Mitt Romney's 47% World View is Dangerous and Hypocritical

Mitt Romney's 47% World View is Dangerous and Hypocritical

Will Moocherpalooza have an impact on the presidential campaign? It might. Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and their allies have been decrying the “entitlement society” and supposedly low number of Americans paying federal taxes for some time now. But the specific language and circumstances of Romney’s comments at a May fundraiser, first reported in Mother Jones on Monday, may capture the attention of average Americans in a way those previous speeches and writings did not.

The episode may also undermine Romney’s support among members of a Republican elite that was already wary of him. Politically speaking, the most significant op-ed on Tuesday wasn’t the even-keeled critique of Romney by David Brooks, a conservative who cares about ideas. It was the more caustic and, apparently, more exasperated blast from Bill Kristol, a conservative who cares about winning elections. That’s going to resonate with the surrogates, strategists, and financiers whose support Romney desperately needs to remain competitive.

But, in the long run, whether this episode affects perceptions of Romney may matter less than whether it affects perceptions of government.

Romney’s argument is actually an amalgam of two separate, although related, claims that you hear all the time in conservative circles. The first is about who pays taxes and, more important, who does not. Romney pointed out that, today, 47 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes. But Romney neglected to point out that most people still pay federal payroll taxes and state taxes, both of which are regressive. And most of the people who don’t pay income taxes now either paid them in the past or will pay them in the future. Romney really has no excuse for making this argument; critics, among them my valiant and persistent colleague Timothy Noah, have been pointing out these omissions for months. (And that's not to mention the fact that Romney himself pays relatively little in taxes, since he relies heavily on investment income that is subject to lower rates and can be easily sheltered.)

The other claim might seem the more defensible of the two: It’s the argument that many more people have become dependent on government programs, placing unsustainable claims on the federal treasury and reducing incentives to work. A seminal text for this argument is “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic,” an essay by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Its key piece of evidence is the observation that, since 1960, “government transfers to individuals” have risen sharply. According to Eberstadt,

    What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast and colossal empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages, and finances. Within living memory, the government of the United States has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, the U.S. government devotes more attention and resources to the public transfers of money, goods, and services to individual citizens than to any other objective: and for the federal government, these amounts outpace those spent for all other ends combined.

Mark Schmitt, a regular contributor to TNR and senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, wrote an elegant critique of Eberstadt’s argument. So did Lane Kenworthy, a sociologist at the University of Arizona. As they note, Eberstadt is correct when he says that the entitlement state has expanded significantly in the last 50 years. But that increase reflects two factors more than anything else: Health care and old people. (Relatively speaking, the cost of low income programs outside of health care is actually declining.) In 1965, with the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, the federal government assumed responsibility for financing medical care for the elderly, as well as the poor and disabled. It also boosted Social Security payments to provide more of the elderly with adequate incomes. The aging of the population and rising cost of medical care have made these propositions significantly more expensive over time. 

Are the people who benefit from these programs today takers rather than makers? Hardly. Most of these people contributed what they could towards he cost of these programs, via payroll taxes, during their working years. If they don’t contribute now—and, remember, the majority of them still contribute something, since Medicare has both cost-sharing and premiums—it’s because they are no longer capable of doing so. They’re too old or disabled to work, and their fixed incomes leave them relatively poor. As Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reminded me recently, median income for Medicare and Social Security beneficiaries is about $25,000.

The growth of these programs has placed significant new demands on the federal budget. That’s why there should be, and has been, a vibrant debate about how to make the programs sustainable, whether by reducing the money they send out or increasing the money they take in. The growth of other, more narrowly tailored programs (like welfare) has also contributed to the fiscal strain, although far less significantly. That’s why there should be, and has been, an equally vibrant debate about who is eligible for these particular programs and under what conditions they should get them. More nuanced conservatives, among them Brooks, Ross Douthat, and Ramesh Ponnuru, have been part of these discussions for some time.

But the fact that the entitlement state has grown shouldn’t, by itself, alarm us. It’s actually a sign of progress, because it’s a reminder that the government has stepped in to do what the market would not. We saw, in the years before Social Security, what the world looks like when seniors don’t have adequate pensions. And we saw, in the years before Medicare and Medicaid and (now) the Affordable Care Act, what the world looks like when people can’t afford to pay their medical bills. It was not pretty. But the price for addressing those failures was the creation of some massive government programs. They cost a lot of money, yes, but we all benefit from them at some point, as Schmitt noted in his essay: “Most of us, other than the permanently disabled, are givers and takers to government, because that's what it is to be part of a community or a nation.”

