's proposal, Washington's open-ended commitment to helping the poor get care would be history. Instead of offering them unlimited funding, the federal government would hand each state a fixed sum of money -- or a "block grant" -- to cover the poor and uninsured as they saw fit. On its own, that change wouldn't necessarily devastate the program. But here's the key detail, the trick that yields all those budget savings conservatives are after: The grants would be indexed to grow much slower than healthcare costs.
The point is to make them stingier over time. Conservatives hope that will force states to find new efficiencies. More likely, it will just lead them to insure fewer residents, offer less generous coverage, or both. In essence, every state would have to act more like Florida, and less like New York. The graph below, from a study [ http://www.kff.org/medicaid/upload/8185.pdf ] published last year by the Urban Institute and the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows the growing gap between Ryan's spending for Medicaid, and the program's growth with or without Obamacare.
Even without conservatives looking to slash the program, Medicaid is about to begin a somewhat awkward transition phase. Credit the Supreme Court. The health reform law attempted to guarantee insurance to an additional 17 million Americans by requiring states to cover any adult living on less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $31,000 for a family of four today. But in its decision upholding most of the law, the justices ruled that states could choose to opt out of the new mandate. Governors in some of the states which would have had to add the most residents to their rolls, such as Texas and Florida, have already said they won't take part.
Still, the Urban Institute's analysis gives us a sense of how many people would stand to lose their government care under Ryan's plan. Even if you ignore the effects of repealing Obamacare, his austere budget would still knock anywhere between 14 million and 27 million people out of the program. When you consider those who would lose coverage granted under health care reform, the total rises to between 31 and 44 million. In the end, we're talking about a potential cut of up to half the program.
What happens to those who get shut out of Medicaid? It's pretty bleak. "A small sliver will be able to get onto private plans," says the Urban Institute's John Holahan. "They may have given up private plans because Medicaid was more generous and the premiums were lower. But by and large, more people will become uninsured. I'd be hard pressed to conclude anything else."
Another, perhaps starker way to envision this change is to look at the amount of our national wealth that would be dedicated to covering the poor. Under Obamacare, the government would, by 2023, spend about 3 percent of our gross domestic product on Medicaid, the related Children's Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for low-middle income Americans to buy private insurance on health exchanges, according to the Congressional Budget Office [ http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-20-Ryan_Specified_Paths_2.pdf ]. Under Ryan's plan, we'd spend a smidgen more than 1 percent.
All of this may seem perfectly reasonable if you view Medicaid as a broken program in which spending has simply grown out of control. Ryan -- and those who sympathize with him -- certainly do. In his view, Medicaid has grown through the years because states get rewarded for adding more residents to their rolls by getting back more in federal dollars than they spend.
But you can also look at it this way: Since the early 1970s, the number of Americans in poverty has been on a staggered rise. Thanks to its dramatic upward swoop over the past ten years, it's now back at highs not seen since 1993. Meanwhile, Medicaid spending per patient has slowed to a modest 3 percent a year, less than the average for healthcare costs overall.
You could say Medicaid is growing unsustainably because of a damaged incentive system. Or you could say our safety net has simply expanded because we need it now more than ever. If Ryan one day cuts it down to size, millions of Americans will certainly fall through. And nobody quite knows what will catch them if they do.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/is-medicaid-doomed-how-ryans-plan-would-affect-americas-very-poorest/261070/ [with comments]
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Billionaire ER Offers 5-Star Suite, Armored SUV
Aug. 14, 2012 (Bloomberg) -- For the billionaire who has it all, Bloomberg's Stephanie Ruhle takes us for a tour through a "ready room" hospital. This ER in waiting is a state of the art, multi-million dollar private hospital available to the mega-rich on a luxury yacht, private plane, or even in their homes. It is all a service of Guardian 24/7, founded by a group of former White House doctors, who beam the world's top specialists right into your room.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/billionaire-er-offers-5-star-suite-armored-suv-_1mlx4iyQVu1oxVHWQAePA.html
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GOP memo: ‘Don’t say entitlement reform’
8/13/12
It only took two hours after the Paul Ryan vice presidential announcement for Republican congressional candidates to get their talking points on how to spin the Ryan budget and Medicare attacks.
“Do not say: ‘entitlement reform,’ ‘privatization,’ ‘every option is on the table,’” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in an email memo. “Do say: ‘strengthen,’ ‘secure,’ ‘save,’ ‘preserve, ‘protect.’”
