On Mitt Romney’s 47% Comments

What Ezra said. Romney’s comments were so shocking – and disgusting – on their face, that it’s tempting to simply point to them or mirror the video and assume that the reader/viewer will know without thinking what’s wrong with them. Truthfully, most people probably will intuitively understand most or all of why Romney’s comments were so vile. But merely using implied assumptions to carry the day on a revelation of this magnitude is to do a disservice to the public record. In short, it’s not enough to simply point and roll our collective eyes at Romney’s despicable, divisive comments. It’s important, for the record (and even if it seems obvious), to point out exactly why Romney’s comments are so revealing about his character, his campaign, and his plans for the country.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein does exactly that (so I don’t have to!). Go read it all, but here’s a taste of Ezra’s devastating takedown of Romney’s remarks and the broader implications of what they mean:

For what it’s worth, this division of “makers” and “takers” isn’t true. Among the Americans who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes — which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid. Another 22 percent were elderly.

So 83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits because they’ve earned them. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed.

Ouch. And spot on. It’s devastating because it simply lays out the facts of who pays what kind of (and how much) taxes in modern America. I especially like Klein’s point that, at 15.3%, even someone who pays only payroll taxes is paying a greater percentage of his or her income than Mitt Romney himself paid in the one year we have complete data for (2011, in which Romney paid 13.9%). Romney’s surreptitiously-recorded statements, made behind closed (and presumably gold-plated) doors to a private audience of top-dollar donors when he thought nobody was listening, are in truth nothing new on the right. Their tone strongly echoes Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, riding around in the free Cadillacs the government bought them. Such noxious nonsense wasn’t any more true in Reagan’s day than it is today when Romney says similar words.

Klein’s service in this column is reminding us of exactly how and why it’s so false. That’s worth remembering, and especially worth repeating, loudly and often, when it rears its ugly head, as it has this week. So, gratitude to Ezra for remembering this stuff doesn’t do itself. Go read the whole thing; it’s more than worth your time.

Grand Old Marxists

What Timothy Snyder said.

Magnificent And Depressing

This got posted up while I was on vacation in San Francisco, so I missed it. Luckily, someone in my Twitter stream was still posting it up today, so it didn’t completely pass me by. It’s a graph from Pew Social Trends Report by way of The Atlantic, of the last sixty years of economic activity in America.

All of it.

Of course, any graph that tries to represent such an incredibly large amount of data is going to be pretty broad-brush. There’d be no comprehensible way to really do a thorough, deep dive on every facet of all the economic activity since the end of WWII until now — there’s just too much to say about it. But oftentimes, graphs which purport to cover very big-picture views of, well, anything, tend to not just use broad brushstrokes of necessity, but are also insufficiently focused in what they do try to represent as to be nearly-useless.

This one isn’t (click for larger version at Atlantic web site):

As the article at The Atlantic puts it:

Here’s the arc it captures: In the immediate postwar period, America’s rapid growth favored the middle and lower classes. The poorest fifth of all households, in fact, fared best. Then, in the 1970s, amid two oil crises and awful inflation, things ground to a halt. The country backed off the postwar, center-left consensus — captured by Richard Nixon’s comment that “we’re all Keynesians now” — and tried Reaganism instead. We cut taxes. Technology and competition from abroad started whittling away at blue collar jobs and pay. The stock market took off. And so when growth returned, it favored the investment class — the top 20 percent, and especially the top 5 percent (and, though it’s not on this chart, the top 1 percent more than anybody).

They ruefully conclude: “And then it all fell apart. The aughts were a lost decade for families, and it’s not clear how much better they’ll fare in the next.”

And that’s exactly it. This is what we’re up against, those of us who favor the immediate-postwar pattern of continued prosperity for all hardworking Americans, not just the richest and/or luckiest of us. This is what’s been lost, and what must be rebuilt.

What The Rude Pundit Said

Sad Mitt Romney Is Sad

Obama Recess-Appoints Richard Cordray to Head CFPB, GOP (P)outraged

I’ve said it on Twitter already, I’ll repeat it here: THANK YOU, PRESIDENT OBAMA, FOR RECESS-APPOINTING RICHARD CORDRAY TO HEAD THE CFPB:

President Obama will appoint former Ohio Atty. Gen. Richard Cordray on Wednesday to be the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, making a controversial decision to install Cordray while the Senate is in brief recess to avoid Republican opposition, according to a White House official.

And although that paragraph is “just the facts,” kudos as well to the LAT for getting the backstory right and not trying to soft-pedal it or shoot for false equivalence in an attempt to provide “balance”:

By refusing to allow Congress to adjourn, Republicans have been able to prevent recess — and recess appointments. The Senate and House have met every few days in pro forma sessions that last a matter of minutes.

Democrats, under Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, used the same strategy on occasion when President George W. Bush was in power.

