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[FatDuck]

The article below is a bit dated, but it still rings true on the hypocrisy of the Republican.


From http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/21...hypocrisy.html

Paul Ryan's Hypocrisy on Obamacare

Monday, 24 September 2012 14:10
By Sherwood Ross


When it came to opening a new health center in his own congressional district, Republican Paul Ryan---yes, the same one who is denouncing Obamacare around the country---wrote to the Federal department of Health and Human Services begging for bucks.

While GOP vice-presidential hopeful Ryan today savages Obamacare as "irresponsible," an editorial in the Nov. 1 The Nation magazine reports that on Dec. 10, 2010 Congressman Ryan wrote HHS "to recommend a grant application for the Kenosha Community Health Center Inc. to develop a new facility in Racine, Wis., an area within Ryan's district."

In his letter, Ryan declared, "The proposed new facility, the Belle City Neighborhood Health Center, will serve both the preventative and comprehensive primary health care needs of thousands of new patients of all ages who are currently without health care."

"The grant Ryan requested was directly funded by the Affordable Care Act," the magazine pointed out. The Nation's editorial said Ryan's letter "is a stark reminder that even the most ardent opponents of Obamacare privately acknowledge many of the law's benefits."

"Federally funded health clinics have long provided a broad range of vital medical, dental and mental health services to underprivileged communities across the country, regardless of a person's ability to pay," the editorial added.

To improve its coverage, the Affordable Care Act provides for a sweeping expansion of such clinics, including $9.5 billion for operating costs to existing centers and $1.5 billion for new construction.

Whatever he might have felt in his heart for the poor in Racine, Wis., as their congressman, Republican candidate Ryan is having none of that bleeding heart stuff today. On the campaign trail, he has been calling Obamacare "irresponsible" and part of "Washington's reckless spending spree."



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Notes (my own words, not plagiarized from somebody else's article ;) ):
- For those who don't know, the Affordable Care Act is coined by the Republican as Obamacare.

[FatDuck]

From http://www.salon.com/2012/10/16/paul...verty_tourism/


Paul Ryan’s poverty tourism
A soup kitchen is just a photo op for the V.P. candidate -- and the 47 percent mere props for a campaign

By Marie Myung-Ok Lee


Paul Ryan, in a recent photo, appeared to be vigorously scrubbing dishes at a soup kitchen in Youngstown, Ohio. As the Washington Post noted: “Ryan, his wife and their young children headed to the kitchen, donned white aprons and offered to clean up some dishes.”

However, they were in an empty facility, at a time when breakfast service was over, the homeless clients vamoosed, the place already scrubbed by volunteers. So what did Paul Ryan do, since he was there to express his concern for the poor and downtrodden? Make a donation? Actually, according to the Post, he “took some large metal pans that did not appear to be dirty, soaped them up and rinsed them … as the cameras clicked and the TV cameras rolled.”

I know soup kitchens. I’ve worked in one. Paul Ryan did not work.

This staged emptiness is such a glaring metaphor for the oxymoronic “compassionate conservatism” that a novelist would reject it as too obvious. Granted, photo ops are the bread and butter of both presidential campaigns. The Obamas, staged or not, have actually worked en famille at soup kitchens, especially at Thanksgiving; the Republicans, meanwhile, give us the Ionesco-worthy absurdity of Paul Ryan scrubbing a pot that had already been cleaned by someone else, in a soup kitchen sanitized of actual homeless. This is exactly what the GOP is all about. They need to pretend to care about the poor and disenfranchised so they don’t come off as total monsters, but in practice, they’d be horrified to confront a food scrap that may have been touched by a 47 percenter.

Seeing the photos of the shiny Ryan family cavorting in the guts of a soup kitchen brings back memories of when my husband and I used to volunteer at the Sunday soup kitchen at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. I’m not sure how we started doing this; I have a penchant for volunteer work, and I probably also irrationally hoped to catch a glance of Madeleine L’Engle, the cathedral’s librarian. It was hard work, preparing and serving food to hundreds of people, cleaning it all up, and starting anew for the second seating.

Crowd control was also part of the duty. You did not have to show ID or document need; any and all were welcome. The line always went out the door, the people were hungry and impatient, and we volunteers could never do anything fast enough. Clients could be rowdy, they fought over ownership of the table’s plastic cup of sugar, which was meant to be spooned into one’s coffee, not mainlined as a foodstuff by one person. I once had a man threaten me with a bat when I told him that we didn’t have plastic wrap so he could pack his food (it turned out to be a wiffle ball bat — but still). Generally, at the end of the shift, instead of being uplifted by my volunteerism, I’d be hot, crabby and covered with the sticky residue of cling peaches, too tired to pat my own back. It took me a while to not take the abuse and occasional disrespect personally; some co-workers who’d been homeless themselves explained that our clients had so little control over their everyday lives, that in the small, safe spaces where they could express themselves, well, they tended to — and some expressed much grace, courage and gratitude.