[...]
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79673.html [with comments]
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Mr. Ryan’s Cramped Vision
Editorial
Published: August 11, 2012
Mitt Romney’s safe and squishy campaign just took on a much harder edge. A candidate of no details — I’ll cut the budget but no need to explain just how — has named a vice-presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, whose vision is filled with endless columns of minus signs. Voters will now be able to see with painful clarity just what the Republican Party has in store for them.
As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan has drawn a blueprint of a government that will be absent when people need it the most. It will not be there when the unemployed need job training, or when a struggling student needs help to get into college. It will not be there when a miner needs more than a hardhat for protection, or when a city is unable to replace a crumbling bridge.
And it will be silent when the elderly cannot keep up with the costs of M.R.I.’s or prescription medicines, or when the poor and uninsured become increasingly sick through lack of preventive care.
More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan, and eagerly accepted by the Tea Party-driven House, come from programs for low-income Americans. That means billions of dollars lost for job training for the displaced, Pell grants for students and food stamps for the hungry. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops raised their voices in protest [ http://www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-063.cfm ] at the shredding of the nation’s moral obligations.
Mr. Ryan’s budget “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment,” the bishops wrote in an April letter to the House. “These cuts are unjustified and wrong.”
Mr. Ryan responded that he was helping the poor by eliminating their dependence on the government. And yet he has failed to explain how he would make them self-sufficient — how, in fact, a radical transformation of government would magically turn around an economy that is starving for assistance. At a time when state and local government layoffs are the principal factor in unemployment, the Ryan budget would cut aid to desperate governments by at least 20 percent [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3816 ], far below historical levels, on top of other cuts to mass transit and highway spending.
Those are the kinds of reductions voters of all income levels would actually feel. People might nod their heads at Mr. Romney’s nostrums of smaller government, but they are likely to feel quite different when they realize Mr. Ryan plans to take away their new sewage treatment plant, the asphalt for their streets, and the replacements for retiring police officers and firefighters.
All of this will be accompanied, of course, by even greater tax giveaways to the rich, and extravagant benefits to powerful military contractors. Business leaders will be granted their wish for severely diminished watchdogs over the environment, mine safety and food quality.
Mr. Romney had already praised the Ryan budget as “excellent work [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/opinion/a-cruel-republican-budget.html ],” but until Saturday the deliberate ambiguity of his own plans gave him a little room for distance, an opportunity to sketch out a more humane vision of government’s role. By putting Mr. Ryan’s callousness on his ticket, he may have lost that chance.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/paul-ryans-cramped-vision.html [with comments]
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The Romney-Ryan Plan for America
Editorial
Published: August 12, 2012
Less than 24 hours after Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, his campaign was already trying to distance itself from Mr. Ryan’s politically toxic budget plan. His budget is not ours, the campaign said [ http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/11/romney-camp-prepares-medicare-defense-after-ryan-pick/ ]; Mr. Romney “will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.”
It’s no wonder that Mr. Romney does not want to take full responsibility for his running mate’s ideas. Mr. Romney hasn’t issued a real budget plan and appears to have no interest in doing so before the election, perhaps for fear that voters might realize how little they would like it. Mr. Ryan, on the other hand, has assembled two spending plans, both of which were passed by the House. While the country is fortunate they were never enacted, they reveal Republican priorities in a way that Mr. Romney up to now has avoided.
Most voters know little about Mr. Ryan. Those who have heard of him are probably most familiar with his Medicare plan, which would turn the program into a voucher system that would pay beneficiaries a fixed amount for their medical care, leaving them on their own if the voucher did not cover their costs.
This notion so alarmed the public last year that Mr. Ryan was forced to backtrack and leave the existing Medicare system as an option. Even so, the plan would leave older Americans on average with $6,400 in extra costs [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/a-closer-look-at-the-ryan-budget/ ] by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Even less familiar to voters are Mr. Ryan’s plans for the rest of the federal budget, which if anything are worse than his Medicare proposal. By cutting $6 trillion from federal spending over the next 10 years, he would eliminate or slash so many programs that the federal government would be unrecognizable. That has long been a goal of the Tea Party ideologues who support Mr. Ryan fervently, but it is not one shared by anywhere near a majority of Americans.