But the Republicans have used the strategy throughout 2011 as the procedural arms race has escalated in the face of GOP opposition.

(emphasis added)

That’s exactly right: the GOP has escalated the procedural war(s) in both houses of congress – but particularly the Senate, which is more susceptible to such procedural abuses of power by the minority. This will be – in fact, already IS being – portrayed by the GOP as an unprecedented abuse of power, yada yada yada…you can almost write the half-whiny, half-fulminating script yourself. The important things here are two: 1) it is the GOP which has broken every vow, gone back on every “gentleman’s agreement,” stretched every rule to (and sometimes past) the breaking point in an effort to deny this President any victories (and ultimately to deny him a second term), and 2) on this issue, Obama did not bend. He did not cave. He did not give in to either GOP pressure, fear of not being “bipartisan” enough, or centrist-leaning, pro-banker aides’ advice to “let the (Wall St.) wookie win.”

I could probably waste a lot of time trying to guess what combination of circumstances motivated Obama to do exactly the right thing in this case: it could be because it was the right thing to do. It could be because he felt heat from progressive groups. It could be because it’s now campaign season and he’s switched back to “stump Obama” and away from “bipartisanship-seeking, conciliator-in-chief Obama.” I have no doubt that in some corners of the Internet, Obama’s decision today is already being portrayed as yet another glorious, planned-in-advance, perfectly-executed example of eleventy-dimensional chess. Any combination of those things might be the real story. But none of it matters much at this point, primarily because we’ll likely never really know what the reasons were (at least not until memoirs-time, years in the future, and possibly not even then).

But even though the political junkie in me would LOVE to know what the real combination of reasons or forces which compelled this particular decision were, and even though I think knowing would help many political observers get a better handle on how this White House operates, even THAT doesn’t change my opinion that it wouldn’t matter all that much if we knew. At least, not in comparison to the simple fact that the (obviously in-the-works for a while) decision to recess appoint Richard Cordray stands as a shining example of this administration choosing to utilize the full tools available to it in the service of the American people against powerful special interests (and the opposition party), instead of inexplicably leaving some tools available to the executive unused or cutting a premature deal that relied even in part upon the good faith of an opposition party clearly unmoored from not just restraint and ethics, but seemingly reality at times, as well.

Because although nothing is certain and no one can see the future clearly, this is the most hopeful signal we’ve had in a long time from this President that he understands the nature and MO of the forces arrayed against him as well as the realistic options he has available to him to make as much genuine progress for Americans as possible. And it is also a very hopeful signal from the President that he both wants and intends to do many of them. I seem to remember this guy from 2007-8. Only back then, he was just talking a good game about a lot of this stuff. The intervening three years have been a mixed bag in terms of both Obama’s willingness and his ability to deliver on them. Today, he’s talking about them again, but this time after having taken a giant, concrete step forward in DOING them.

Congratulations again, Mr. President, and thank you for doing the right thing when you had the ability to do so.

Holy Crap, That’s Some Good Writing

I’ve not read the book itself yet – though I’ve seen it recommended in several places – but this review of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, by Connor Kilpatrick in The Exiled not only makes me want to run out and buy the book immediately, it makes me want to find the author and plant a big wet kiss on both his cheeks. Get a load of this:

The first rule of debate: Never accept your opponent’s characterization of his own position. But for decades, liberals–in their perpetual Nerf-war against conservatives–have done just the opposite. While conservatives bloviate about traditionalism (Buckley), skepticism (Burke), sobriety (Taft), and order (Mill), liberals are the first to bobblehead in agreement. “Yes,” they say over paté and pinot at Davos, “That’s you.”

Yet no matter how many laws they break or billions they loot, how many phantoms they conjure, how many social ties they sever, how many innocents they imprison, torture and execute, no matter how many foreign monsters they champion, no matter how much they scream that two-plus-two equals five, and no matter how much they double-down on crazed schemes while swearing it’ll all be different this time, the liberal–dutiful little poodle that he is–still wags his head. “Yes, yes. Calm, measured, skeptical conservatism.”…Robin’s thesis is simple: ignore the Right-wing taxonomy. Conservatism–despite the seemingly incompatible respective ideologies of free-marketeers, slavers, neocons, neofascists, Buckleys, Federalists, Bloombergians, traditionalists, Tea Baggers, Randians, McCarthyists, libertarians, Birchers, Goldbugs, Jesus Freaks, J .Edgars, pro-lifers—has been, in reality, firmly united behind a single mission since the French Revolution: the creation of new regimes of privilege and domination in the face of democratic threats.