As mentioned, some of my co-workers had joined the ranks of volunteers and workers after first being the recipients of St. John the Divine’s charity. They lived their convictions, showing up every week to work through its challenges and mess. The volunteers as a group, including the English teacher with the nimbus of granny-white hair, could be hard-bitten and grim as the clients. But they were there. They worked. Paul Ryan did not work.

From time to time, the soup kitchen had church youth groups come to volunteer as a one-time thing. The well-groomed white kids, plastic aprons protecting their suits and dresses (who wears a suit or dresses to a homeless kitchen besides Paul Ryan and his family?). They looked warily about, fiddling with their aprons, making sure to stay a good ways away from both homeless clients and scrungy volunteers. They made it abundantly clear how repulsive post-meal detritus is (it’s not pretty, face it) and, by extension, us, because we were dumb enough to handle it.

The first time a youth group came in to “help,” I just grumbled to my husband about how they had just sat there, stared in horror, gotten in the way. When these churchy groups were reprised — seemingly the same blond girls, slicked-hair boys — I started to resent them (yes, even Buddhists can be resentful). I resented them not just because they made our work harder, but also because they didn’t conceal their distaste at what they saw: the long lines of the downtrodden, the industrial food we were serving them, the children — some their age — dutifully eating. I wanted to bonk heads together, crack open their minds like melons, but within the hour, they’d be gone, back to the safety of their expensively appointed church.

What was the point of this exercise, to take the kids slumming for an hour or two, to watch the freak show? Merit badges? Something to put on their college applications? Actually, I think none of the above. I think the valid point for the organizers was for the kids to experience, just a little bit, how to be like Jesus, who welcomed the poor, fed the hungry. Who told his followers never to turn away a beggar at your door because — you never know. However, given the brevity and the fact they seemed to be coming directly from church in their churchy clothes, it amounted to a theme park ride — Jesus in an hour! Perhaps next, they could go to “Navy Seal Adventure” in Minnesota, where they can experience shooting bin Laden.

I can’t rule out the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, some of the children/teens might have been inspired by the experience to later volunteer on their own. But from the repugnance and fear on their faces, I can’t help thinking their visit was nothing more than poverty tourism, i.e., today we learn a little bit what it was like to be Jesus when he ministered to the poor and fed the hungry; OK, OK, let’s put those poor and hungry back in the abstract.

The problem with that is, you put entire classes of people in the abstract, add a little fear, and, well, you stop seeing them as people — and want to keep it that way for your mental comfort. It’s not unlike the mind-set you need in order to kill another human being during war — but is this how we want our privileged children to learn to regard their fellow humans?

Paul Ryan and his family, supported by million-dollar trust funds, have never struggled for their daily bread, they have government-sponsored health insurance, Ryan’s college was paid for by Social Security — and yet he vigorously works toward taking away government supports for the poor, to gut Medicare, and cut taxes for the hyper-rich. This cognitive dissonance/hypocrisy can only be achieved when you are insulated by endless layers of money, race and social class, enough to be untroubled by and incurious about those who struggle for their next meal. How soulless has the Romney/Ryan avowedly Christian campaign become that they are able to regard poor, homeless people as well as the compassionate institutions that serve them as props and scenery that they can use and manipulate at will, time only to make sure the photogs get a few good shots of the wholesome family acting all Jesus-y, then leave?

Brian J. Antag, president of the charity that runs the soup kitchen, is not fooled. He told the press how the Romney campaign did not ask their permission (which would have been denied, he said) and instead “ramrodded their way in” (the facility was closed at the time, the campaign operatives cajoled a volunteer to open it) and basically colonized the kitchen’s pots and pans. Antag stood up for the hard work of soup kitchen volunteers everywhere when he blasted Ryan with three choice words: “He did nothing.”

This is more than a fleeting moment to be laughed at on the “Colbert Report,” although the hilarity is there: buff gym rat Paul Ryan rolls up his sleeves washes a pan à la Marie Antoinette doing the grunt work of herding sheep. What’s serious is the egregious deceit, the insult to American voters. Romney, Ryan’s boss, believes profit-making corporations deserve the rights of people, yet disdains 47 percent of actual American people, declaring behind closed doors that he is happy to not think about them. But with the comments now leaked out in the public, Romney/Ryan are now backpedaling furiously, trying to distract us, change the narrative by force.