As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan drew a blueprint for a government that would be absent when people needed it the most. Medicaid, food stamps, and other vital programs would be offloaded to the states, but the states would not be given the resources to run them. The federal government simply would not be there to help the unemployed who need job training, or struggling students who seek college educations. Washington would be unable to respond when a city cannot properly treat its sewage, or when the poor and uninsured overload emergency rooms as clinics close.
More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan come from programs for low-income Americans. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops protested the proposal as failing to meet society’s moral obligations, saying the plans “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors.”
To Mr. Ryan, the poor will benefit when they no longer rely on government handouts. But his plans contain no pathway to self-reliance for the tens of millions of people who are either poor, unemployed or uninsured. In his world, they will be entirely on their own, or will rely on charity.
He certainly can’t pretend to turn around the economy by eliminating the deficit. Mr. Ryan’s budget would not reach a surplus for 30 years, according to the C.B.O., because he would cut taxes, largely for the rich and for corporations, by $4 trillion. That’s even more than Mr. Romney’s extravagant tax giveaways, because Mr. Ryan would erase all capital gains taxes. Since investments are the principal income generators for Mr. Romney and millions of other high earners, Mr. Romney made the more prudent choice to cut capital gains taxes only for the middle class.
•
There may be other differences between the two men on the Republican ticket, but Mr. Romney’s deliberate obfuscations of his plans will make them difficult to discern. Up to now, for example, their Medicare plans have been identical, but Mr. Romney has also said he would issue his own Medicare plan [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/romney-talks-to-abc-news-about-health-care-jobs-ties-and-red-sox/ ] at some point this fall, keeping voters in the dark.
Whatever his political considerations were, Mr. Romney made a clear statement in choosing the most extreme of the vice-presidential possibilities, both in Mr. Ryan’s economic views and his positions on social issues, like his opposition to contraception coverage under the health care reform law for employees of religiously affiliated institutions, repeal of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy, and sensible gun control. More than any small differences that eventually develop between the men, it is their shared and troubling goals that bind them together.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/opinion/the-romney-ryan-plan-for-america.html [with comments]
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The Ryan Pick Confirms: This Election Is More About the Past Than the Future
The Republican VP nominee is young, but the political debate between now and November is largely about how far back into history we want America to go.
Aug 13 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-ryan-pick-confirms-this-election-is-more-about-the-past-than-the-future/261032/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan? Seriously?
August 8, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169285/paul-ryan-seriously [with comments]
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Economists to Romney campaign: That’s not what our research says
Posted by Ezra Klein on August 8, 2012 at 11:58 am
On Tuesday, the Romney campaign responded to the fire it’s taking from economic analysts by unleashing some artillery of their own. They released a paper by four decorated economists associated with the campaign — Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, John Taylor, and Kevin Hassett — that tried to lend some empirical backing to “The Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth, and Jobs.”
Hubbard, Mankiw, Taylor and Hassett make three main points: The first is that this recovery has been terribly slow, even by the standards of post-financial crisis recoveries. The second is that the Obama administration made a grievous error by relying on stimulus. And the third is that Romney’s tax and economic plans would usher in an era of rapid growth that would both be good for the country and provide the boost to revenues and employment necessary to make their numbers work out.
Each of these sections include supporting documents from independent economists. And so I contacted some of the named economists to ask what they thought of the Romney campaign’s interpretation of their research. In every case, they responded with a polite version of Marshall McLuhan’s famous riposte. The Romney campaign, they said, knows little of their work. Or of their policy proposals.
“The historical record is clear,” write the Romney campaign’s economists. “Our economy usually recovers quickly from recessions, and the more severe the recession, the faster the subsequent catch-up growth.” The paper they’re relying on here is “Deep Recessions, Fast Recoveries, and Financial Crises: Evidence from the American Record [ http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/workpaper/2012/wp1214.pdf ],” by Michael Bordo of Rutgers University and Joseph Haubrich of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. So I asked Bordo whether he agreed that this recovery had been inexplicably sluggish, and whether a different set of policies could have dramatically shortened it.
“This recession is really quite different,” Bordo said. But he didn’t see government policy as the obvious cause. “We found that a lot of the difference between what would’ve been predicted by the normal behavior of recessions and what we observed now is explained by the collapse of residential investment. Put another way, if residential investment were what it was in a normal recovery, we would have recovered already.”
That is to say, what Bordo found was fairly consistent with the rest of the literature on this topic: Recessions associated with a housing bust tend to have very slow recoveries. That’s rather different than the Romney campaign’s interpretation of Bordo’s paper, which is that the features of this particular recession couldn’t explain the slow recovery, and thus you had to conclude that “America took a wrong turn in economic policy in the past three years.”
