Romney Wants to Give His Capitalist Cronies More Money
But, of course, he can’t get elected to do that unless he lies to the voters. Jonathan Chait at NYMag’s Daily Intel on “Mitt Romney’s big tax problem“:
Mitt Romney has been insisting for a while that he will not cut taxes for the rich, which everybody took to mean that he would lock into place the enormous, expiring Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, but cut taxes no deeper than that. He has said so over and over again. Here he is saying, “If I’m going to use precious dollars to reduce taxes, I want to focus on where the people are hurting the most, and that’s the middle class. I’m not worried about rich people.” And here’s Romney insisting, “I’m proposing no tax cuts for the rich.”
Today the Tax Policy Center analyzes his plan, and it turns out that Romney would, in fact, cut taxes for the rich, even below current levels. The highest-earning one percent would get an additional tax cut averaging $82,000 a year. Romney’s plan would also raise taxes on the lowest quintile by an average of $157 a year…
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post lines out the numbers:
Here’s the bottom line. When comparing how people are doing under today’s tax policies to how indivuals would do under Romney’s plan in 2015, these are the changes you’d see:
Individuals in the top 0.1 percent, or those making over $2.8 million, would get an income tax cut of nearly half a million dollars.
Individuals in the top one percent, or those making over $629,000, would get a cut of over $80,000.
Meanwhile, people in the other percentiles would see a tax reduction, but a far smaller one. Those in the 95-99 percentiles would see a tax cut of around $7,500. Those in the 90-95 percentiles would see a tax cut of around $2,500. And those in the 80-90 percentiles would see a cut of around $1,100.
Broken down by quintile, those in the fourth highest would see a tax cut of roughly $6,900; those in the third highest would see a cut of around $500; and those in the bottom two would see a slight increase…
You could say that Willard Romney is just another religiously-oriented GOP candidate; his true religion is the almighty dollar, every blessed one of which he wants taken from the heathen hands of peasants like us, and tendered to the pious care of his fellow Point-One-Percenters.
January 6, 2012 12:44 am
Posted in: Assholes, C.R.E.A.M., Election 2012, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
52 Comments
Thursday Evening Open Thread
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
By popular request (okay, at least two commentors found it as amusing as I did), Dana Milbank on “Mitt Romney Out of Control“:
The day after his impossibly thin eight-vote victory, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination flew here for a town hall meeting at Manchester Central High School, where he was to bask in the endorsement of his 2008 arch rival, John McCain.
But the senator grimaced when he was introduced, and as Romney delivered his own stump speech, an increasingly impatient McCain pulled up his sleeve and checked his watch. McCain gave his endorsement address without mentioning Romney’s Iowa win until the end. “By the way, we forgot to congratulate him on his landslide victory last night,” he said, laughing. Romney ignored him.
Then came the questions: First, one from an Occupy Wall Street infiltrator needling the candidate about his belief that “corporations are people.” A second questioner wanted to know why Romney flip-flopped on universal health care when he was governor of Massachusetts and why he would not increase health-care costs. Later, a Chinese American woman accused Romney of saying “degrading” things about China, and she complained that “after 20 years of Reagan trickle-down economics, it didn’t help me. My tin can is still empty.”
Romney sat through most of the ambush with a tight grin and raised eyebrows. At length he attempted to challenge the woman to name a place where income is higher than it is in the United States…
When the end mercifully came, the candidate gave a final rallying call to “get the White House back.” All but a few rose and put on their coats without applauding…
Much more schadenfreude at the link. Willard is not a humanoid who improves with familiarity, and if President Obama’s re-election team can’t take advantage of that, they don’t deserve to be called “Chicago-style political thugs”, or whatever the Repub insult-of-the-hour is.
Any other encouraging developments, political or otherwise, this evening?
