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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Romney On Obama Recovery: He Gets No Credit For Stopping Recession From Going Further
The Huffington Post | By Sam Stein Posted: 09/10/2012 12:28 pm Updated: 09/10/2012 5:21 pm
WASHINGTON -- In an interview with a local Virginia television station on Sunday, Mitt Romney went further than normal in criticizing the president's handling of the economy, saying that he doesn't deserve credit for stemming the bleeding he inherited from his predecessor.
"There has never been a recession that went on forever. There has never been a depression that went on forever," Romney told WVEC News. "A recession occurs, the economy goes down, and then comes after recession, the recovery. That's happened since the beginning of time. The president wants to say, well, he stopped the recession from going further. Well, frankly, the recession came to an end and we are waiting for the president to get us to where he said he'd get us, which is 5.4 percent unemployment. And he hasn't been able to do it because of the policies he's put in place."
This is a variation of the attack line that Romney's campaign traditionally deploys, in that it's more explicit than usual in its unwillingness to give the president any due for slowing the rate of job loss that he inherited upon taking office. The country was shedding between 700,000 and 800,000 jobs a month in the winter of 2008 and 2009. By early spring and summer of 2009 -- shortly after the stimulus passed -- that number was reduced to the 300,000 to 400,000 range; by the summer, it was in the 100,000 to 200,000 range; by the fall it was in the 0 to 100,000 range; and shortly after, the country started producing a net gain of jobs on a monthly basis.
"Mr. Romney is correct that recessions always do end, but their severity and duration vary," former Obama Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag said in an email to The Huffington Post. "The relevant question is therefore whether you can cushion the blow, and the evidence (including cross-state comparisons) strongly suggests that the Recovery Act did exactly that."
Romney, certainly, has been more generous with respect to the stimulus in the past. He himself argued in favor of stimulus at the time of the recession. And while his stimulus plan was half the cost of President Obama's and built almost exclusively on long-term tax rate reductions, the mere fact that he pitched a plan suggests that he too believes the government has a role in buffering against a recession. Finally, both Obama and Romney supported the Trouble Asset Relief Program, on grounds that injecting capital into the financial markets would, in turn, prevent the recession from turning into a global economic meltdown.
Asked for comment, however, the Obama campaign focused primarily on
the Recovery Act.
“Because of the President’s decisive actions and smart investments, businesses have added 4.6 million private sector jobs over the past 30 months, the American auto industry is back, and American manufacturers are adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith. "And every step of the way, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Republicans in Congress have opposed him and served to slow the jobs recovery because they thought it would help them politically. Now, they’re promising to bring back the same failed policies that devastated the middle class and crashed the economy in the first place. Americans can’t afford to go back.”
Also on HuffPost:
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Sun Sep 16, 2012 10:23 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Tue Sep 11, 2012 6:44 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Romney and Ryan- We won't give specifics ot more tax returns because you would criticize us. what are they hiding?
Romney: Voters can look to 'principles' for sense of how he'd govern
The Republican presidential nominee talks with NBC's David Gregory about his policy positions and his standing in the 2012 race.
By Michael O'Brien, NBC News
Mitt Romney argued Sunday that voters should have enough of a sense of his principles to have confidence in how he'd handle the nitty-gritty details of taxes, spending and health care as president.
The Republican presidential nominee, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," argued his plan to cut taxes squares with his vow to achieve a balanced budget by the end of a second hypothetical term, even though achieving those two goals would seem difficult, if not incongruent.
"My tax policy is designed to find a way to encourage more hiring in this country. I'm very concerned that we have 23 million people that are out of work or stopped looking for work or under-employed," Romney told moderator David Gregory. "So everything I want to do with regards to taxation follows simple principles, which is bring our rates down to encourage growth, keep revenue up by limiting deductions and exemptions and make sure we don't put any bigger burden on middle income people. In fact, I want to lower the burden on middle income people."
But Romney has been dogged by criticism that his plan lacks specifics, thereby making it difficult to conceive of how he would be able to reasonably achieve his agenda.
Romney's tax plan calls for making a 20 percent, across-the-board cut to marginal tax rates while keeping most existing taxes on investment the same (and cutting investment taxes altogether for households earning less than $200,000.) The former Massachusetts governor has argued that if "we limit or eliminate some of the loopholes and deductions at the high end," he could maintain current levels of tax revenue while also stimulating growth.
In an preview of Sunday's exclusive interview with Mitt Romney, the Governor tells David Gregory GOP lawmakers made a "big mistake" in signing off on the deal, which prevented a U.S. default on its borrowing obligations.
But, pressed for specifics, Romney resisted, and said his "principles" make up the details of his policy.
"The specifics are these, which is those principles I described are the heart of my policy," he said. "And I've indicated as well that — contrary to what the Democrats are saying — I'm not going to increase the tax burden on middle income families. It would absolutely be wrong to do that."
The opacity of some of Romney's proposals has invited plenty of scrutiny from Democrats, including President Barack Obama, who seized upon Romney's tax proposals in his convention speech on Thursday.
