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  1. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    05-16-2012, 01:20 PM #1

    In Florida, Romney hammers Obama on the economy

    For the second day in a row, Mitt Romney trashed President Obama's record on government spending, suggesting the growing federal debt is going to lead to a "dramatic" tax increase and drag down an already sluggish economy.

    Speaking in St. Petersburg, Florida, the presumptive Republican nominee was flanked by a group of seniors and spoke in front of a digital sign ticking off the growing federal deficit.

    Echoing his speech in Iowa Tuesday, Romney said the country needs a president who will stop the "spending and borrowing inferno" and insisted he is the man for the job.

    While he acknowledged that both parties are to blame for the nation's debt problem, Romney repeatedly said that Obama had been critical of "his predecessor" in office—a nod toward former President George W. Bush, who informally endorsed Romney on Tuesday.

    But Romney declined to mention the former GOP president's name. That's perhaps a nod to how unhelpful a reminder of the Bush record would be to Romney's chances in a state like Florida, which has been plagued by some of the highest unemployment and foreclosure rates in the country since the recession began in 2008.

    Instead, Romney kept the focus on Obama, saying he hasn't "stopped" what his "predecessor" began but rather, "he's added to it."

    "Every year, every day, it's getting bigger and bigger," Romney said. "This is where your taxes are going. They're going to pay for the interest on the hidden debt."

    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/f...160843128.html

  2. Havakasha is offline
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    05-16-2012, 01:29 PM #2
    In this May 8, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks in Lansing, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
    WASHINGTON (AP) — When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney decried the "prairie fire" of U.S. debt Tuesday, he ignored some of the sparks that set it ablaze.

    One was the Great Recession that took hold before Barack Obama became president. That landmark event went unmentioned in Romney's speech. Another was a series of Bush-era tax cuts that Romney wants to follow with even lower rates.

    Instead he laid the blame on Obama, a president who has certainly increased the nation's eye-popping debt — but not, as Romney claimed, by nearly as much as all other presidents combined.

    A look at some of Romney's assertions and how they compare with the facts:

    ___

    ROMNEY: "America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined."

    THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That's roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined.

    in short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.

    ___

    ROMNEY: "I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno. We will stop borrowing unfathomable sums of money we can't even imagine, from foreign countries we'll never even visit. I will bring us together to put out the fire."

    THE FACTS: Romney's tax and spending plans don't support his vow to dampen the debt fire. He proposes to cut taxes and expand the armed forces, putting yet more stress on the budget, and his promise to slash domestic spending isn't backed by the big specifics. Romney's tax plan would cut the top income tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent and other rates by 20 percent each. He says he'd broaden the tax base and eliminate many deductions in the process, but details are missing.

    A study by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concluded earlier this year that Romney's plans would not make a dent in deficits, and could worsen them considerably. That study was done before Romney upped his tax cuts, inviting even deeper debt.

    That's not to say he can't at some point lay out the spending cuts necessary to achieve his aims. But he would have to slash domestic programs by more than 20 percent — far more than the 5 percent in immediate cuts he has proposed. It is nearly unthinkable that Congress would approve the evisceration of basic federal functions such as food inspection, air traffic control, the Border Patrol, FBI, grants to local governments, health research, housing and heating aid for the poor, food aid for pregnant women, national parks and much more.

    Nowhere in Tuesday's speech was there a new idea of how Romney would accomplish the promised deficit reduction. He spoke generally of reforming Social Security and Medicare, eliminating duplicative government programs, and transferring some functions to the states or the private sector, adding that he would "streamline everything that's left."

    The closest he has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1519253.html

  3. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    05-16-2012, 02:00 PM #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Havakasha View Post
    In this May 8, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks in Lansing, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
    WASHINGTON (AP) — When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney decried the "prairie fire" of U.S. debt Tuesday, he ignored some of the sparks that set it ablaze.

    One was the Great Recession that took hold before Barack Obama became president. That landmark event went unmentioned in Romney's speech. Another was a series of Bush-era tax cuts that Romney wants to follow with even lower rates.

