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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...190_story.html
In an elegant dining room where the self-satisfaction was thick enough to cut with a knife, Romney made clear that he sees this election as “us” vs. “them” — wealthy Republicans vs. the unwashed hordes, makers vs. takers. Romney believes half of America is lazy, dependent and, frankly, not too bright.
Voters will soon have the opportunity to show him we’re not as stupid as he thinks.
During his failed 1994 Senate race, Mitt Romney tried to reassure liberal Massachusetts voters that "I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush; I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush." Now, Reagan's ghost is getting his revenge.
After Romney defended the carried interest exemption that allows him to pay a lower tax rate than many middle-class families, the Gipper's apparition emerged from 1985 to insist that "the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver." And now that Mitt Romney has slandered the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income taxes thanks to measures like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the ghost of Reagan is haunting him once again.
As BusinessWeek explained, it was with good reason that President Reagan described the EITC as "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress."
Reagan strongly supported the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which sends checks to Americans who work but earn less than around $46,000 a year, depending on family size. Recipients of the credit are among those who don't pay income tax, but Reagan never regarded that as a problem. His administration estimated that the 1986 reform of the tax code would remove 6 million working poor from the tax rolls. Reagan called the reform a "sweeping victory for fairness" and "perhaps the biggest antipoverty program in our history."
Which is exactly right.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162...y-in-one-term/
Mr. Clinton connected Romney's tax rate to the larger political debate about the economy, taxes and the deficit.
"I don't think we can get out of this hole we're in if people at that income level only pay 13 or 14 percent," he added.
As for Mitt Romney's comments about 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income tax, Mr. Clinton said they are out of the federal income tax pool, in part, because of the economic crash. He also said a reason is because of bipartisan efforts to reduce the tax burden on working families.
He said that as president he doubled the Earned Income Tax Credit and President George W. Bush doubled the Child Tax Credit. An "enormous number of these people who were dropped out were dropped out for reasons of work and family, not dependents. These people are working their hearts out," Mr. Clinton said.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/b...-election.html
Bill Clinton: Romney’s ’47 percent’ remark could haunt him in debates
By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 7 hrs ago
Bill Clinton thinks the upcoming presidential debates are crucial for Mitt Romney, and that the Republican candidate's controversial "47 percent" remarks could come back to haunt him.
"I think if he's going to double down on that 47 percent remark, that will cause difficulties," the former president told Piers Morgan on Tuesday in an interview taped at the Clinton Global Initiative. "Because we now know the overwhelming number of those people work and have children, and the reason they don't pay federal income taxes is that median income is as low as it was in 1995 now, and until the current election season, Republicans and Democrats supported both the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit."
In a secretly taped video published by Mother Jones last week, Romney told attendees of a fundraiser that President Barack Obama's core supporters—47 percent of voters, according to the GOP hopeful—"believe they are victims" and "are dependent upon government."
"This is a rejection of basically more than three decades of bipartisan policy to support working families," Clinton said. "It's not a bunch of freeloaders."
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/20...ref=fpnewsfeed
Mitt Romney argued Tuesday that President Obama has not yet raised taxes during his presidency, contradicting a line of attack congressional Republicans have lobbed against the president for years.
“I admit this, he has one thing he did not do in his first four years, he’s said he’s going to do in his next four years, which is to raise taxes,” Romney told a crowd at a campaign stop in Vandalia, Ohio.
The Republican nominee’s assessment is mostly accurate — as president, Obama temporarily cut taxes for working families via the 2009 stimulus package and signed an extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts until the end of this year. He intends to let the lower rates expire on incomes above $250,000 expire in January 2013.
Averting a tax increase on high incomes is a top Republican goal.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2...ref=fpnewsfeed
SAHIL KAPUR OCTOBER 2, 2012, 10:44 AM 952
Mitt Romney’s health care platform would leave 72 million Americans without insurance by the year 2022, according to a new study by the Commonwealth Fund. President Obama’s approach, the researchers found, would mean 27.1 million are uninsured.
The study illustrates a stark contrast between the two candidates’ health care platforms. The projections are derived by contrasting the impacts of Obama’s plan to implement the Affordable Care Act with Romney’s promise to repeal it and scale back Medicaid. (Romney’s proposed Medicare changes would only take effect after 2022.)
