Ideas, Opinions, Genealogy, and Book Reviews
I see that Todd Akin, the “legitimate rape” guy, now has the support of the Republican Party. The Senate is supposed to be a great deliberative body but, of course, it doesn’t always work out that way.
But this seems to be a new low. The Republican position seems to be: better an ignorant extremist in my party than a reasonable person in another party.
Where are the independents when you need them?
Here is a good article I ran across looking for some information on Mitt Romney:
If the old game show “To Tell The Truth” were still on, it would be fun to have the three versions of Mitt Romney play so that after a period of questioning by a panel of celebrities, Gary Moore could then ask the real Mitt Romney to please stand up.
Read more from Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up?
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing about Mitt Romney’s taxes or his lack of transparency on that issue. The Democrats are not satisfied and it would be nice if he was more transparent about it. But I think it should be a closed issue.
There is no reason to believe he is doing anything illegal. He says he is just taking legal steps to which he is entitled to pay no more tax than necessary. Isn’t that pretty much what we all do? He does have a much higher income than most of us so he is able to hire better tax advisers and some steps make economic sense when dealing with a potential tax liability of millions rather than the smaller amounts that most of us deal with.
Perhaps the fact that a multimillionaire pays a lower tax rate than someone who makes a middle class salary suggests to some that our tax system is a bit unfair and should be reformed but that is a different argument.
About 10 years ago, Vice President Cheney supposedly declared that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” as the administration moved us from the surplus at the end of the Clinton administration to the deficits of the Bush administration. Then a few days ago Mr. Cheney realized deficits do matter .
At first I was a bit confused. But then I realized, the difference. When a Republican run a big deficit, it doesn’t matter. But if a Democrat does it, it is terrible. This is true even if the Democrat inherited much of the deficit from his Republican predecessor.
We should all be grateful that this is cleared up at last and that we have a two party system to guide us through this difficult time.
I liked the phase “disingenuous crap” so much to describe Romney’s claim that Obama has no jobs plan that I stole it from Andrew Sullivan. This is the third in his series on the big lies of Mitt Romney. This one seemed most relevant to today’s post so I referenced it here. But all are worth reading.
But it is rather a big claim that Obama has a plan so here is a second reference from the Washington Post. It seems it would have been more accurate for Mr. Romney to claim that President Obama has no plan that Republicans support.
Obama has proposed a plan and it has been blocked by Republicans who don’t want him to succeed. But he is succeeding. It seems likely to me that the success would be much faster if the Republicans in Congress would do their job and govern.
The highest Republican party objective seems to be to deny Obama a second term. That is a rather short video with Mitch McConnell defending his now famous quote. But if you have the time you might enjoy an almost 9 minute video from Media Matters which includes several Republican quotes and a bit of context.
Despite opposition President Obama is succeeding in getting our economy to grow. Of course, growth would be faster if he had the support of Congress. Think about that when you vote.
But if you remember, we were losing about 800,000 jobs per month when President Obama took office. The job loss slowed and for the past few years we have actually been gaining jobs each month. (See Stimulus worked, more jobs needed.)
That post is about a year old, see Chart Book: The Legacy of the Great Recession which bring things up to date and adds quite a bit more on the recovery.
Mitt Romney has a plan to fix the economy. It is just that he won’t tell us exactly or even approximately what it is. He will cut taxes for everyone while reducing the deficit and the economy will boom.
Unfortunately he will not tell us how he will manage to cut tax rates while reducing the deficit except to say that he will eliminate nonspecified loopholes and deductions. Paul Ryan seems to have a similar plan with unspecified details. Should they be called the “Trust Me Team”?
It seems they will work with Congress to specify some of those loopholes and deductions. So our role is to trust them and trust Congress. Congress certainly hasn’t done much lately to earn our trust.
So trust them and trust Congress. Does anyone else see a flaw in this plan ?
Here in Pennsylvania, the Republicans in the state legislature have based a strict voterID law. I say Republicans because the law did not attact a single Democratic vote. The Philadephia Inquirer has had a good series of articles on the difficulties of getting the ID that some people experience and the legal battles.
Many have a hard time but a few are lucky. Often a case highlighted by the paper is given help by the state but a recent one was Jim Cramer’s dad. Yes, it was that Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame.
A recent study by News21 (http://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud/) rather convincingly shows that the type of voting fraud that would be prevented by VoterID laws is extremely rare. In the study they canvassed voting officials in all 50 states.
They found 10 cases of in-person voter impersonation among 146 million voters – about 1 case in every 15 million. By the way, there were 0 in Pennsylvania. In-person voter impersonation is the only type of voting fraud that would would be prevented by the VoterID laws.
There were about 200 times as many other types of voting fraud but VoterID laws and the Republicans who support them focus on the rare cases because they also happen to disenfranchise large numbers of voters who may side with Democrats.
Why solve real problems when you can stick it to the opposition?
Yesterday I heard a great radio interview. Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed Mickey Edwards whose new book The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans is about our hyper-partisan political system.