It also happens that in what has been called the "The Submerged State" - the part of government subsidies done largely through the tax code and other programs, Romney is one of the 47% who apparently, according to his words, needs to learn how to be independent. Two examples: Mitt Romney Benefited From Government Bailout: Report and Romney’s 'Crony Capitalism': Bain's Big Government Subsidies. In other words Romney and Bain are massive corporate welfare queens. So is every millionaire that buys a mansion whose mortgage is subsidized by tax incentives that we all pay for. Romney and his mindless followers have surely drunk the kool-aid. They live in a world totally detached from reality and guess what, they refuse to take responsibility for their lives and the damage their sick world view is having on the USA.

Myth Busters: President Obama and Appeasement

Myth Busters: President Obama and Appeasement

The Bizarre Meme That 'Appeasement' Caused the Libya Attack

There is no better example of the obliviousness to reality that characterizes current conservative attacks on Obama's foreign policy.

Professor Paul Rahe is a nice man who teaches history at Hillsdale College. Here's what he wrote about the attack on our embassy in Libya and the murder of four people, including the American ambassador:

    The American people cannot be allowed to discover that Barack Obama's policy of appeasement has persuaded our enemies that we are weak and feckless and has elicited aggression on their part. Nor can they be allowed to learn that Hillary Clinton and our minions have been grossly negligent with regard to the security of our embassies, consulates, and other installations in the larger Muslim world. Instead, we must ignore the spirit of the First Amendment and vent our wrath on an inept Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt.

So let me get this straight. President Bush cuts a deal with Moammar Gadhafi, in which the dictator forswears weapons of mass destruction, and is thereafter treated as a friend of the United States. President Obama takes office. The Libyan dictator threatens to massacre his own people. In response, Obama orders the U.S. military to play the lead roll in bombing Libya, helping rebel forces to oust and kill Gadhafi. Every last person in Libya knows that this happened.

And you assert, as if it's self-evident, that the Libyans attacked our embassy because of Obama's "policy of appeasement." What possible sense does that make? In Libya, none, and it doesn't make sense elsewhere either. Obama surged troops into Afghanistan before beginning the present withdrawal with bipartisan support in Congress and from American voters.

Obama escalated a drone campaign that has spread to half a dozen countries, ordered a raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, and helped to engage in a cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. He ordered a special forces raid on pirates that rescued hostages. All told, the various drone strikes that Obama has ordered have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.

Perhaps you have critiques of this record.

I certainly do!

To call it appeasement is to traffic in fantasies. But Rahe is hardly alone in doing it. It's a widespread meme on the right. And for a slightly different species of unreality, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

    At the very least, the Obama administration needs to drop the politically-correct euphemisms, stop the Cairo-speech banalities, and remind its diplomatic team that radical Islam's hatred of the West is not placated by loud American outreach, soaring mytho-history about Islam, or the particular politics, race, pedigree, or charisma of the occupant of the White House, but that Islamic expressions of that hatred most surely are predicated on the degree to which America appears diffident, apologetic, and unsure--or confident, occasionally dangerous, and unpredictable.

I don't know how the people of Libya judge America's confidence. But again, given our recent intervention in their civil war, after previously cutting a deal with their dictator, it's a fair bet that Libyans of all people regard as as "occasionally dangerous" and "unpredictable." When it comes to foreign policy, the conservative movement is running against a president of their own creation.

Victor Davis Hanson a hack on the payroll of wing-nut welfare at several "think tanks" has a record of supporting every failed policy of the neocons. Having no humility, lacking the intellect and maturity required for insight, Hanson keeps rolling the same stinking boulder up the same stinking hill no matter how many times it crushed him on the roll back down. As an historian ( that is a kind of joke, no one thinks Hanson is a real historian excpet some brain damaged conservative geeks) Hanson shows a remarkable ability to learn abosutely nothing from history. There are certainly hate filled radical Muslims. Out of the world's 1.1 billion those radicals represent perhaps 1%. Since most serial killers are white males by Hanson's logic we should declare war on white males as well as all Muslims.