"When Gov. Romney and his friends in Congress tell us we can somehow lower our deficits by spending trillions more on new tax breaks for the wealthy, well — what'd Bill Clinton call it? You do the arithmetic. You do the math," the president said in Charlotte.
Brian Snyder / Reuters
Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney talks briefly with reporters after stopping to buy two pizzas at Lui-Lui restaurant in West Lebanon, New Hampshire September 5, 2012.
Romney shot back Sunday: "I want to make sure people understand, despite what the Democrats said at their convention, I am not reducing taxes on high income taxpayers."
Speaking of those conventions, Romney said he has emerged in a "better spot" for his campaign by spending a week better familiarizing voters with his personality and record. And the GOP nominee pounced on Friday's anemic jobs report as further evidence as to why voters should back him.
"It is a jobless recovery, if it's a recovery at all," Romney said of the pace of the recovery. "If President Obama is re-elected you're not going to see our unemployment picture change dramatically. You're not going to see us create the jobs we need to create or the rising incomes people need."
In a preview of his exclusive Meet the Press interview with David Gregory, Mitt Romney reacts to Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention.
The economy joins the issues of taxes and spending as top problems a President Romney would be forced to confront almost immediately upon taking office. Current tax rates will automatically spring upward at the beginning of 2013 absent another extension of the so-called "Bush tax cuts," or some other kind of substitute comprehensive tax reform. And a series of automatic spending cuts stipulated by the 2011 debt ceiling deal will take place in January unless Congress makes steps to undo them.
Those looming issues are linked in large part to partisan discord in Congress, a phenomenon that might not be broken with this year's elections. Internal divisions within the GOP, pitting conservatives who have pushed for deeper cuts against their party's leadership, have additionally complicated dealmaking on Capitol Hill.
As president, Romney said he would seek out compromise, but not in such a way that it would contravene his principles.
"There's nothing wrong with the term compromise, but there is something very wrong with the term abandoning one's principles," he said. "And I'm going to stand by my principles. And those are I am not going to raise taxes on the American people."
A senior Republican analyst says the GOP has seen how difficult it is to take out an incumbent president who is personally popular. CNBC's John Harwood has more.
Those governing principles extend to health care, a hot-button issue this election which Romney has vowed to tackle if elected.
The GOP nominee has vowed, for instance, to repeal Obama's signature health care law and replace it with his own series of reforms. But that doesn't mean that some of the more popular elements of "Obamacare" would necessarily go away, Romney said.
"I'm not getting rid of all of health care reform. Of course there are a number of things that I like in healthcare reform that I'm going to put in place," said Romney. "One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their family up to whatever age they might like. I also want individuals to be able to buy insurance, health insurance, on their own as opposed to only being able to get it on a tax advantage basis through their company."
Romney also spoke to the issue of foreign policy, a topic on which he scarcely touched at his convention speech in Tampa. Romney said that Obama has "had some successes and he's had some failure," an example of the latter being the president's handling of Iran.
"President Obama had a policy of engagement with Ahmadinejad. That policy has not worked and we're closer to a nuclear weapon as a result of that," he said.
Romney said he would handle it differently by more aggressively pursuing diplomacy and sanctions, while also maintaining a military option.
"We need to use every resource we have to dissuade them from their nuclear path. But that doesn't mean that we would take off the table our military option. That's something which certainly every American would hope we would never have to use," Romney said. "But we have to maintain it on the table or Iran will, undoubtedly, continue their treacherous course."
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Tue Sep 11, 2012 7:04 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Sam SteinBecome a fan.
stein@huffingtonpost.com
Zach CarterBecome a fan.
zach.carter@huffingtonpost.com
Mitt Romney Tax Policy Studies: Candidate Seemingly Contradicts Their Conclusions
Posted: 09/14/2012 2:08 pm Updated: 09/14/2012 2:15 pm
WASHINGTON --
Over the past few weeks, the Romney campaign has repeatedly pointed to five separate studies supporting the candidate's contention that a dramatic, across-the-board, reduction in tax rates can be paid for by economic growth and the elimination of deductions and exemptions for high-income earners.
Romney himself referenced these five studies in an interview with Meet the Press on Sunday. His running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), said the same during his run through the Sunday show circuit.
A closer examination, however, calls into question the fact that there are even five studies at all. Last week, the Romney campaign passed along the five documents that the candidate had referenced on NBC's Meet the Press. Three of the five are blog posts or op-eds (as opposed to academic literature), and two of those three are written by the same author: Harvard economist Martin Feldstein.
Of the remaining two studies, one is the tax reform white paper authored by Romney-backing economists and paid for by Romney for President, Inc. (in an email to PolitiFact, the Romney campaign highlighted several Wall Street Journal editorials in place of the campaign white paper as the "fifth" study).
The final study, produced by Princeton University's Harvey Rosen, backs the Romney campaign's assertions by arguing that people will work more, accumulate more income, pay more taxes, and seek out fewer loopholes if their tax rates are lowered. But even that report has several nuances that complicate the candidate's use of it.