January 5, 2012 9:23 pm
Posted in: Election 2012, Open Thread, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
118 Comments
Blame Taibbi
One of the people I like to poke and prod on twitter is David Freddoso, a right winger who works for the Examiner and other various wingnut sites. I think his world view is crazy and all that, but I like the fact that I can pop in every now and then and basically call him a moron, he’ll respond in kind, and then we both go on our own way. That’s pretty rare- most right wingers will just lose their shit you say anything to them, and the next thing you know they’ve tweeted at you 100 times.
At any rate, last night he tweeted something to the effect that if Mitt Romney wins the nomination, he is going to have to “educate people about private equity.” I just giggled when I read it, and basically responded, wait a minute- you guys spent the last three years getting people to yell “get government out of medicare” and know you think you have a shot in hell at explaining something like private equity? To which he responded with this gem:
To back up his “point,” he then directed us to this Rolling Stones piece:
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.
After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.
Matt Taibbi on the response to this article: “Rand’s Medical Group: Obama Hypnotized Voters”
“I’m anti-spending and anti-government,” crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. “The welfare state is out of control.”
“OK,” I say. “And what do you do for a living?”
“Me?” he says proudly. “Oh, I’m a property appraiser. Have been my whole life.”
I frown. “Are either of you on Medicare?”
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
“Let me get this straight,” I say to David. “You’ve been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?”
“Well,” he says, “there’s a lot of people on welfare who don’t deserve it. Too many people are living off the government.”
So in the wingnut hive mind, it wasn’t distributed right wing talking points, or colossal ignorance or anything like that that had legions of blue hairs in hoverrounds all over the country yelling “Get government out of Medicare.” Nosirree. It’s either because Taibbi started something at a rally or Rolling Stone’s circulation numbers in the 65 and older set are FUCKING PHENOMENAL. And even then, you have to ignore the fact that Taibbi wasn’t telling them to yell that, he was pointing out how stupid it was to tell government to get out of a… government program. You’d also have to ignore the fact that the media was reporting these sorts of things prior to Taibbi’s column.
So the next time you see one of these:
Come across one of those in the wild, and you know who to blame. Matt Taibbi.
Priceless.
January 5, 2012 9:06 pm
Posted in: Clown Shoes, Our Failed Media Experiment, Teabagger Stupidity
37 Comments
Paint It Blah
This may be the most pathetic and feeble backtrack of a dog whistle ever:
Iowa runner-up Rick Santorum said Thursday that he would be “a much bigger player” than expected in the New Hampshire primary and denied saying that he didn’t want “to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”Santorum allegedly made the controversial comments when discussing welfare in an interview Wednesday night with Fox News, but he maintained that people misheard the word “black” when he stumbled on a word.
“I looked at that, and I didn’t say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn’t,” Santorum said.
I imagine this is going to kill him with the blah vote.
We’ll see if the media lets him get away with this. Or if they already have.
January 5, 2012 8:08 pm
Posted in: Assholes, Election 2012, Our Failed Media Experiment, Post-racial America
141 Comments
Some Good News on the Economy
Not great, but still good:
For the first time in many years, manufacturing stands out as an area of strength in the American economy.When the Labor Department reports December employment numbers on Friday, it is expected that manufacturing companies will have added jobs in two consecutive years. Until last year, there had not been a single year when manufacturing employment rose since 1997.
And this week the Institute for Supply Management, which has been surveying American manufacturers since 1948, reported that its employment index for December was 55.1, the highest reading since June. Any number above 50 indicates that more companies say they are hiring than say they are reducing employment.
There were new signs Thursday that the overall jobs climate was improving, as the Labor Department reported that new claims for unemployment benefits fell last week and a payroll company’s report showed strong growth in private-sector jobs in December.