A better summation of modern-day conservatism I’ve not read in a long, long time – maybe ever.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Gets It EXACTLY Right

In yesterday’s New York Times (how the heck did I miss this when it came out??). He starts out by pointing out that the reason Barack Obama is President today is that he beat Hillary Clinton in a very, VERY close primary election (remember that?), and the reason he beat her despite their similarity of views is that Obama was against the Iraq war when it mattered, when only the dirty hippies were taking such an unpopular stance, while Clinton was not. The reason Obama was able to refer back to having taken that stand so often and to such great effect while he was campaigning in 2007-8, is because a group of said lefty agitators organized that anti-war rally, and invited young Barack Obama (then a nearly-unknown Illinois state Senator) to speak at it.

Read the whole thing, because there’s much more, but here’s a taste:

In the fall of 2002, Chicago’s own professional left organized a rally to oppose the Iraq War and invited Mr. Obama to join them. He accepted, and the first unwitting steps to the White House were taken. It is considerably harder to imagine Mr. Obama’s path through the Democratic primary had he been just another pro-war Democrat insisting that the base activists stop whining.

Mr. Obama, of course, is not an activist but a politician held accountable by a broad national electorate. He is thus charged with the admittedly difficult task of nudging the country forward, even as he reflects it. That mission necessitates appreciating the art of compromise, but not fetishizing it. Mr. Obama need only look to his hero for an object lesson. Parcel to emancipation, Abraham Lincoln, against the howls of radicals and black leaders, pushed for the colonization of blacks in Africa or the Caribbean, as middle ground between full equality and slavery. The scheme ended in embarrassment; Lincoln’s point man was exposed as a con artist who attempted to effectively re-enslave the blacks he was charged with leading. A Congressional investigation soon followed. It was a fiasco — and it was a compromise.

Obama has been much praised for the magnanimity he shows his opposition. But such empathy, unburdened by actual expectations, comes easy. More challenging is the work of coping with those who have the disagreeable habit of taking the president, and his talk of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” seriously. In that business, Obama would do well to understand that while democracy depends on intelligent compromise, it also depends on the ill-tempered gripers and groaners out in the street.

A Creed That Sums Up The Timeless Credo of a People: Eat Your Peas

(And, by “a people,” I mean “Obama fans”)

In other words, this has been another edition (since Atrios isn’t doing it as often as he used to, I thought I’d take up some of the slack) of What Digby Said.

Dean Baker Slaps Tom Friedman Silly

It’s well deserved, of course, as are most of the brickbats leveled at the man who once, in 2003, offered Charlie Rose the notion of “suck on this” as a rationale for the Iraq war (no, really, he did):

Ah, memories. This is who much of the current crop of leaders of industry (read: baby boomers) revere as a great thinker. Dean Baker gives us yet another reason (besides “suck on this” and the endless Friedman Units which Atrios coined and FAIR chronicled) why that was never true, and why treating Friedman as a serious person is, in fact, a pernicious misconception, not a harmless one:

The problem for which baby boomers share blame is that we allow people like Friedman to distract us from real concerns. For example, Friedman gives us a lecture today about living within in our means. In fact, the reason that so many people find themselves in bad financial shape today is that people like Friedman crowded out voices who saw real economic problems like the stock bubble, the housing bubble and the over-valued dollar.

The consumption of the 90s and 00s would have been entirely sustainable if the stock bubble and the housing bubble did not burst. And the country would not be borrowing from China or anyone else if the dollar fell to a level that was consistent with balanced trade. But the people who were warning of the collapse of the bubbles and who understand international trade did not have the same megaphone as Thomas Friedman.

Exactly.

 

ALMOST Feeling Sorry For The Tea Party

What Booman said (here’s a taste; go read the whole thing):

Look, this isn’t complicated. There are a few very wealthy people in this country and there are hundreds of millions of…well…everyone else. Very wealthy people have a particular set of concerns. They would like to keep the money they have and they’d like to set the optimal conditions for them to make much more money. In this, they’re not really much different than the rest of us, but their behavior can have an outsized impact on all kinds of things, like the integrity of investments or the quality and safety of products or the healthiness of the air and water or the kind of compensation we receive as their employees. Very frequently, our interests conflict with their interests. They’re badly outnumbered, so they should expect to lose political arguments pretty much all the time. But they have money. Lots and lots of money. And they use that money to create political speech and political outcomes. But speech isn’t enough. They need votes. And the only way for them to get enough votes to have their interests reach parity with ours is to align themselves with some other large segment of the population. In our recent history, this has been religious conservatives and, especially, Southerners who still retain an unhealthy contempt for the Federal government that beat them in the Civil War. There’s also another group of people, usually called libertarians, who are basically cheerleaders for rich fat cats not out of any particular self-interest but probably as a result of some quirky protein produced by their DNA in utero. Who knows what is wrong with these people? Most of them were born on third base, think they hit a triple, and are really pissed that they haven’t yet scored. They blame empathy. And Al Sharpton.

Just so.