Jesus washed people’s feet to show his humility and service. Ryan washes a pan that’s already clean and calls it work.

Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney care. They really, really care. Trust us, they say.

They have the pictures to prove it.



Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and she is regular contributor to Slate. She is the author of the novel Somebody’s Daughter and teaches creative writing at Brown University. Find her on Twitter @MarieMyungOkLee and on Facebook.

[FatDuck]

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/guy-ho...b_1969333.html


Paul Ryan's Shameful Soup Kitchen Visit

by Guy Horton
Posted: 10/16/2012 5:53 am


The Romney campaign achieved a new low last week when it had Paul Ryan and his family invade an Ohio charity "soup kitchen" for a photo op.

Covering the incident in an October 15 Washington Post article, Felicia Sonmez, citing witnesses, describes the scene:

Upon entering the soup kitchen, Ryan, his wife and three young children greeted and thanked several volunteers, then donned white aprons and offered to clean some dishes. Photographers snapped photos and TV cameras shot footage of Ryan and his family washing pots and pans that did not appear to be dirty.

Ryan had dropped by on the way to the airport to snap footage of him turning a good deed for the needy. This is the new, compassionate Paul Ryan. But this is the same sort of hollow election cycle compassion displayed by his running-mate, Mitt Romney. Remember that this is the ticket that would be thrilled to see such charities closed so that "moochers" and "takers" could" take responsibility for their own lives." Here is another example of just how out of touch Ryan and Romney are with the lives of everyday Americans, especially those who have befallen hard times.

Shameful displays such as this don't usually bring to mind catchy pop songs, but in this case I am reminded of the song, "Common People" by the British group, Pulp. The song describes a rich girl fascinated with the lives of the poor and working class. She wants "to live like common people," as the lyrics go. But, as the singer notes:

still you'll never get it right, cos when you're laid in bed at night, watching roaches climb the wall, if you call your Dad he could stop it all.

Ryan did not get this right. In fact, this little campaign media stunt was absolutely wrong on so many levels. While conservatives bemoan how unfair it is to wage class warfare or highlight class as a campaign issue, incidents like this highlight issues of class by cynically positioning Ryan as a supposedly benevolent one-percenter. Additionally, this illustrates how class warfare is not something waged from the bottom-up, as the right conceives of it, but rather as a war of oppression weighing downward from the top. An elite family blessed by privilege, wearing their Sunday best, drops by a soup kitchen to scrub pans for the common people. And then promptly departs once the footage is captured. They may feel good about themselves but they do so by sacrificing the dignity of an entire community or, dare I say it, class of people.

Ryan and his family did nothing short of exploiting this vulnerable community for their own gain and, based on the photographs, were seemingly having the time of their lives helping "these poor people."

Serving communities in need takes dedication, passion, and commitment. The people who devote their lives to helping others were belittled by Ryan's opportunistic charade. He tried to show how easy it is to help, to lend a hand, to do a good deed. Of course it's easy when it's this sort of poverty tourism. He can always call his dad, so to speak, and we are painfully aware of this obvious divide that somehow escapes him.

The hypocrisy, though, is inescapable and inexcusable. The head of the charity is right when he says that he never would have let Ryan in had the campaign gone through the proper channels. Typical of the Republicans, they show up unannounced, force their way in, take what they need, and then leave in a glow of moral superiority. From any other point of view, Ryan's false act of charity was nothing short of morally bankrupt.

[FatDuck]

From http://www.salon.com/2012/10/26/mitt...uble_standard/


Romney’s economy hypocrisy
The GOP candidate slams Obama for 2 percent GDP growth, but he never saw anything that fast as governor

By Alex Seitz-Wald
Friday, Oct 26, 2012 01:35 PM EDT



Today, new government data showed that the economy grew by 2 percent last quarter, faster than the previous quarter, but still slower than desirable. It’s “reasonably good news” for the country and Obama, as Andrew Leonard wrote, though certainly not a home run.

But how did Mitt Romney respond? Predictably, by slamming the news. “Today, we received the latest round of discouraging economic news … This is what four years of President Obama’s policies have produced,” he said in a statement.

By the way, how fast did the economy grow when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts? According to data from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, average real GDP growth was 1.5 percent per year in Massachusetts from 2002 to 2006. For each of the years Romney was in office, the economy grew 1.49 percent, 1.86 percent, 1.14 percent and 1.43 percent, respectively.