“The health reform law will reduce the number of uninsured people by an estimated 32.9 million, leaving 27.1 million people uninsured,” the report said. By contrast, “Nationally, Romney’s proposals are estimated to increase the number of uninsured people by 12 million compared with the baseline (no Affordable Care Act), leaving 72 million people uninsured in 2022.”
The Commonwealth Fund study concluded that repealing the Affordable Care Act — which would unwind the subsidies and market reforms to expand coverage and roll back the law’s expansion of Medicaid — would swell the ranks of the uninsured. Taken together, Romney’s other proposals to convert Medicaid into a block grant and equalize the tax treatment of employer-provided and individually-purchased insurance would add to that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/op...t-jobs.html?hp
If anyone had doubts about the madness that has spread through a large part of the American political spectrum, the reaction to Friday’s better-than expected report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should have settled the issue. For the immediate response of many on the right — and we’re not just talking fringe figures — was to cry conspiracy.
Leading the charge of what were quickly dubbed the “B.L.S. truthers” was none other than Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the books had been cooked to help President Obama’s re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities.
It was nonsense, of course. Job numbers are prepared by professional civil servants, at an agency that currently has no political appointees. But then maybe Mr. Welch — under whose leadership G.E. reported remarkably smooth earnings growth, with none of the short-term fluctuations you might have expected (fluctuations that reappeared under his successor) — doesn’t know how hard it would be to cook the jobs data.
DANVILLE, Ky. — Whatever Joe Biden was drinking Thursday night, Barack Obama ought to order a case of it.
Biden took on Paul Ryan in the one and only vice presidential debate and did what Obama had failed to do last week in his debate with Mitt Romney: Biden not only won over the audience, but got under his opponent’s skin.
Biden smirked, sneered, and openly laughed at many of Ryan’s responses. It could have looked rude, but Biden made it look tough.
After all, Biden was the 69-year-old defender and Ryan was the 42-year-old challenger. But by the end of the evening, Joltin’ Joe had done real damage to his opponent.
In fact, as the 90 minutes flew by - - it was the rare debate where one actually wanted it to go longer - - Ryan began looking younger and younger. And not in a good way.
Both men have been in politics most of their adult lives, but Biden’s adult life has been longer. Biden was in the Senate so long, he knows a dozen ways of observing outward forms of politeness, while sticking a knife in your ribs and twisting it.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories...#ixzz293x570Me
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/1...ustrian-School
I was completely unsuprised when the New York Times wrote back in August that Paul Ryan is a fan of the economist Friedrich von Hayek, a member of the Austrian school of economics. After all, the Ryan budget takes from those mooching poors and gives to the rich übermenschen who've earned the upward redistribution of wealth because CAPITALISM! Ayn Rand couldn't have designed a more sociopathic budget herself, and we're talking about a woman who thought there was something praiseworthy about William Edward Hickman.
But in the same way that libertarians generally espouse Rand's ideas about the evilness of traditional values like altruism and equality, they've also decided to endorse yet another fantasy world where the rules are made up and the facts don't matter. If you don't know much about the Austrian school, they're so far up their own asses that they think Milton Friedman is a socialist. That's not even the looniest part about the Austrian school, the favored economic system of most Randists and Libertarians.
If you're like me, you may have found yourself yelling some version of "there are four lights!" or "Two Plus Two Equals Four!" at republicans on television over the past few months. You may have loved Bill Clinton's mathtastic takedown of the Republican party at the DNC. But Paul Ryan's economic theory is much harder to rubble, because it relies on special magic math that is immune, in the eyes of its beholders, from any kind of outside criticism.
Im happy to bring this thread to s close. I hope all reasonable people are able to see now that i was correct in describing President Obama as a fairly moderate, center/left politician and not a radical Communist as Mr.Siriuslywrong has suggested.
Justin Green:
"...How could he possibly have a shot at being re-elected, people must think, if he is so bad for America? Because the truth is, he isn't so awful, and most people know it.
As a Romney supporting, moderate Republican, here's my basic view of the President. He is a liberal man who has governed (whether by design or fate) in a largely pragmatic, centrist style. Obamacare has origins on the right, as does the stimulus, and his execution of foreign policy is not unlike his predecessor."
It has truly been fun debating here. Hasta luego.