Romney is not without philosophical support with respect to his tax plan. The Wall Street Journal editorials that his campaign sent PolitiFact, for one, argue that sharp reductions in tax rates will spur economic growth, which, in turn, will allow for increases in tax revenues. Those pieces have helped the campaign push back on a critical study by the Tax Policy Center, which concluded that Romney would have to eliminate tax deductions on things like home mortgage interest payments, charitable donations, and employer-provided health insurance in order to have his plan be deficit-neutral.
But even Feldstein has said that to make Romney's math work, some of those deductions would have to be eliminated on incomes over $100,000. In his August 28 Wall Street Journal piece, what Romney calls a "study," Feldstein writes that Romney could generate $191 billion by scrubbing these deductions, "more than enough to offset the revenue losses from the individual tax cuts proposed by Gov. Romney
."
In other words, the economist who has written two of the five studies that the Romney campaign highlights has conceded that Romney would have to eliminate tax preferences for people making over $100,000 per year in order to make his plan work. And yet, when asked in an interview with "Good Morning America" on Friday morning if he would remove those deductions and exemptions for incomes over $100,000, Romney said "no."
"That’s not what I propose," he said. "And, of course, part of my plan is to stimulate economic growth. The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending."
The statement follows months of refusals from the Romney campaign to actually detail what kind of deductions and exemptions the candidate would seek to eliminate once in office. George Stephanopoulos, hosting GMA, pushed back, noting that Romney was now actually distancing himself from a study he routinely cites as supportive.
Romney responded by saying he hadn't "seen [Feldstein's] precise study" but that there were five studies in total "that point out that we can get to a balanced budget without raising taxes on middle income people." Romney would define middle income as $200,000 to $250,000 per year and lower.
With that measure of middle class, Princeton economist Rosen's study may still suffice. Rosen argued that Romney could get his tax plan to deficit neutrality by eliminating deductions for income over $200,000 a year. But in a separate interview with Reuters on Friday, he seemingly revised that figure downward to $100,000 per year
"What the political system would find feasible, I don’t know,” Rosen said. “It’s mathematically possible."
Even then, there are questions that surround the study's conclusions. Rosen depends on assumptions that he acknowledges are not made by the Treasury Department or the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation about how high-income earners respond to changes in tax rates. Unlike those government bodies, he assumes that the wealthy will not seek to take advantage of as many tax loopholes if their overall tax rate is lower. More importantly, he assumes that Romney's tax plan will grow wage and capital income by at least three percent. This could be viewed as an aggressive assumption. Under President Bush, the entire economy (not just tax policy) resulted in total personal income growth that varied between 2.8 percent and 6.7 percent.
Romney may agree with Rosen's data when it comes to wage growth. But he is now on record opposing the idea that certain exemptions and deductions would need to be eliminated above a $100,000-a-year threshold in order to make the plan work.
The situation seems to leave the Romney campaign with supportive economists, but no purely supportive academic study.
In addition to Rosen's work and Feldstein's two articles, the Romney campaign has highlighted a post by Matt Jensen of the American Enterprise Institute. But that post is primarily a rebuke of a small sliver of the Tax Policy Center analysis -- Jensen argues that, contrary the TPC, Romney could get tens of billions in revenue by eliminating the exclusion of interest on tax-exempt bonds and interest on life insurance savings. The Romney campaign's own white paper, authored by Romney-backing economists, doesn't attempt to lay out how mathematically his plan will work. Instead, it says that the former governor will "broaden the base to ensure that tax reform is revenue neutral."
Also on HuffPost |
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Sat Sep 15, 2012 4:41 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Washington Post Editorial Board: Mitt Romney's Tax Plan 'Counting On Magic'
The Washington Post | By Alana Horowitz Posted: 09/15/2012 9:22 pm Updated: 09/15/2012 10:02 pm
The Washington Post editorial board on Saturday published another critical review of Mitt Romney's campaign, this time focusing on his tax plan.
"For several weeks, we’ve been asking Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to explain how he can cut taxes, as promised, without adding to the nation’s debt, as also promised," the piece said. "Now he’s effectively let the cat out of the bag: He can’t."
The editorial attacked Romney's plan as "counting on magic" and compared it to "the wishful thinking of President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that helped turn a surplus into the deficit now weighing the nation’s economy."
WaPo's editorial staff has come after Romney in recent weeks for his tax plan, his lack of foreign policy experience, and for being too vague. It also criticized the Republican presidential nominee over comments he made about the attacks in Libya last week.
President Obama has also targeted Romney over his tax plan.
"I guess my opponent has a plan, but there's one thing missing from it: arithmetic," Obama told supporters in Florida last week, according to ABC. "They couldn't answer the question of how you already have deficits, you add five trillion dollars in new tax cuts, two trillion dollars in new defense spending and somehow you're going to close the deficit without raising taxes on middle class families?"
Also on HuffPost: |
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Sun Sep 16, 2012 10:26 am |
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