Romney And Bain Boosted Agriculture Giant Monsanto In Spite Of Toxic Past

K.T. McFarland, Fox News Security Analyst, Repeats Myth That Obama Went On "An Apology Tour". This meme has been around since the first month Obama was in office. You'll note that at no time has any of these conservative Republican freaks ever produced a transcript - a full one - not an edited one - in which Obama apologizes for America. It never happened. If Republicans have values how come they never show them. Do they keep their values in a secret place, maybe the safe where Rush Limbaugh keeps his drugs and divorce papers.

Mitt Romney Is A Capitalist The Way A Bank Robber Is A Champion Of The Free Market

Mitt Romney Is A Capitalist The Way A Bank Robber Is A Champion Of The Free Market

A splendid accidental benefit of this year’s Republican presidential primary is that one of the most abusive dark corners of American capitalism, so-called private equity, is coming in for belated scrutiny and scorn. Delectably, the disclosures and criticisms are coming from leading Republicans, in a blatant undermining of cherished Republican ideology. Even before Democrats lay a glove on Romney, he will be assaulted by an investigative documentary that is more Michael Moore than Adam Smith. In politics, it doesn’t get much better than this.

“Private equity” was rebranded in the 1990s. It used to be called, more honestly, leveraged buyouts. While the job-killing aspect of many of the deals done by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and kindred financial engineers has come in for withering criticism, that is only one part of the mischief.

The phrase “private equity” conjures up images of venture capitalists pooling their funds and backing promising new ventures or contributing new equity and new management to companies in need of restructuring. But that is not how the game really works most of the time. Typically, private-equity companies borrow a ton of money, sometimes in collusion with incumbent management and sometimes in opposition to it, and take a company private. That is, the company’s shares are no longer publicly traded.

This maneuver has several advantages to the new owners. First, despite the picture of investors putting in equity, most of the money is usually borrowed. That produces a huge tax break, since the interest is tax-deductible. Second, the new owners can pay themselves large management fees as well as “special dividends.” Typically, they take out far more than they put in, by incurring debts carried on the books of the operating company.

For instance, when Bain masterminded a private-equity deal for HCA, one of America’s largest for-profit hospital chains (which has gone from private to public twice and which paid a multibillion-dollar fine for defrauding Medicare), Bain paid itself a management fee of $58 million, even though it had only put up 6.3 percent of the buyout fund.

Another big plus: The main regulatory principle protecting investors and by extension, the system as a whole, is disclosure. Under the securities laws administered by the Securities and Exchange Commission, management must disclose information deemed “material” to the interests of the investing public, including salaries, earnings, losses, assets, liabilities, and risks. But these laws flow from the fact that a corporation’s shares are publicly traded. A company owner by a private-equity outfit like Bain can operate completely in the shadows.

Then, there are three possible ways to cash in.  If the company turns out to be a success, like Staples (one of Bain’s big winners), the private-equity owners can take their legitimate share of the reward. But that turns out to be the exception. If the company, newly loaded up with debt, starts to falter, it can be broken up, with massive layoffs and cuts in health and pension benefits, and resold, usually at a profit for the private-equity owners.

Or the company can simply declare bankruptcy under Chapter 11 and shed its debts. Normally, shareholders think twice about incurring risks that could result in  bankruptcy, because one of the consequences is that the stock becomes worthless. But private-equity owners typically have already made their bundle on management fees and special dividend payouts, so even if the operating company goes bankrupt, they are still in the money.

And all of this is legal.

Oddly, as one abuse after another was exposed following the financial collapse, the predations of private equity have sailed merrily on. There is a terrific 2009 book on the subject, which I reviewed for the Prospect, Josh Kosman’s The Buyout of America. Read Kosman, and you will learn chapter and verse about how Bain, Carlyle, Blackstone, Texas Pacific Group, and the others plunder operating companies with taxpayer subsidies thanks to the borrowed money.

Among the tales Kosman tells: Thomas H. Lee Partners buys Warner Music, the world's fourth-biggest music company, and loads up the company with debt to finance the buyout and to pay itself $1.2 billion in dividends. One-third of the workforce is fired. CD&R, The Carlyle Group, and Merrill Lynch buy Hertz, the nation's largest auto-rental company, putting up just $2.3 billion in cash out of a $15 billion deal. The private-equity owners quickly recoup more than half of their down payment by loading up the company with even more debt. Funds for rental operations are cut by 39 percent, and Hertz's market share falls. In another example, Bain Capital, the company that made Mitt Romney rich, invests just $18.5 million in KB Toys, extracts $85 million in dividends, then takes the company into bankruptcy, stiffing employees, investors, and creditors.