    Instead he laid the blame on Obama, a president who has certainly increased the nation's eye-popping debt — but not, as Romney claimed, by nearly as much as all other presidents combined.

    A look at some of Romney's assertions and how they compare with the facts:

    ___

    ROMNEY: "America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined."

    THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That's roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined.

    in short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.

    ___

    ROMNEY: "I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno. We will stop borrowing unfathomable sums of money we can't even imagine, from foreign countries we'll never even visit. I will bring us together to put out the fire."

    THE FACTS: Romney's tax and spending plans don't support his vow to dampen the debt fire. He proposes to cut taxes and expand the armed forces, putting yet more stress on the budget, and his promise to slash domestic spending isn't backed by the big specifics. Romney's tax plan would cut the top income tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent and other rates by 20 percent each. He says he'd broaden the tax base and eliminate many deductions in the process, but details are missing.

    A study by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concluded earlier this year that Romney's plans would not make a dent in deficits, and could worsen them considerably. That study was done before Romney upped his tax cuts, inviting even deeper debt.

    That's not to say he can't at some point lay out the spending cuts necessary to achieve his aims. But he would have to slash domestic programs by more than 20 percent — far more than the 5 percent in immediate cuts he has proposed. It is nearly unthinkable that Congress would approve the evisceration of basic federal functions such as food inspection, air traffic control, the Border Patrol, FBI, grants to local governments, health research, housing and heating aid for the poor, food aid for pregnant women, national parks and much more.

    Nowhere in Tuesday's speech was there a new idea of how Romney would accomplish the promised deficit reduction. He spoke generally of reforming Social Security and Medicare, eliminating duplicative government programs, and transferring some functions to the states or the private sector, adding that he would "streamline everything that's left."

    The closest he has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1519253.html
    Typcial liberal - always looking back and blaming. I thought progressives looked forward?

  4. Havakasha is offline
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    05-16-2012, 03:09 PM #4
    Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a speech in Iowa in which he vowed to cut spending dramatically and slammed President Obama for spending too much:

    "Today America faces a financial crisis of debt and spending that threatens what it means to be an American. [...] The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party. And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire. He has spent more and borrowed more. [...] Washington has been spending too much money and our new President made things much worse."

    Romney singled out President Obama's stimulus plan for particularly harsh scorn:

    "President Obama started out with a near trillion-dollar stimulus package – the biggest, most careless one-time expenditure by the federal government in history."

    Leave aside the fact that it was actually a $787 billion plan and that Romney himself had praised it in January of 2009. Instead, check out what Mitt Romney told a town hall audience last week about spending:
    "I'm not going to cut a trillion dollars in the first year. And I heard a question. Why not? And the answer is: taking a trillion dollars out of a $15 trillion economy would cause our economy to shrink and would put a lot of people out of work."

    So from one side of his mouth, Romney says President Obama's "trillion-dollar stimulus plan" as the single worst expenditure the federal government has ever made. From the other side of his mouth, Romney says he wouldn't immediately cut a trillion dollars in spending because it would "shrink" the economy and "put a lot of people out of work. From one side of his mouth, Romney says President Obama's spending policies threaten "what it means to be an American," yet from the other side of his mouth Romney says departing from those policies would be bad for the economy.
    And the thing about Romney is that he says this kind of stuff every single day. Keeping up with his two-faced inconsistency is exhausting—and we've got nearly six more months of it ahead of us.

  5. Havakasha is offline
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    05-16-2012, 03:13 PM #5
    http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2...et.php?ref=fpa
    GOP Budget Violates Boehner’s Debt Ceiling Demand


    SAHIL KAPUR MAY 16, 2012, 1:15 PM 4253
    House Speaker John Boehner’s demand Tuesday that the next increase in the debt limit be accompanied by dollar-for-dollar “cuts and reforms” apparently comes with a caveat: It doesn’t apply to the GOP budget drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).

    Ryan’s House-passed blueprint would increase the nation’s debt by $5 trillion over a decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The plan has the strong support of congressional Republicans and conservatives.

    “I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase,” Boehner said during a speech in Washington. “This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance.”