The Romney campaign then turns to the Obama administration’s response to the recession. “The negative effect of the administration’s ‘stimulus’ policies has been documented in a number of empirical studies,” they write. When Dylan Matthews surveyed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/08/the-romney-campaign-says-stimulus-doesnt-work-here-are-the-studies-they-left-out/ ] the literature, he found 15 studies, of which 13 found the stimulus had a positive effect. But the Romney campaign only names two studies. One is by John Taylor, a Stanford economist who advises Romney and is, as luck would have it, one of the economists the Romney campaign tapped to coauthor this brief. That leaves one study that is not by a Romney-affiliated economist: Amir Sufi and Atif Mian’s look [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w16351 ] at the “Cash for Clunkers” program.
Sufi, an economist at the University of Chicago, is quick to point out that his paper did not show a negative effect for “the administration’s stimulus policies.” His paper was just about Cash for Clunkers. “This was a $4 billion program. It’s nothing, basically. We weren’t saying anything specific about broader stimulus programs, we were just looking at these programs to bring forward purchases of durable goods.”
So I asked Sufi what he thought of the stimulus more broadly. “Most of the research is pretty positive on stimulus,” he said. In particular, he pointed to a paper [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w17391.pdf ] from Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson that used “cross-sectional data that seems to indicate the fiscal multiplier is quite large when you’re in a recession.”
I also asked him whether he thought the Romney campaign was right that this recovery was unusually slow in a way that was best explained by policy failures. “I strongly believe the evidence shows these private debt overhangs are always longer, the recoveries always slower,” he said. So that’s two strikes for the Romney campaign.
The key argument the Romney campaign makes for their candidate’s plan comes toward the end, when they try and answer the criticism of the vague tax-reform proposal. ”The Romney tax reform plan will increase GDP growth by between 0.5 percent and 1 percent per year over the next decade,” Romney’s economists write. “These long-run gains from tax and budget reform have been the subject of significant study by economists, as documented in the Appendix.”
So I turned to the appendix. Of the four studies mentioned, two of them are co-authored by Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach. When I looked deeper into the studies, however, they didn’t seem all that applicable to Romney’s tax plan. The Romney campaign, for instance, was using an estimate from a simulation [ http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~auerbach/ftp/taxreform/flatfinal.pdf ] Auerbach ran in which he replaced the income tax with a consumption tax. If the Romney campaign proposed such a policy, that would be very big news. But they have not proposed such a policy.
So I e-mailed Auerbach the relevant quote from the Romney campaign’s paper, and added two questions: “Given what we know and don’t know of the Romney plan, is it reasonable to attach these kinds of dynamic estimates to it? Do you think that reporters like me should assume that the 0.5-1% gdp boost is a reliable base case?”
His response came quickly. “I did not see the [Romney campaign's] paper, but from your description the basic answer to both of your questions is ‘no’,” he replied. His paper looked at “a much bigger tax change than Romney is proposing.” It also “assumed that all tax changes were revenue-neutral on an annual basis; the size of the Romney tax cuts makes this a questionable assumption.”
So, that’s three economists named in the Romney paper, not one of whom would sign on to the interpretation the Romney paper gave to their work.
There are interesting criticisms of the Obama campaign buried in the work of the economists the Romney campaign cited — the problem is that the Romney campaign doesn’t have the standing to make them.
Both Sufi and Bordo agree that the housing market was at the core of this recession, and of the sluggish recovery that has succeeded it. So one possible criticisms — which I’m sympathetic to — is that the Obama administration bobbled the single most significant policy question related to the recovery: What to do about housing.
But Sufi and Bordo disagree on what should have been done. “If the problem is housing, then the market needs to clear, and when the market needs to clear, it needs minimal amount of government intervention,” says Bordo. But when I probed whether Bordo was implicitly criticizing the Obama administration’s housing policies, he essentially shrugged. “We didn’t have massive government intervention in it anyway,” he says.
Sufi’s argument leads to a clearer critique of the Obama administration. He points to a Bloomberg column [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-08/household-debt-is-at-heart-of-weak-u-s-economy-business-class.html ] where he argued that “in both the data and the theory, the critical problem is the high level of debt in the household sector. So why doesn’t macroeconomic policy directly combat this problem?” Sufi goes on to advocate a program of debt forgiveness, though he admits that designing such a program effectively is very difficult. But while the Obama administration has been tepidly supportive of plans to reduce principal for underwater borrowers, the Romney campaign opposes it.