In their tactical attack on Mitt Romney, the other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner. They owe it to the public to explain just what is improper about what private-equity operators do, what should be illegal, and what should be subject to disclosure.

Many Americans, bless them, have some naive ideas about how modern capitalism works in the USA. Many, if not most think if you work hard you earn money. You might get promotions and rises based on merit. You get ahead mostly by playing fair and being a decent human being. That is pretty much the way things operate for most Americans. Romney, Bain, Carlye group, and Blackstone operate by different rules. They make money as parasites on the value or capital created by others. That is not capitalism or even Americanism, it is moral corruption of the worse kind. No nation in history that has fallen so deep into this kind of depraved behavior has survived unscathed. We are well on our way to be a nation not of and for the people, but of and for the upper 1%. They used to call that tyranny.

CNN Facilitates Romney's Deceptive Highly Edited Video Attack Ad Against Obama and

Romney To Release Misleadingly Edited Obama Video As An Ad

Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic nominee for Senate in Massachusetts, has said that the Libor scandal calls the integrity of the entire financial system into question. Her opponent the morally bereft Scott Brown doesn't care because without a corrupt system where are his contributions going to come from.

Questions of Character - Mitt Romney's Bain Stories Do Not Add Up

Questions of Character - Mitt Romney's Bain Stories Don't Add Up

Romney didn’t start pushing the idea that he’d severed all ties with Bain in ’99 until late in the ’02 campaign, when Democrats played up Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant, a move that cost 700 workers their jobs. Confronted with this potentially damaging attack, Romney pleaded ignorance, insisting he couldn’t have had anything to do with the closure because it came two years after he’d left. That’s the story he’s stuck with ever since – and especially this year, as national Democrats have taken up the GST story.

The point here isn’t that Romney was running Bain Capital and making all of its key decisions from 1999 to 2002. But the story he tells now absolves him of all responsibility for anything and everything Bain did in those years. This would be reasonable if Romney had forged a clear and total break with the company in 1999, but he didn’t. His statement to the ballot law commission 10 years ago was supported by just about all of his actions between 1999 and 2002: Until the final few months of his Olympic tenure, Romney’s break from Bain was supposed to temporary.

According to Fortune magazine - who is being fed documents by a Bain employee, we are supposed to believe that while Romney was listed as exclusive owner of Bain from 1999 until 2002 he had zero say in how the company was run. Did Romney tell the water-cooler guy to come twice a week instead of once - probably not, but Bain moved around hundreds of millions of dollars during that time and Romney claims he did not have a clue what Bain was doing - even though he was collecting income from Bain. Only a kool-aid drinking conservative could believe that load of BS. Another bad news cycle for Mitt Romney, even Republicans want him to come clean

Comically Awful Survey Says 83 Percent Of Doctors Might Quit Over Obamacare . Republicans live in their own little world with their own version of reality.

President Obama Was Right - The Private Sector is Doing Fine

President Obama Was Right - The Private Sector is Doing Fine - Corporate Profits Just Hit An All-Time High, Wages Just Hit An All-Time Low

In case you needed more confirmation that the priorities of US companies and the US economy are screwed up, here are three charts for you.

1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. (And some people are still saying that companies are suffering from "too much regulation" and "too many taxes." Maybe little companies are, but big ones certainly aren't).

Corporate profits are climbing yet private sector not adding jobs

2) Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. One reason corporations are so profitable is that they don't employ as many Americans as they used to.



Right-Wing Media Side With Pro-Romney Forces In Wash. Post's Internal Bain Capital Dispute. Romney and Bain sent jobs, from companies they raided and sent them to Asia and Mexico. That is a fact and no amount of conservative Republican word games will change that fact. The reason conservative propagandists like Fox News, Hot Air and The Blaze are so outraged is that this fact about Romney screws with their lame attempts to portray Romney as someone who can relate to the middle-class.

Mitt Romney's Pants Are on Fire. Does America Want a Sleazy Serial Liar As President

Mitt Romney's Pants Are on Fire. Does America Want a Sleazy Serial Liar As President

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.