And how did Romney assess the economic growth of the state under his leadership? “When we took office, the state economy was in a tailspin. Today, jobs are being created by the thousands and our economy is stronger,” he said in early 2006, his last year in office. So less than 2 percent was good then, but 2 percent is bad now.

And one could argue that Romney had an easier task than Obama. During Romney’s tenure in the governor’s mansion, the national economy grew at a much fast clip than Massachusetts’, staying comfortably above 2 percent every year. National GDP even broke 3 percent one year and doubled the state’s growth another year. On the campaign trail in 2002, Romney promised jobs creation “second to none in the history of the state.” After four years, the state had added 31,000 jobs — a growth rate of less than 1 percent while the country as a whole added 5 percent more jobs.



Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

[FatDuck]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...-in-one-chart/


Who wins under Mitt Romney’s cap plan, in one chart

Posted by Dylan Matthews on October 17, 2012 at 4:12 pm



Despite its vagueness, Mitt Romney’s proposal to cap itemized deductions is prompting some insightful analyses from reputable think tanks. On Tuesday, Third Way released a report estimating that a $25,000 cap on deductions – the number Romney floated in that night’s presidential debate — would bring in only $730 billion over 10 years, a far cry from the $4.6 trillion needed for Romney’s tax cut plan to add up.

On Wednesday, the Tax Policy Center released numbers estimating that the cap would bring in $1.286 trillion in revenue over 10 years (more than Third Way’s estimate, but still not nearly enough to counterbalance Romney’s proposed tax cuts). The center also found that a $25,000 cap on deductions, combined with Romney’s rate cuts, would winding up lowering the tax bill for every income level.

That right there should tell you the plan doesn’t add up. It’s impossible to cut taxes for every single person and make up for it by simply capping deductions. The numbers also show that such a plan would mainly benefit top earners:





This is scaled according to how many people are in each group. The majority of Americans who make under $70,000 a year would get a tax cut of 0.13 percent to 1.07 percent. But those in the 95th percentile of earners, making $148,000 a year, would see a 2.6 percent cut. The top one percent and the top 0.1 percent of earners would get smaller cuts, owing to the large amount of deductions they currently claim, but they would still make out better than the bottom 90 percent as far as income tax relief.

So, in proposing the deductions cap, Romney breaks two of his campaign promises: revenue neutrality and no tax cut for the rich.

[FatDuck]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-1...-tax-plan.html


The Final Word on Mitt Romney’s Tax Plan
By Josh Barro Oct 12, 2012 12:34 PM ET



Mitt Romney's campaign says I'm full of it. I said Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible: he can't simultaneously keep his pledges to cut tax rates 20 percent and repeal the estate tax and alternative minimum tax; broaden the tax base enough to avoid growing the deficit; and not raise taxes on the middle class. They say they have six independent studies -- six! -- that "have confirmed the soundness of the Governor’s tax plan," and so I should stop whining. Let's take a tour of those studies and see how they measure up.

The Romney campaign sent over a list of the studies, but they are perhaps more accurately described as "analyses," since four of them are blog posts or op-eds. I'm not hating -- I blog for a living -- but I don't generally describe my posts as "studies."

None of the analyses do what Romney's campaign says: show that his tax plan is sound. I'm going to walk through them individually, but first I want to make a broad point.

The Tax Policy Center paper that sparked this discussion found that Romney's plan couldn't work because his tax rate cuts would provide $86 billion more in tax relief to people making over $200,000 than Romney could recoup by eliminating tax expenditures for that group. That means his plan is necessarily a tax cut for the rich, so if Romney keeps his promise not to grow the deficit, he'll have to raise taxes on the middle class.

Various analyses have adjusted TPC's assumptions in an effort to bring down that $86 billion deficit. But getting from $86 billion down to $0 is not enough to make Romney's proposal work. For Romney's math to add up, he actually needs a substantial surplus of a high-income base broadening above the cost of his high-income rate cuts.

This is for two reasons. First, TPC's thought experiment -- eliminate as many deductions as possible at the top while holding those below $200,000 harmless from tax increases -- was not only exceedingly generous in granting Romney's assumptions. It was impossibly generous. Under the terms analyzed by the TPC study, a taxpayer earning $199,999 would face a drastically higher tax bill for earning $1 more in income. That doesn't happen in the real world.

Instead you would need to phase in restrictions in deductions on the wealthy, which would reduce the amount of revenue those restrictions generated. Harvard Professor Martin Feldstein, in one of the analyses cited by the Romney campaign, makes a rough estimate that a phase-in would cost about $15 billion. My back-of-the-envelope calculations roughly match that.