Indeed, the Romney campaign doesn’t have a housing policy at all. “Housing” isn’t one of the issues on their Web site. The word is only mentioned twice in their 160-page economic plan [ http://www.mittromney.com/jobs ]. There are no recommendations in this paper. Indeed, Hubbard, one of the authors of this paper and a key adviser to Romney, has advocated a large program to encourage mortgage refinancing in the past, but Romney hasn’t embraced it [ http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2012/08/06/will-romney-back-refinancing-proposals-supported-by-adviser/ ].
Indeed, as Nick Timiraos notes [ http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2012/08/06/will-romney-back-refinancing-proposals-supported-by-adviser/ ], Romney’s comments on housing have been self-contradictory. At one point, his position was, “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” Later, he said, “The idea that somehow this is going to cure itself by itself is probably not real. There’s going to have to be a much more concerted effort to work with the lending institutions and help them take action, which is in their best interest and the best interest of the homeowners.” But the campaign never released a formal policy resolving these tensions.
Meanwhile, Auerbach added another interesting wrinkle to his analysis. “Our paper didn’t take into account business-cycle considerations,” he said. “To the extent that the Romney plan spurs a more rapid economic recovery from our current state of high unemployment, that could make a big difference in short-run growth estimates. These would basically be demand-side stimulus effects.” In other words, insofar as Romney’s tax cuts act as a Keynesian stimulus package, they could do more for the economy in the short-run than standard tax models would assume. But that requires assuming that Keynesian stimulus works, which would contradict the first section of the Romney campaign’s paper.
So even the studies that the Romney campaign’s economists handpicked to bolster their case don’t prove what the Romney campaign says they prove. And some of the key policy recommendations that flow from those studies are anathema to the Romney campaign. And in perhaps the key policy area highlighted by these studies, the Romney campaign doesn’t have a formal policy. If this is the best they can do in support of their economic plan, well, it’s not likely to quiet the critics.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/08/economists-to-romney-campaign-thats-not-what-our-research-says/ [with comments] [the Annie Hall YouTube, as embedded in the original, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpIYz8tfGjY ]
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Why America doesn't like Mitt Romney
August 14, 2012
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/14/opinion/granderson-romney-likeability/ [with comments]
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Paul Krugman: Paul Ryan Budget Proposal 'Just A Fantasy, Not A Serious Policy Proposal'
08/13/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/paul-krugman-paul-ryan_n_1772105.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan vision harks back to the days of Taft
August 14, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-days-of-taft-20120813,0,3544670.story [no comments yet]
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Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and the GOP's push for theocracy
8:00 a.m. EDT, August 14, 2012
Rep. Paul Ryan made a curious and troubling statement in his roll out as the Republican vice presidential candidate. He said "our rights come from God or nature, not from government." As a member of this government for the last dozen years, I am certain he bases this statement on something.
It is certainly not the Constitution. You know, that document that lays out how this government works. Nowhere in that document is God mentioned. It talks about the separation of church and state in the establishment of religion clause. Perhaps he would refer to the Declaration of Independence. That was a declaration of war against England, not a document of government. It said God has endowed us with certain inalienable rights. The word "certain" is important. It didn't say, endowed us with "every" right. Be that as it may, let's get back to what Mr. Ryan said.
"Our rights come from God, not from government". Really? Did the right to bear arms come from God? No, it is in that document of government called the Constitution. Did the right for African Americans and women to vote come from God? No, it is in the Constitution. If a woman is raped and gets pregnant with that rapist's baby, does the right for that woman to get an abortion come from God? No, it is legal due to a Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutional right to obtain such a procedure. On this one, Mitt Romney supports the resolution that would take away that right. And finally, does the right to avoid paying income taxes in this country by stuffing your money in a Swiss bank account come form God?
Paul Ryan in that short statement, makes it clear where Mitt Romney and the Republicans want to take this country. They want to take it toward a government of an "American Taliban" guided by some interpretation of the "inalienable rights" that "their" god has bestowed upon us. We should think long and hard of the implications of that statement.
Mel Mintz, Pikesville
Copyright © 2012, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/readersrespond/bs-ed-paul-ryan-constitution-letter-20120814,0,7601915.story [with comments]
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The Real Ryan Record: 2 Minor Bills, Lots of High-Profile Talk, Gridlock
Ryan's legislative record shows him renaming post offices, honoring Ronald Reagan and Wisconsin, approving commemorative coins, and increasing the deficit.