As stores have filled with inexpensive imports from China and other Asian countries, the perception has risen that the United States no longer makes much of anything. Certainly there has been a long decline in manufacturing employment, which peaked in 1979 at 19.6 million workers. Now even with hiring over the last two years, the figure is 11.8 million, a decline of 40 percent from the high.But those numbers obscure the fact that the United States remains a manufacturing power, albeit one that has been forced to specialize in higher-value items because its labor costs are far above those in Asia. The value of American manufactured exports over a 12-month period peaked at $1.095 trillion in the summer of 2008, just before the credit crisis caused world trade volumes to plunge. At the low, the 12-month figure fell below $800 billion, but it has since climbed back to $1.074 trillion. Those figures are not adjusted for inflation.
Excellent timing, since Newt plans to let the NAACP in on the secret that black people would like jobs more than food stamps. This white privilege thing isn’t going to mean a hill of beans if Gingrich keeps letting out our secrets. And yes, I’m still completely flabbergasted he said that and that it doesn’t immediately disqualify him for office in the minds of every person in the country. There are still people who will vote for him, which I find shocking and upsetting at the same time.
January 5, 2012 7:06 pm
Posted in: Domestic Affairs
63 Comments
Another Sign That The Apocalypse Is Upon Us…
....this, presented without further comment, via TPM:
Former New Life Church pastor and self-described “bisexual” Ted Haggard swapped wives with actor and self-described “church” Gary Busey for the ABC reality show Celebrity Wife Swap.
Uh.
What?
Speechless, me.
...
Really. The Mayans might just have bee on to something. 2012 could be it for our species, or at least for any culture that could spawn Celebrity Wife Swap. (Which is, I suppose, perhaps the perfect habitat for the guests mentioned above.)
I say we throw in the trowel and await our Vogon overlords.
Image: Lovis Corinth, In Max Halbes’ Garden, 1899
January 5, 2012 4:21 pm
Posted in: Decline and Fall, My Own Theological Premises About The Nature Of Sex, We Are All Mayans Now
89 Comments
This Will Make You Laugh
It sure made me laugh, at least:
(via)
Almost as funny as this- 25 People who Googled Santorum for the First Time. Personal favorite, “After I googled Santorum, I now know why he goes by Rick.”
January 5, 2012 3:28 pm
Posted in: Election 2012, Humor
100 Comments
Mid-Day Open Thread
Been a shitty couple of days (except for that big win last night), so I think we all need a mid-day bit of kitty porn:
I’ve never met another cat who makes relaxing look so natural. He wasn’t born to hunt and prey, he was born to laze.
January 5, 2012 2:01 pm
Posted in: Cat Blogging, Open Thread
103 Comments
And Today’s Most Blatantly Racist GOP Statement of the Day
“I will go to the NAACP convention, and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps,” said Gingrich.
The title of this post may be a touch misleading, because it is only 1:30 and there is still time for another candidate to take it to 11.
January 5, 2012 1:25 pm
Posted in: Assholes, Election 2012, Post-racial America
183 Comments
A New Virus To Be Injected Into the Public Discourse
Impressed by the effectiveness of the liberal Center for American Progress, a group of conservative journalists and operatives are preparing to engage in their own sincerest form of flattery — launching an advocacy group with a similar name and mission but very different target.Part assault on CAP and part homage, the Center for American Freedom’s goal is to wage a well-funded assault on the Obama White House and the liberal domination of partisan online media.
Based in Washington, it will have an annual budget of “several million dollars,” according to its chairman, Michael Goldfarb, and will house a new conservative online news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, edited by former Weekly Standard writer Matthew Continetti. It will also include a campaign-style war room led by two former chiefs of the Republican National Committee’s vaunted research operation, and a media-monitoring shop that aims to do to MSNBC what Media Matters has done to Fox News.
“This is a fairly modest start-up that really hopes to combat the Center for American Progress and create something that in the not-so-distant future can be competitive,” said Goldfarb, 31, a former Weekly Standard writer who is now a partner in the lobbying firm Orion Strategies, where his clients include Charles and David Koch — liberal bugaboos and dominant funders of a range of conservative causes and politicians.
There is no slimier person in politics than this guy:
There seriously is no bigger douchebag on the planet, and I don’t mean Rick Sanchez. That the right wing is willing to throw millions of dollars at him to spew his bile tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about the modern right. Oh, and Matt Continetti? That’s this winner.