There is a second reason Romney needs a big surplus for his plan to work. When asked why he won't lay out a specific plan to eliminate tax expenditures, Romney consistently says it's because he can't dictate a plan to Congress and will work with legislators from a menu of options. As he said in last week's debate:

I'm going to work together with Congress to say, OK, what are the various ways we could bring down deductions, for instance?. . . . There are alternatives to accomplish the objective I have, which is to bring down rates, broaden the base, simplify the code and create incentives for growth.

There are only meaningful "alternatives" to discuss with Congress if Romney can pick and choose from a pool of tax preferences for the wealthy that far exceeds the $250 billion annual cost of his rate cuts for them. If the pool of available base broadeners is just large enough to finance his tax cuts, then Romney actually is dictating a plan to Congress: if they don't eliminate exactly the set of preferences he proposes, his plan will either have to raise taxes on the middle class or grow the deficit.

TPC finds that Romney's rate cuts, plus elimination of the estate tax and Alternative Minimum Tax, would cost the Treasury about $250 billion in revenue from high earners. If he could somehow find, say, $300 billion in base broadeners from the wealthy, $15 billion of which would have to go to a phaseout, that wouldn't leave a lot of "alternatives" on the table. Yet there aren't enough base broadeners for Romney to reach the $300 billion level, let alone exceed it.


Now, on to the six studies.

1. The strongest of the six analyses is actually one of the shortest: An October 1 blog post from Alex Brill at the American Enterprise Institute. Brill chips away at the $86 billion figure by raising three objections to the TPC study.

TPC included in its baseline Obamacare taxes, which Romney did not say he would offset ($29 billion), and did not account for the possibility of eliminating favorable tax treatment of municipal bonds ($25 billion) and life insurance ($20 billion).

I think these objections are correct with regard to life insurance and Obamacare taxes, but mostly wrong with regard to municipal bond interest, which should be counted at just $5 billion. This is because the CBO estimates that only about 20 percent of the tax subsidy for municipal bond interest actually accrues to bondholders; the rest goes to state and local governments because bondholders will accept low interest rates on government debt in exchange for favorable tax treatment.

If the muni bond tax preference were eliminated, high income taxpayers would pay about $25 billion more in federal income taxes. But they would be relieved of roughly $20 billion in implicit taxes they pay to state and local governments in the form of reduced interest rates on municipal debt, for only $5 billion in actual added taxes.

Depending on your assumptions, it may be that the remaining $20 billion in muni bond subsidies effectively flows back to owners of capital generally, though not to municipal bondholders specifically, by inflating the yields on non-tax advantaged investments. If the muni bond tax exemption were repealed and replaced with nothing, this would broaden the tax base.

However, it is politically unthinkable that the muni bond subsidy would be repealed without something, such as tax credit bonds, taking its place and producing similar market-wide effects. Consequently, only 20 percent of the proceeds from eliminating the muni bond subsidy should be counted as actual base broadening on high earners. Or if the muni bond subsidy were somehow repealed without offset, a key effect would be state and local governments raising taxes (mostly not on the wealthy) to pay higher interest costs.

In total, this leaves Brill about $32 billion short of closing the deficit in the TPC report. Since he also needs about $15 billion to structure a phaseout and tens of billions more to allow Romney to offer a real menu of options to Congress, Brill is well short of "confirming the soundness" of the Romney tax plan.

Finally, Brill appeals to the possibility of added economic growth, as do several of the other analyses I discuss below. Tax reform might well produce some added economic growth. But claims about growth induced by tax policy changes are often overstated -- remember, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were also sold on the promise of higher economic growth offsetting much of the revenue loss. It didn't happen.

2. The second analysis the Romney campaign cites is an August 9 blog post by Brill's colleague, Matt Jensen. Jensen didn't actually claim that Romney's tax plan was sound, he just raised some questions about the TPC report. He previewed the municipal bond and life insurance issues that Brill discussed at greater length. He also suggested that Romney might use a lower threshold than $200,000 for "high income," but Romney later excluded that possibility in an interview with ABC News.

As such, Jensen's post does nothing to bolster Romney's plan beyond the limited support it gets from Brill.

3 and 4. The Romney camp cites two analyses by Martin Feldstein: a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a blog post responding to criticism of that op-ed.

Feldstein ran the numbers and said Romney can cut tax rates by 20 percent and eliminate enough tax expenditures to balance the budget without raising taxes on the middle class. But Feldstein defines "middle class" differently than Romney does.