The Tax Policy Center’s Roberton Williams summed it up perfectly in a quote to me:

    “The bottom line is that whatever baseline you use, until Romney makes good on his promise to pay for his tax cuts, he would increase the deficit far more than Obama would.”

On the second point, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has determined that the policies put in place under Bush are the main driver of the deficits that are projected over the next decade.

Yet anti-American PACs like American Crossroads are running ads complaining about the deficit. They support a Romney presidency and the Romney/Paul Ryan (R-WI) economic plan which will increase the deficit and mean severe cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Obama's debt bad, conservative Republican debt is good. Its the Bush 43 presidency redux. Tell the Big Lie and repeat constantly.

Another thing the current pro-Romney ads are claiming is that Romney is a job creator. We have been through this round of lies already and the Romney as job creator myth will continue. Only the numbers will never add up. If Romney practiced accounting the way he figures his jobs record he would be arrested for fraud, but since he is a conservative he gets away with pants on fire lies. The ads are only using the jobs that some companies added, but they do not count the number of jobs lost. In a rare moment of candor - Romney Camp Admits That Its Bain Job Creation Number Is Bogus

Mitt Romney, last night’s Iowa caucus winner, has been on the campaign trail claiming that the private equity firm he ran, known as Bain Capital, was responsible for creating loads of jobs. Romney responded to criticism about his time at Bain by saying, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”

When a group of Romney backers ran an ad making the same claim, they were unable to back up the number with data. And as it turns out, the Romney camp can’t either, as it admitted that the statistic is nothing but cherry-picked job growth from a few companies that did well after they were bought by Bain:

    [Romney spokesman Eric] Fehrnstrom says the 100,000 figure stems from the growth in jobs from three companies that Romney helped to start or grow while at Bain Capital: Staples (a gain of 89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs), and Domino’s (7,900 jobs).

    This tally obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain. (Indeed, Romney made his comments in response to a former employee of American Pad & Paper Co. who says he lost his job after Bain Capital took it private.)

Bain Capital has been responsible for thousands of layoffs at companies it bankrupted, such as American Pad & Paper, Dade International, and LIVE Entertainment, which Romney’s stat completely leaves out. He’s also taking credit for jobs created long after he left the firm to launch his political career. To sum it up, the stat Romney uses is incredibly dishonest, like much of his jobs rhetoric.

Only in conservative LalaLand could Romney be thought of as a "success". When the rich rob the middle-class to make money that is a kind of theft, not success.

Why Does Mitt Romney Hate Retired Americans and the Disabled

What Does Mitt Romney Hate Retired Americans and the Disabled

Mitt Romney’s proposals to cap total federal spending, boost defense spending, cut taxes, and balance the budget would require extraordinarily large cuts in other programs, both entitlements and discretionary programs, according to our revised analysis based on new information and updated projections.

For the most part, Governor Romney has not outlined cuts in specific programs. But if policymakers exempted Social Security from the cuts, as Romney has suggested, and cut Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlement and discretionary programs by the same percentage — to meet Romney’s spending cap, defense spending target, and balanced budget requirement — then non-defense programs other than Social Security would have to be cut 29 percent in 2016 and 59 percent in 2022 (see Figure 1). Without the balanced budget requirement, the cuts would be smaller but still massive, reaching 40 percent in 2022.

The cuts that would be required under the Romney budget proposals in programs such as veterans’ disability compensation, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for poor elderly and disabled individuals, SNAP (formerly food stamps), and child nutrition programs would move millions of households below the poverty line or drive them deeper into poverty. The cuts in Medicare and Medicaid would make health insurance unaffordable (or unavailable) to tens of millions of people. The cuts in non-defense discretionary programs — a spending category that covers a wide variety of public services such as elementary and secondary education, law enforcement, veterans’ health care, environmental protection, and biomedical research — would come on top of the deep cuts in this part of the budget that are already in law due to the discretionary funding caps established in last year’s Budget Control Act (BCA).
Box 1: The Romney Tax Cuts and Our Estimates

Governor Romney has said he would offset an unspecified portion of his proposed tax cuts by reducing tax exemptions, deductions, and other preferences known as “tax expenditures.” Because of Romney’s spending cap (which covers interest payments along with other spending) and his balanced budget requirement, the depth of his required budget cuts depends on the degree to which the cost of his tax cuts would be offset through reductions in tax expenditures. In this analysis, we assume that Governor Romney would offset half of his proposed tax cuts, though we also provide estimates under alternate assumptions. This is a generous assumption: estimates from the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center indicate that the Romney tax cuts would cost about $4.9 trillion over ten years. Securing tax-expenditure savings equal to half that amount — about $2.4 trillion — would be extremely difficult, especially since Governor Romney has said he would not increase the low tax rate on capital gains and dividend income and would not cut heavily into tax expenditures for the middle class. Analysts at the Congressional Research Service recently concluded that securing savings of more than $100 or $150 billion a year from tax expenditures is likely to be difficult to achieve.