In the interview, he calls political parties “cancer at the heart of our democracy”. Strong words but well deserved.
I have previously written about this excessive power of party and am glad Mickey Edwards‘ views are getting wider coverage. I enjoy listening to podcasts when I go for a walk. If you enjoy podcasts, be sure to get this interview by Terry Gross.
Although the citizens (or we the people) are theoretically in charge, the people we elect to represent us and govern are too busy posturing and refuse to compromise and so are unable to govern and solve our country’s problems. We have given too much power to the 2 major political parties.
The parties control our elections and limit our choices, determine what laws are come up for a vote and how our representatives will vote. The votes will be in the interests of the party leaders, rather than the people.
The NPR website has highlights of the interviews as well as comments on the interview and the roles of parties in our dysfunctional system.
Is this anyway to run a democracy?
There is an interesting post on the Forbes website about increases in Federal spending by recent Presidents. I was surprised. We always hear how President Obama is a big spender. But when the actual numbers are examined, it turns out that President Obama is responsible for the lowest spending increases.
President Clinton was the second lowest. In contrast Presidents Reagan and both Presidents Bush were a considerably higher. It seems the Republicans talk a good game about being the financial watchdogs but the data don’t seem to support that view.
The tricky thing is the 2009 budget which is really a President Bush budget but some of President Obama’s stimulus is added to that. This is accounted for and explained well, especially in the comments.
I do not understand why Paul Ryan, Romney-Ryan ticket, and perhaps Republicans in general seem to believe that having health insurance on exchanges for Medicare will somehow bring down healthcare costs though the magic of the marketplace. But having health insurance on exchanges in Obamacare will not also drive down health care costs.
I hope this is one on many mysteries that will be explained in the next few days or maybe months.
As previously mentioned, Mitt Romney promises to lower tax rates but has not specified how he would make up for the loss of revenue to the federal government. He has has suggested that he would be able to do this by closing loopholes and and eliminating deductions (but has not specified which ones).
Here is a suggestion. How about eliminating the lower rate paid on dividend and capital gains (as opposed to wages)?
To quote President Ronald Reagan:
We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. It’s time we stopped it.
Our financial policy is now that certain financial institutions are Too Big To Fail and so they must be tightly regulated and bailed-out by the taxpayers if they do fail, lest they topple the U.S. economy.
Over regulation is a potential problem. Bail-outs of hundred of billions and perhaps several trillion are also potential problems, especially when our government is running large deficits and is trillions of dollars in debt.
Too Big To Fail = Too Big To Exist is the simplest solution. Simply, do not let the institutions reach a size where they threaten the U.S. economy. Some institutions already exceed that size and need to be gradually broken-up or unwound to get under that number.
Jon Huntsman proposed such a plan during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. I’m sure there are other plans out there.
Too Big To Fail = Too Big To Exist can be shortened to TBTF = TBTE or 2B2F = 2B2E for those who like things shorter. Thus financial institutions will be freer to experiment and take risks. The taxpayers need not regulate so closely and are not on the hook for a bail-out. It is a win-win as far as I can see.
I usually disagree with David Brooks of the New York Times but do find his columns well-worth reading as he often makes good points. In a recent column Ryan’s Biggest Mistake he makes the point that in voting against the Simpson-Bowles proposal and so denying a vote for the proposal which offered both deficit reduction and tax reform, Paul Ryan helped shoot down a good proposal which he viewed as less than perfect.
They do say the perfect is the enemy of the good or something like that and this seems to be a good example. While I don’t think Paul Ryans’s ideas are perfect, I’m sure he has a high opinion of them. But as David Brooks points out, Paul Ryan was giving up real progress for a fantasy. Read the column. It is interesting (good but not perfect).
Mitt Romney promised to lower tax rates but make up for the loss of revenue to the federal government by eliminating deductions and loopholes he has not specified.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the GOP platform committee has committed to retain the deductions for charitable donations but will not commit to retaining mortgage interest deduction. In 2008, they did commit to retaining mortgage interest deduction.
Would the Romney-Ryan team care to enlighten regarding their plans for the mortgage interest deduction ?
I like to walk.
Now that I am retired I find that I often take 2 or more walks each day. Usually I have company but perhaps 2 or 3 times a week, I walk alone. A few months ago I decide to take my iPod on these walks.
Then I realized I could add podcasts and listen to intelligent conversation as I walk. One of the more interesting talks I heard lately was an interview with Dr. Kerry Emanuel and Chris Mooney on a conservative’s view of climate change from a climate scientist. Kerry Emanuel is a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chris Mooney is one of the hosts of the Point of Inquiry podcasts.
This quote is taken from the Point of Inquiry “about” page:
Point of Inquiry is the Center for Inquiry’s flagship podcast, where the brightest minds of our time sound off on all the things you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table: science, religion, and politics.
So if you’d like to hear interesting interviews, I’d highly recommend their podcasts. You can get them for free at the Apple online store (same as iTunes). Many of us like free.