Feldstein allows for tax increases on people making more than $100,000. But on Sept. 14, Romney told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he would hold people making less than $200,000 or $250,000 harmless from tax increases.

The Romney campaign, therefore, is dishonest in saying Feldstein's analyses "confirm the soundness" of Romney's tax plan. Feldstein is analyzing a different tax plan, which would allow tax increases on taxpayers making between $100,000 and $200,000. That's a large group, accounting for 24 percent of all adjusted gross income in 2009. But it's a group Romney has pledged not to touch.

5. Next up is a paper by Curtis Dubay of the Heritage Foundation. Dubay raises the same issues as Brill on municipal bond interest, life insurance and economic growth. He adds another claim: Romney would likely change the rules about capital gains tax treatment on estates, raising additional revenue.

Currently, when you die, your heirs receive a "step-up," with the value of your assets determined at the time of your death. Say you bought your home for $100,000, it was worth $200,000 when you died and your heir eventually sold it for $250,000. Your heir would only owe capital gains tax on a gain of $50,000; the other $100,000 of gains would go untaxed. This is often described as an offset for the estate tax.

Dubay assumes that, when repealing the estate tax, Romney would adopt "carry-over" basis, meaning your heir would assume the gains accrued during your lifetime and pay tax on the entire gain when he sells those assets. Dubay says this would raise $19 billion annually from people earning over $200,000.

But that's wrong. Dubay is citing a report from the Office of Management and Budget that compares the current step-up basis rules to a regime in which accrued capital gains are taxed immediately upon death. Though Dubay has protested that this isn't so, you can see it plainly in footnote 74 on page 272 of the OMB report.

I have not seen an estimate of the revenue impact of moving to carry-over basis at death, but it would surely be much less than the revenue impact of forcing the realization of capital gains at death.

6. Finally we have Princeton's Harvey Rosen, who ran his own score of Romney's tax plan and finds that, even if Romney sets his tax increase threshold at $200,000, he can more than eliminate the deficit identified by TPC. But there are several problems with Rosen's analysis, as highlighted by William Gale, a co-author of the Tax Policy Center report that sparked this discussion.

Rosen calculates the revenues needed to offset Romney's cuts to tax rates, but he does not include revenue loss due to repealing the estate tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax. And he makes very aggressive assumptions about dynamic effects, where taxpayers respond to lower tax rates by reporting more taxable income. Gale emails:

Rosen discusses and includes the effects of how taxpayers adjust their activities in response to lower tax rates (“micro behavioral” responses to tax rate cuts, which tend to reduce the revenue loss) but he neglects to include similar effects for how taxpayers respond to base-broadening measures. For example, he does not allow for the possibility that taxpayers with mortgages would likely choose to pay down their mortgages with taxable assets (and thus reduce taxable investment income) if the mortgage interest deduction were removed.

Rosen also depends on aggressive assumptions about macro-level dynamic effects, where taxes rise not because individual taxpayers report more taxable income but because the economy grows as a whole. In other words, he is depending on rosy -- and not necessarily warranted -- economic assumptions to make the numbers pencil.

There you have the six "studies" on which the Romney campaign has based its defense of Romney's tax plan. Individually and collectively they fail the task.

Finally, I would note one item that the Romney campaign does not cite in support of its tax plan: Any analysis actually prepared for the campaign in preparation for announcing the plan in February. You would expect that, in advance of announcing a tax plan, the campaign would commission an analysis to make sure that all of its planks can coexist. Releasing that analysis now would be to the campaign's advantage, helping them put down claims like mine that their math doesn't add up.

Why don't they release that analysis? My guess is because the analysis doesn't exist, and the 20 percent rate cut figure was plucked out of thin air for political reasons without regard to whether it was feasible.



(Josh Barro is lead writer for the Ticker. E-mail him and follow him on Twitter.)

Read more breaking commentary from Josh Barro and other Bloomberg View columnists and editors at the Ticker.

[FatDuck]

http://thinkprogress.org/security/20...ion/?mobile=nc


Former Israeli Intel Chief On Iran: Romney ‘Destroying Any Chance Of A Resolution Without War’

By Hamed Aleaziz on Oct 22, 2012 at 5:15 pm


Efraim Halevy, former chief of Israel’s spy agency the Mossad, said in two separate interviews on Sunday and Monday that President Obama’s approach toward Iran has been “courageous” and “brave.” Halevy told Al-Monitor that: “Obama does think there is still room for negotiations. It’s a very courageous thing to say in this atmosphere.” Halevy contrasted the approach with Mitt Romney’s:

HALEVY: Negotiating with Iran is perceived as a sign of beginning to forsake Israel. That is where I think the basic difference is between Romney and Obama. What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said.