As explained below, our estimates of the depth of spending cuts that the Romney proposals would require are broadly consistent with what Governor Romney himself has said about the magnitude of his spending reductions. These updated estimates are based on new information and proposals from the governor, updated budget and economic projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), modifications in our own assumptions about “current policy” to match those that CBO and other budget analysts use, and other relevant factors.

Governor Romney’s cuts would be substantially deeper than those required under the austere House-passed budget plan authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Over the 2014-2022 period, Romney would require cuts in programs other than Social Security and defense of $7 trillion to $10 trillion, compared with a little over $5 trillion under the Ryan budget. By 2022, Romney’s cuts would shrink non-defense discretionary spending — which, over the past 50 years, has averaged 3.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and has not fallen below 3.2 percent — to between 1.1 percent and 1.6 percent of GDP.
The Romney Budget Proposals

During his campaign, Governor Romney has made four proposals that would significantly affect the overall level of federal spending, taxes, and the deficit:

    Cap total spending:  "Reduce federal spending to 20 percent of GDP by the end of my first term" and "cap it at that level."[1]
    Increase defense spending:  "Set a core defense spending floor of 4 percent of GDP."[2]   "Core defense spending," as Governor Romney defines it, encompasses 93 percent of the national defense budget function.
    Cut taxes:  Continue current tax policy by permanently extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and other tax cuts that are scheduled to expire, further reduce income tax rates by another 20 percent (the top tax rate thus would be 28 percent), eliminate the estate tax, eliminate the taxation of investment tax for people other than those with high incomes, reduce the corporate income tax, and repeal the taxes enacted in the 2010 health reform legislation.[3] 
    Balance the budget:  "I am planning on getting a balanced budget."[4]

This paper examines the combined effect of these four proposals, since they interact, to determine the amount of spending that would be available for programs other than core defense.

because it has been generally such a well run program Medicare costs have risen much slower and lower than private insurance costs. Mitt Romney's plans would accelerate medicare costs to exceed those of private insurance - imagine seniors having to pay 29% to 59% more out of their pocket.

Time for the Department of Justice to Investigate Criminal and Currently Gov of Florida Rick Scott For Purging Eligible Voters From Florida’s Rolls

Mitt Romney Embraces the flip-flop to pander to extreme conservative voters, Romney Campaign Attacks Stimulus Mitt Once Supported

Conservative Republican Media Starts Noise Campaign to Drown Out The Fact Obama Has Been a Conservative Spender

Conservative Republican Media Starts Noise Campaign to Drown Out The Fact Obama Has Been a Conservative Spender

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters not to buy into the "BS" of GOP-driven tax and spending claims and pointed to a Wall Street Journal MarketWatch column that noted that government spending is rising at its slowest pace since the 1950s. Far from heeding that advice, right-wing media figures relied on misleading economic talking points to attack Carney

...Right-Wing Media Respond By Saying The Debt Dramatically Increased Under Obama

Fox's Varney: "Obama Has Run Up The Debt A Great Deal More Than President Bush Did In His Full 8 Years." From the May 23 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto:

    STUART VARNEY (guest host): [I]f you are going to argue that the president is not a big spender, it's very difficult to argue against the hard, solid numbers. I've got figures which show very clearly that President Obama has run up the debt a great deal more than President Bush did in his full 8 years: 4.9 trillion for President Bush in 8 years. 5 trillion and more for President Obama in just three-and-a-half years.