    CNN’s Erin Burnett, interviewing Boehner Tuesday after his speech, confronted him about the contradiction.

    “Yeah, the big bad House Republican budget that would just gut everything under the sun, according to my friends across the aisle, would still require a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling over the next 10 years,” Boehner said. “Why? Because of the great big demographic bubble — baby boomers like me, that are going to retire and continue to retire for the next 20-25 years. It’s a big challenge.”

    In fact, the Ryan budget includes large tax cuts that would bring about a $4.6 trillion reduction in federal revenues, according to the Tax Policy Center. The plan’s deep cuts to domestic and safety-net programs would, however, significantly reduce the debt.

    CBO projects that by radically reshaping the size and scope of government, Ryan’s plan would pay off the nation’s debt by 2040. Ryan has promised to close tax loopholes to help bridge the revenue shortfall, although he has declined to specify any. Even so, using a 30-year window, which by itself is rife with problems, elides Boehner’s demand that raising the nation’s credit card limit be offset with near-term dollar-for-dollar savings.

    The dilemma exposes an important but somewhat obscured aspect of the Republican fiscal agenda: It’s not ultimately about deficit reduction. Although deficits have been a GOP messaging priority in the Obama era, when push comes to shove the party has routinely preferred to cut taxes rather than pay off the nation’s debt.

  6. Havakasha is offline
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    05-16-2012, 03:36 PM #6
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g.html?hpid=z2

    How Mitt Romney gets away with his lying
    By Greg Sargent
    Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a big speech in which he accused Obama of lighting a “prairie fire of debt.” It’s a good line, and it has received widespread media coverage.

    Romney’s speech has already been dissected by Jonathan Chait and Steve Benen. They note that it’s entirely at odds with conventional understanding of how deficits work, and utterly disconnected from context, rendering it almost unquantifiably misleading.

    But I wanted to make another point. If you scan through all the media attention Romney’s speech received, you are hard-pressed to find any news accounts that tell readers the following rather relevant points:

    1) Nonpartisan experts believe Romney’s plans would increase the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

    2) George W. Bush’s policies arguably are more responsible for increasing the deficit than Obama's are.

    Oh, sure, many of the news accounts contain the Obama campaign’s response to Romney’s speech; the Obama campaign put out a widely-reprinted statement arguing that Romney’s plans would increase the deficit and that he’d return to policies that created it in the first place.

    But this shouldn’t be a matter of partisan opinion. On the first point, independent experts think an actual set of facts exists that can be used to determine what the impact of Romney’s policies on the deficit would be. And according to those experts, based on what we know now, Romney’s policies would explode the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

    The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has taken a close look at this question. It has determined that relative to current policy — that is, if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, as Romney wants to do — Romney’s tax cutting plans would increase the deficit by nearly $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s on top of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Romney has promised to close various loopholes to pay for his tax cuts, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Until he does, the Tax Policy Center concludes, his plan would cost $5 trillion — which would be added, yes, to the deficit.

    By contrast, Obama’s plans would not increase the deficit by anything close to that amount. Relative to current policy, the Tax Policy Center has found, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by approximately $2 trillion over the next decade. Now, under Obama, the deficit would still increase. That’s because current policy means we’re forgoing the $4.5 trillion in revenues we’d gain if we let all the Bush tax cuts expire. But neither candidate is going to do that. Obama, however, would end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and bring in revenues through a variety of other tax increases. Bottom line: relative to current policy, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by bringing in $180 billion or more in revenues a year, or approximately $2 trillion over 10 years; Romeny’s plan would increase the deficit by nearly $500 billion a year — $5 trillion over ten years.

  7. Havakasha is offline
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    05-17-2012, 12:13 AM #7
    For the rest of this campaign, count on Republicans to tout Clinton as more pro-business than Obama and to do all they can to separate our current president from the best parts of Clinton’s legacy. Yes, many business folks who initially resented Clinton’s tax increases came to appreciate the economic boom that followed. But whose approach to government, budgets and taxes more closely resembles Clinton’s? Here’s a hint: It’s not the guy who went out of his way to vote against Clinton in 1992.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...y.html?hpid=z2

  8. Havakasha is offline
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    05-17-2012, 11:29 AM #8
    Do you agree that Romney has been caught in clear distortions?