Halevy also acknowledged the impact of recent sanctions. During a conversation on Israeli radio on Monday, the former spy chief attributed Iran’s recent economic problems to the sanctions passed by the Obama administration. He told Al-Monitor: “The sanctions have been very effective. They are beginning to really hurt.” These comments reinforce a speech that Halevy delivered at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. last Thursday, where he said: “The fact of the matter is the sanctions have not brought the end to the program but sanctions are hurting very much.” Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, has also said that sanctions against Iran have been “effective.” Halevy’s statements undermine the Romney campaign’s claim that President Obama’s handling of the Iran issue has been ineffective and that Romney would be better at the “negotiating table.”

Halevy himself urged negotiations, saying to Al-Monitor: “I realized that dialogue with an enemy is essential. There is nothing to lose. Although the claim was, if you talk to them, you legitimize them. But by not talking to them, you don’t de-legitimate them. So this convinced me, that we all have been very superficial in dealing with our enemies. Not everything you try succeeds. But you have to be willing to try.” His comments come on the heels of a New York Times report that Iran and the U.S. have agreed “in principle” to direct negotiations with each other. When Romney was asked if he supported such an approach, he refused to answer.

Responding to the report, Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s strategic affairs minister, said that Israel would support direct negotiations if they could halt the nuclear program in Iran.

The Obama administration, along with its European allies, believe that an Iran with a nuclear weapon is a threat and have implemented several rounds of crippling sanctions aimed at finding a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. The sanctions have resulted in an estimated loss of $48 billion a year in Iranian oil revenues. U.S., Israeli and U.N. officials have repeatedly pointed out that Iran has not yet decided to pursue a nuclear weapon.

[FatDuck]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_1...n-storms-wake/


Romney faces scrutiny on aid in storm's wake

AP/ October 31, 2012, 8:45 AM


WASHINGTON — There's nothing like a natural disaster to test the depth of politicians' preference for small government.

And so Mitt Romney found himself on the hot seat after superstorm Sandy battered the East Coast. Only last year, as Romney hewed to the right while battling for the GOP nomination, he appeared to suggest in a debate that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be shuttered and its responsibilities left to the states.

"Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction," Romney said at a debate last year. "And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better."

Asked by moderator John King of CNN whether that would include disaster relief, Romney said: "We cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids."

Now, a week before Election Day, in the wake of a massive disaster, Romney's campaign is reassuring voters that his administration wouldn't leave disaster victims in the lurch. The public's attention is locked on the devastation caused by superstorm Sandy at a time when Romney and President Barack Obama are locked in a close presidential campaign. With Obama heavily involved in getting federal funds to those in trouble, the Romney campaign moved quickly to reassure the public it supports a strong program of storm relief.

"A Romney-Ryan administration will always ensure that disaster funding is there for those in need," said campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg. "Period."

Romney's campaign says he's not interested in getting rid of FEMA, though Romney himself ducked a spate of opportunities Tuesday to clarify his position. The campaign instead issued a statement that essentially endorsed the current disaster aid system.

"Gov. Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions," Henneberg said. "As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA."

But what the campaign wouldn't do is say whether a President Romney would insist that help for disaster victims be funded by cutting other programs in the federal budget.

Running mate Paul Ryan is squarely on the side of cutting other spending to pay for disasters. Earlier this year, he tried but failed to scrap a new system, established in the 2011 debt ceiling-deficit cuts deal, that boosts disaster spending and budgets help for victims of hurricanes, tornadoes and floods before they occur. House leaders rebuffed him, siding with Appropriations Committee members of both parties who like the new system.

What Ryan proposed is that when disaster strikes, lawmakers first scour the rest of the budget for savings to pay for rebuilding homes, roads and schools and helping small businesses.

That's easier said than done, especially since it can mean delays in getting aid out the door. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina — and perhaps Sandy — can prove so costly that it's simply impracticable to find cuts in other programs big enough to pay for the aid.

As has been shown time after time — especially as tornadoes and hurricanes rip through politically conservative states — even the sturdiest tea party supporters become fans of government when it's doling out money to storm victims for motel rooms and other temporary housing or helping with house repairs.

That role fell Tuesday to New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie, who was effusive in his praise for Obama and the federal government's initial response.

"The president has been outstanding in this and so have the folks at FEMA," Christie said on NBC's "Today."

It'll take several weeks to come up with damage cost estimates to determine whether FEMA's main disaster account will need more money.