Aug 13 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/the-real-ryan-record-2-minor-bills-lots-of-high-profile-talk-gridlock/261069/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan’s voting record: Big-spending conservatism
Ryan's voting record shows him to be far from a pure fiscal conservative
8/14/12
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79688.html [with comments]
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Paul Ryan Debt Ceiling Bill: Why Did He Advocate Killing The Grand Bargain?
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/paul-ryan-debt-ceiling-bill-grand-bargain_n_1773971.html [with comments]
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Paul Ryan’s Liberal Fan Club
August 12, 2012
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/paul-ryans-liberal-fan-club/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan, Black Panther?
Eldridge Cleaver, 1968.
Library of Congress
A catchphrase was born in this 1967 poster.
Courtesy of Charles Rosner
By ADAM GOODHEART, PETER MANSEAU and TED WIDMER
August 12, 2012, 6:42 pm
Did Paul Ryan quote a famous 1960s Black Panther Party slogan in his speech [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/08/excerpts-from-rep-paul-ryans-speech-joining-romney-ticket.html ] on Saturday announcing his candidacy for vice president on the Republican ticket?
For a moment, it sounded that way. Recalling words of advice offered by his late father, Mr. Ryan said, “I still remember a couple of things he would say that have really stuck with me. ‘Son, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.’ Regrettably, President Obama has become part of the problem, and Mitt Romney is the solution.”
Give Mr. Ryan credit for making the Republicans’ big tent a little bigger. The slogan “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” served as a mantra of sorts for Eldridge Cleaver, the minister of information for the Black Panthers, the extreme black nationalist group. Cleaver was an unlikely public figure who had emerged from the Los Angeles ghetto with a long criminal record and a penchant for provocative statements. An ex-con who had done time for a series of rapes, he called for armed resistance to government authorities and urged black G.I.s in Vietnam [ http://www.hippy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=74 ] to kill their white officers. With Cleaver’s name attached, the phrase appeared on banners, buttons [ http://ronwade.freeservers.com/garyhartline2009-1x8.jpg ]
and picket signs at demonstrations well into the 1970s, and was picked up by other radical leftist leaders.
It’s perhaps unlikely that Mr. Ryan’s father, a lawyer in Janesville, Wisc., was present at a political gathering in 1968 when the Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, urging his followers to smash “the American Empire,” proclaimed:
Everyone falls into two categories. You are either part of the problem – or part of the solution. Being part of the solution means you’re willing to grab a shotgun and take to the barricades, killing if necessary. Being part of the problem means you’re on the other side of the shotgun. There is no in-between.
The Panthers, it turns out, may themselves have been borrowing from an earlier, more mainstream usage of the phrase, in a 1967 poster campaign created by an advertising firm in Washington. The ads promoted Volunteers in Service to America, commonly known as VISTA, the anti-poverty service program begun as one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. Mr. Ryan, who has built his career [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/paul-ryans-cramped-vision.html ] on opposing federal aid to low-income Americans, would hardly find this much more palatable.
Charlie Rosner, the graphic designer and copywriter who wrote the text for the VISTA posters and claims credit for coining the famous slogan, recalled yesterday in a phone interview that the campaign was a rush job in response to an offer of free ad space on the sides of Washington’s mail trucks. The promotion included several different catchphrases; Mr. Rosner’s own favorite was “Not exactly the sort of work your mother had in mind for you.”
But Mr. Rosner, a registered Democrat who describes himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative,” has no plans to try to collect usage fees from Mr. Ryan, or from anyone else. “Certain pieces of the lingo sort of become the property of nobody,” he said. “This one seems to have the half life of Strontium-90 [ http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/radionuclides/strontium.html ]. It’s terrific that he’s using it; it’s a pretty decent set of words to live by.”
Some might also see Mr. Ryan’s usage of the phrase as an example of how today’s conservative leaders have adopted many of the attitudes and tactics of what was once the new left. Just as the gentler liberalism of the early 1960s hardened into the militancy of the Black Panthers, so, too, Republicans like Mr. Ryan have increasingly adopted a “you’re either with us or against us” stance.