( can Varney and Fox News do simple arithmetic? See charts above)

PolitiFact: "Obama Has Indeed Presided Over The Slowest Growth In Spending Of Any President Using Raw Dollars." From a PolitiFact post rating the MarketWatch finding that Obama has the lowest spending record of any president as "Mostly True":

    Obama has indeed presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president using raw dollars, and it was the second-slowest if you adjust for inflation. The math simultaneously backs up Nutting's calculations and demolishes Romney's contention. The only significant shortcoming of the graphic is that it fails to note that some of the restraint in spending was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly True. [PolitiFact, 5/22/12]

The charts include statistics from the OMB ( Office of Management and Budget, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and Haver Analytic. Those numbers would look even better except that from 2000 to 2008 conservative Republicans put all their spending on the national credit card, leaving those bills for the next guys to pay. Behavior that was both irresponsible and immoral, but hey that is the way conservatism works.

There are several ways to run a free market economy. One way is the Romney way. Where people with lots of money, power and connections give average Americans the shaft and call it "success".Why Mitt Romney’s Time At Bain Capital Matters

Michele Bachmann(R) Was Critical of Bain and Romney. Now Conservative Republicans Are In a Panic Over Bain Attacks

Michele Bachmann(R) Was Critical of Bain and Romney. Now Conservative Republicans Are In a Panic Over Bain Attacks

1. CAN’T BEAT OBAMA — “He cannot beat Obama,” Bachmann told ABC News in December. “It’s not going to happen.”

    2. ‘NEWTROMNEY’ — During the moment that Newt Gingrich was on top, Bachmann lumped the two leading candidates together as single entity — “NewtRomney” — a corrupt insider who supported socialized Medicine and other nefarious liberal polices. “When you take a look and people say this is a two man race I would agree, but the one man is ‘NewtRomney’ and the other man is Michele Bachmann, the only proven consistent conservative,” she told CBS News.

    3. ROMNEY WRONG ON IMMIGRATION, CLIMATE, STIMULUS — Bachmann went on to say that ” ‘NewtRomney‘ are on the same side as the president when it comes to cap and trade, the $700 billion bailout, illegal immigration, even the payroll tax this week.” “NewtRomney” also “advocated for the healthcare mandate,” she said.

    4. ‘BIG GOVERNMENT CANDIDATE’ — During a debate in Iowa, Bachmann charged that “Mitt Romney is the big government candidate.”

    5. ‘CHAMELEON’ — In a speech in Florida, Bachmann called Romney a “chameleon” for his propensity to change positions in the political winds.

    6. NOT PRO-LIFE — At the same speech, she said, “If you look at Mitt Romney, he…has been very inconsistent on his positions. He has been both sides of the abortion issue, on both sides of the issue of same-sex marriage.”

    7. PRO-GAY MARRAIGE — Bachmann accused Romney of signing “189 same-sex marriage licenses.” This attack was false, but Bachmann said it cast doubt on Romney’s willingness “to fight against same-sex marriage.”

    8. INDIVIDUAL MANDATE — Bachmann repeatedly hit Mitt Romney for implementing the antecedent of ObamaCare while governor of Massachusetts, saying the dreaded individual mandate “was Newt Gingrich’s idea, and Mitt Romney implemented it.”

    9. NOT COMMITTED TO REPEALING OBAMACARE — Bachmann often criticized Romney’s plan to repeal Obamacare, which she said didn’t go far enough. “You’ve got to full-scale repeal it, and I don’t think the governors have that level of commitment to do it,” she said in a radio interview in Iowa.

    10. ROMNEY ENDORSEMENT FALSE — Back in February, Bachmann seemed to take offense at the prospect of endorsing Romney, demanding the Boston Globe retract a “completely false” story reporting that negations were in the works. “Let me be absolutely clear — there are absolutely no negotiations between me and the Romney campaign regarding any pending endorsement of Governor Romney,” she said in a statement.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry(R) also said of Romney, "'There were a couple of times when I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.' He actually said this. Now, I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips, whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out."

Who Really Caused The Deficit? (CHART)

Anti-Progress Conservatives at  Daily Caller Distorts American Jobs Created By Green Energy Loans. The Daily Caller recently reported that "$3.1 billion in DOE loan guarantees" to First Solar "created mostly overseas jobs." In fact, the chairman of First Solar testified before Congress that "all the jobs directly created with the loan guarantees" are American.

The Daily Caller embedded video of his testimony in its report, but apparently didn't watch it all the way through. Neither did right-wing news aggregator Weasel Zippers (the infamous America hating web site), which ran with a similarly misleading headline.

Its the new conservative values - lie all the time about everything. Then sit back and hope some of the propaganda sticks.