FEMA has enough cash available to deal with immediate disaster relief, almost $8 billion, thanks to a six-month government funding bill passed in September and the new disaster financing system.



© 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[FatDuck]

http://www.examiner.com/article/chry...-to-china-lies


Chrysler's CEO Sergio Marchionne Calls Romney out for Jeep to China lies

October 30, 2012
By: Lucius Wilson


Although Chrysler has refuted Mitt Romney’s lie about jeep moving to China.

Despite the fact that Chrysler has made it clear that they have no intention to ship jobs to China the Romney campaign has decided to double down on the lie, and has continue to run ads touting the lie all in a despicable effort to deceive and scare Ohio Voters.

The Romney's Campaigns refusal to be honest with the American people has once again drawn fire from the media and from Chrysler.

In an email to the Detroit Free Press Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne felt it necessary to set the record straight… again.

Here is his email:

Chrysler Group’s production plans for the Jeep brand have become the focus of public debate.

I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China.

North American production is critical to achieving our goal of selling 800,000 Jeep vehicles by 2014. In fact, U.S. production of our Jeep models has nearly tripled (it is expected to be up 185%) since 2009 in order to keep up with global demand.

We also are investing to improve and expand our entire U.S. operations, including our Jeep facilities. The numbers tell the story:

We will invest more than $1.7 billion to develop and produce the next generation Jeep SUV, the successor of the Jeep Liberty -- including $500 million directly to tool and expand our Toledo Assembly Complex and will be adding about 1,100 jobs on a second shift by 2013.

At our Jefferson North Assembly Plant, where we build the Jeep Grand Cherokee, we have created 2,000 jobs since June 2009 and have invested more than $1.8 billion.

In Belvidere, where we build two Jeep models, we have added two shifts since 2009 resulting in an additional 2,600 jobs.

With the increase in demand for our vehicles, especially Jeep branded vehicles, we have added more than 11,200 U.S. jobs since 2009. Plants producing Jeep branded vehicles alone have seen the number of people invested in the success of the Jeep brand grow to more than 9,300 hourly jobs from 4,700.

This will increase by an additional 1,100 as the Liberty successor, which will be produced in Toledo, is introduced for global distribution in the second quarter of 2013.

Together, we are working to establish a global enterprise and previously announced our intent to return Jeep production to China, the world’s largest auto market, in order to satisfy local market demand, which would not otherwise be accessible.

Chrysler Group is interested in expanding the customer base for our award-winning Jeep vehicles, which can only be done by establishing local production. This will ultimately help bolster the Jeep brand, and solidify the resilience of U.S. jobs.

Jeep is one of our truly global brands with uniquely American roots. This will never change. So much so that we committed that the iconic Wrangler nameplate, currently produced in our Toledo, Ohio plant, will never see full production outside the United States.

Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand.

[FatDuck]

http://www.examiner.com/article/obam...lies-of-romney


Obama is too busy being president to respond to the lies of Romney


October 30, 2012
By: Willie Carlisle


Within six days we will know which direction the country will be heading. We will either be moving forward with Obama or backward with Romney. Just in case you feel that I’m misrepresenting Romney’s position, he often says on the campaign trail that “I’m going to take our country back”.

There is usually an October surprise in every Presidential Election, but this surprise is normally some concoction devised by some foreign entity for the purpose of embarrassing America at the time it is in transition of leaders.

This time it was an act of nature. Hurricane Sandy came ashore in the most densely populated area in America. It is estimated that the storm cause nearly twenty billion dollars worth of damage. Amid the devastation one could only be thankful that the Obama administration restores sanity to F.E.M.A.

Mitt Romney has vowed that if elected he would defund F.E.M.A. and return the responsibility of responding to natural disasters to the states. He went on to say, “it would be even better to direct it (F.E.M.A.) to the private sector.


Forward or Backward
Within twenty four hours after the largest storm in recent memory Romney was back in Ohio campaigning. He was asked fourteen times by reporters if he still held the same position concerning F.E.M.A. and fourteen times he refused to answer. In a state where Romney is running ads claiming that Obama sold the Chrysler Corporation to Italy and that the production of Jeeps will be moved to China, many in that state only wish that Romney and his lies would just go away.

With Obama looking presidential in his response to the governors and mayors in the affected area, Romney by contrast is looking like a spoiled child that has no one to play with. Surely by now everyone in the nation realizes that Romney will say anything regardless of the consequences if it will result in a win on Nov. 6th. Unfortunately if he does win the nation loses. We will be heading back to a place in time where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Until then we’ll have to learn to ignore Romney and his lies or get ready for an America that even Romney himself can tell you what it will look like.