Mitt Romney and his new running mate might find comfort in another odd twist of history. Eldridge Cleaver eventually fled the United States after a shootout in which two policemen were wounded. But he later returned, having pleaded guilty to lesser charges – and, before his death [ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/us/eldridge-cleaver-black-panther-who-became-gop-conservative-is-dead-at-62.html%20?pagewanted=all ] in 1998, became a Republican and a Mormon.
Adam Goodheart is the director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, where Peter Manseau is a scholar in residence and Ted Widmer, a former presidential speechwriter, was the founding director. Kathy Thornton and Katie Tabeling, student associates at the center, contributed research.
Historically Corrected is a project of students and faculty at Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience [ http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu/ ]. To learn more, click here [ http://www.washcoll.edu/historically-corrected/ ].
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/paul-ryan-black-panther/ [with comments]
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Ryan Ranks as Top House Fundraiser With Backing by Banks
August 11, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-11/ryan-ranks-as-top-house-fundraiser-with-backing-by-banks.html [with comments]
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Ryan to meet with Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas
August 14, 2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57493156-503544/ryan-to-meet-with-sheldon-adelson-in-las-vegas/ [with comments]
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Paul Ryan Las Vegas Fundraiser: Press Banned From Covering Event
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/paul-ryan-las-vegas-fundraiser-press-banned_n_1776479.html [with comments]
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Ryan raises money, talks foreclosures in Las Vegas
Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan R-Wis., center, greets members of the Palo Verde High School band during a campaign event at Palo Verde High School on Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012, in Las Vegas.
(Credit: AP Photo/David Becker)
By Rebecca Kaplan
August 14, 2012 9:45 PM
(CBS News) LAS VEGAS - Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan turned his attention to the fundraising portion of his new job Tuesday evening as he met with the Romney campaign's Nevada Finance Leadership at the Venetian Hotel. The hotel and casino is owned by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, who was reported to be meeting with Ryan.
Earlier in the day, Ryan spoke to more than 2,000 people at a high school gym here in a speech that the Romney campaign had said would focus on foreclosures. The Wisconsin congressman offered no policy prescriptions, telling attendees that they deserved better.
"Since the president took office, 8.5 million foreclosure filings. Home values down an average of 20,000 dollars. 11 million homes underwater. Nevada ranks 5th in foreclosures. The unemployment rate? I had to read this number three times. 11.6 percent in Nevada," Ryan said. "You deserve better than that. You deserve jobs in your economy, you deserve an america that's heading in the right direction."
Ryan's appearance bore similarities to an event earlier Tuesday in the Denver area in which he attacked the administration on energy without offering specific policy proposals apart from a promise to approve creation of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline
Ryan's event at the Venetian was closed to the news media. Romney generally has permitted coverage of fundraising events held in public venues, but an aide said the rule didn't apply in this case with Ryan because the event isn't a fundraiser.
Copyright © 2012 CBS Interactive Inc.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57493356-503544/ryan-raises-money-talks-foreclosures-in-las-vegas/ [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Miami Campaign Event Held At Juice Shop Owned By Convicted Cocaine Trafficker (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/romney-event-host-drug-dealer-miami_n_1774246.html [with comments]
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Katey Sagal, The Former Peggy Bundy, Roasts Ann Romney As A Do-Nothing Mom (VIDEO)
08/13/2012
[...]
Sagal famously played Peggy Bundy on "Married... with Children." She spent her time snacking on bon-bons and buying new clothes instead of cleaning the house, caring for her kids or even remotely attempting to get a job.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/katey-sagal-ann-romney-do-nothing-mom_n_1773099.html [with comments]
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Paul Ryan's 'Path To Prosperity' Hurts Americans In These 10 Ways
#9: Poor Weather Forecasts
Ryan's proposed cuts to environment and natural resource programs could result in weather forecasts being only half as accurate, according to Third Way's budget expert, David Kendall. "For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday," he's quoted as saying in the Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/12/what-paul-ryans-budget-actually-cuts-and-by-how-much/ ].
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/paul-ryan-path-to-prosperity_n_1773623.html [with comments]
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Joe The Plumber: 'Put A Damn Fence On The Border Going To Mexico And Start Shooting'
08/13/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/joe-the-plumber_n_1773590.html [with comments]
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GOP Voter ID Campaign Based On Bunk, Data Shows
08/14/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/gop-voter-id-data-voter_n_1773142.html [with comments]
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George R.R. Martin, 'Game Of Thrones' Author, Slams Republicans For 'Voter Suppression'
08/13/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/game-of-thrones-author-republicans_n_1773283.html [with comments]
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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