  9. Havakasha is offline
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    05-18-2012, 09:01 AM #9
    How Odd That Mitt's Smitten With Clinton
    Posted: 05/17/2012 7:53 pm



    Mitt Romney is full of praise for Bill Clinton even as he heaps scorn on Obama.

    "Almost a generation ago, Bill Clinton announced that the era of big government was over," says Romney, "Clinton was signaling to his own party that Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem." By contrast, President Obama has "tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas."

    It's politics at its stupidest. Polls show Bill Clinton with higher favorability ratings than Obama, so Romney does what any vacuous opportunist politician does -- try to associate himself with more popular, and maybe bring along some of those white males who voted for Clinton in '92 and '96.

    But it won't work. It might even backfire.

    I was in Bill Clinton's cabinet. I was in charge of Clinton's economic transition team even before he became president. I've known Bill Clinton since he was 22 years-old.

    Romney doesn't know what he's talking about.

    Clinton doctrine? As president, Bill Clinton raised taxes. Government receipts as a percent of gross domestic product rose from 17.5 percent in 1992, when Clinton was elected, to 20.6 percent in 2000, when he left office. Supply-siders screamed. They predicted the end of civilization as we know it.

    In 2011, President Obama's third full year in office, government receipts were down to just 15.5 percent of GDP.

    Does Romney really prefer Clinton's approach?

    Under Bill Clinton, the top income tax rate was 39.6 percent. It's now 35 percent, courtesy of George W. Bush. Obama wants to return to the 39.6 percent rate, but he doesn't want to restore the Clinton rates on the middle class. Obama wants a lower rate on the middle class than the rate under Clinton.

    (Romney doesn't even mention George W. Bush, by the way. He now refers to him as "Obama's predecessor.")

    So why, exactly, does Romney prefer Clinton over Obama?

    The Obama administration has been far friendlier to business than Bill Clinton ever dreamed of. Obama bailed out Wall Street, no strings attached. He bailed out General Motors and Chrysler. His healthcare law creates giant benefits for Big Pharma and big insurance. By contrast, business hated Clinton's major initiatives, such as the Family and Medical Leave Act.

    Think about the modesty of Obama's healthcare plan (which was enacted) relative to Bill Clinton's immodest one (which wasn't, due largely to the opposition of Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA). Obama's plan bears far more resemblance to Romneycare in Massachusetts than to Bill Clinton's failed plan.

    During the first three years of Bill Clinton's administration the government invested far more in education, infrastructure, basic R&D, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (a wage subsidy for the poor) than has the Obama administration to date.

    So Romney really prefers Clinton to Obama?

    In his absurd attempt to drive a wedge between Obama and Clinton, Romney has even gone so far as to suggest Obama has a "personal beef" with the Clintons.

    Doesn't Romney know the Obama White House is brimming with veterans of the Clinton Administration -- from Gene Sperling (head of the National Economic Council) to Alan Kreuger (chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors), to Hillary Clinton herself?

    Doesn't he know Bill Clinton is already campaigning hard for Obama?

    And that almost everyone who served with Bill Clinton is dead set against almost everything Mitt Romney stands for?

    Oh, one more thing. Romney has done whatever he can to appeal to right-wing evangelical Christians, from opposing same-sex marriage to decrying abortion. Perhaps Romney doesn't remember Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath to cover up an affair with an intern?


    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert...b_1526027.html

  10. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    05-18-2012, 12:18 PM #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Havakasha View Post
    Do you agree that Romney has been caught in clear distortions?
    Don't care. Would rather vote for him than any democrat even remotely connected to Nancy (you have to pass it to know what's in it) Pelosi LOL.

    He's a politician. Of course he lies and distorts. Obama lies. I've cited several examples. He's on public record saying our tax dollars go to "big oil". That's an outright lie. He's on public record for saying that free enterprise doesn't work, never did, when in fact it built the greatest nation on Earth. That's crazy talk.

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