January 5, 2012 1:00 pm
Posted in: Assholes, Kochsuckers, Politics
75 Comments
Got My Calendar
UPS just delivered my Balloon-Juice calendar and it’s a beauty. It’s not too late to order yours. My dog is on the lower left corner of October for those of you who have one. Here’s an open thread.
January 5, 2012 12:43 pm
Posted in: Open Thread
30 Comments
More of This, Please
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post highlights the Obama administration’s response to Romney’s craven defense of his fellow One Percenters:
[Wednesday] Romney denounced the Cordray appointment as “Chicago style politics at its worst.” The Obama campaign responds:“Mitt Romney today stood with predatory lenders and Republicans in Congress over the middle class. He doubled down on his promise to eliminate the Wall Street watchdog and allow Wall Street to write its own rules again, leaving consumers vulnerable to hidden fees, financial traps and excessive risk taking that will hit their pocketbooks. Governor Romney has made clear he has not learned the lessons of the economic crisis, instead, he’s giving the most irresponsible financial actors a bright green light to pursue profit at any cost to communities across America.”Note the mention of “Republicans in Congress.” Dems know it’s imperative that they prevent the eventual nominee from achieving separation from the unpopular Congressional GOP and its policies.
There is a sidebar poll asking “Has Mitt Romney locked up the Republican nomination?“. Responses, as of pre-dawn Thursday, are running 71% against.
January 5, 2012 10:59 am
Posted in: Election 2012, Proud to Be A Democrat, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
144 Comments
Your Liberal Media
Is there a bigger candy-ass crybaby prima donna than Keith Olbermann?
Current is a start-up of sorts, lacking the backing of a deep-pocketed parent company — something Mr. Olbermann hasn’t contended with in years. When the channel put on Iowa caucus coverage without Mr. Olbermann on Tuesday, it was derided by online commenters as cheaply produced; “the production values were only slightly better than local public access,” wrote Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review, calling it “hilarious.”Mr. Olbermann did not directly cite production values as a reason for his absence, but he said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, “I was not given a legitimate opportunity to host under acceptable conditions.”
Current TV is a start-up and Olberman apparently has equity, but even a partnership stake and the understanding that things might be lean isn’t enough for this pompous drama queen. Instead of making light of the production values while hosting the show, he took his toys and went home.
Also, too: the sparkling water in his dressing room was Perrier, not Pelligrino, and it wasn’t chilled to the correct temperature, as clearly specified in his rider.
January 5, 2012 10:48 am
Posted in: Assholes
107 Comments
Happens every time
No, there is nothing interesting or special about Rick Santorum. The guy was the poster boy for Bush-era big guvmint conservatism. He ran the K street project out of his own office. He has a long history of statements that are not just crazy-conservative, but get up and move to another part of the bus crazy. His issue agenda is so far gone that it makes even Focus on the Family types uncomfortable. He has the charisma of a banana slug and he lost by record margins to Bob Casey, a guy so unmemorable that he could lose a primary to Generic Democrat. When the fundie base gets a good look at their last savior, most will turn out for the anointed mormon and the rest will stay home and watch Wheel of Fortune.
Also too. Rick Perry’s dynamo campaigning style will not take the race by storm. Herman Cain’s business acumen does not give him some unique edge, and people will not collectively forget that Newt Gingrich is an own goal in plus-size pants.
Steel yourself for a season of Romney/Paul #1/#2 primary results, epic low turnouts and a solid ten months of frantic flopsweat from trolls in the comment section of internetblogs.
January 5, 2012 10:10 am
Posted in: Election 2012
127 Comments
Open Thread
Still in the after-glow from last night’s game. This kind of sums things up:
No Tigers were actually killed last night, animal lovers.
I may come down off this game high later on and post something worthwhile.
January 5, 2012 9:54 am
Posted in: Sports
19 Comments
