Elizabeth Warren Vindicated as Fox News Use Argument That Rich Don't Make It On Their Own

Elizabeth Warren Vindicated as Fox News Use Argument That Rich Don't Make It On Their Own

Last fall, right-wing pundits at Fox News and elsewhere savaged Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, after video circulated of the former Obama administration official explaining that because business moguls take advantage of infrastructure and education funded by taxes, "[t]here is nobody in this country who got rich on his own." This morning, an unlikely group offered up comments strikingly similar to Warren's: the hosts of Fox & Friends Sunday.

During a segment on wealthy Americans who renounce their citizenship to avoid paying taxes, Clayton Morris offered up this advice to such persons: "Get out of here. But the point is, you've made all this money on the backs of the infrastructure, taxpayers that got you there, the roads that taxpayers pay so you can drive back and forth to work to get rich on a regular basis, and now you're going to leave so you're not going to pay taxes."

Alisyn Camerota added, "[A]re they just greedy? I mean, are they just -- after this country allowed you the entrepreneurial spirit, the freedom to make all this money, now you're going to leave it? I mean, that does send the message that you care more about your money than you do about your country."


Compare their comments to those Warren made during a campaign stop in August while pushing back against claims that asking the wealthy to pay more in taxes is "class warfare":

    WARREN: There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there -- good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look. You built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great idea -- God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

There are some differences, of course. Fox & Friends being what it is, the segment concludes with the hosts determining that "the answer" is to "be part of the solution" by "stay[ing] here and... fight[ting] for better tax laws," followed by a series of jokes about European toilets. But both make the case that the private sector success of the wealthy is driven by government investments funded by the public. Fox, of course, has long been a chief promoter of the very claims of "class warfare" Warren criticized.

In October, Fox News' Andrew Napolitano responded to Warren's comments by labeling her a "crazy lady." Reason magazine editor in chief Matt Welch called them "the best advertisement I've seen in a long time for limiting the size and scope of government" and "terrifying." Other right-wing commenters termed her remarks "dunderheaded" "piffle" that made her sound like a "guileless, fevered Marxist."

It remains to be seen whether the right will similarly target the "Marxist[s]" on Fox & Friends' curvy couch.

The least Fox News could do is send Warren a check for co-opting her speech. But like your average conservatives, the Fox News propaganda channel tends to take what it wants, earning it or creating something themselves would just be too much work.

It's Not About the Damn Ponies

It's true that Romney makes most of his annual income off of dividends and capital gains he earns by investing his fortune. But he made $374,327.62 in 2010 on speaker's fees alone. That's a figure, by the way, that Romney characterized as "not very much" money. Kathleen Parker thinks people are just hating on the Romneys' success out of some kind of pony-envy, but we're really appalled about something completely different. We're appalled that he wants to cut way back on programs to help the poor and middle-class survive and advance in our society at the same time that he wants to hand out a $250,000 annual income tax break to millionaires. Over a four-year presidential term, that would be a million dollar tax break to everyone who made a million dollars a year for those four years. You can't make a proposal like that when you are worth a quarter of a billion dollars and then complain about the budget deficit and call for massive cuts in social spending, and then think you'll be above criticism.

As for Ann Romney's horse, Ms. Parker doesn't get into the specifics for a good reason. Apparently, the Romneys formed a corporation to deal with this horse, and they declared a $77,000 loss in 2010 for that corporation. If the corporation ever makes any money by, for example, breeding this Olympic-performing horse, they can write off those losses. And you thought the Olympics were about amateur sports!

Romney says our taxes - the lowest they have been in fifty years - are too high. Yet here we are subsidizing Romney's expensive hobby. Mitt and Ann are welfare queens, simple as that.

If they gave Olympic Gold Medals for lying, Mitt Romney would have a mansion full of them. Character does matter. Romney says he is a man of character and morals. When can the American people start to see some of that character and morality? After the election will be too late.

Who Killed Womens Jobs? The Conservative Republican Pretend Patriots

Who Killed Womens Jobs? The Conservative Republican Pretend Patriots

Yesterday on Meet the Press David (the GOP Talking Point Spigot) Gregory peppered Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on the issue of jobs losses faced by women under President Obama.  Most news items covering his response have only pointed out the first said...

    "It's a ridiculous and misleading way of looking at the economy"

You can find that quote as the headline at the L.A. Times,, ABC News, Business Insider, Politico, and CBS News among others.

But what I found more interesting is what he said next.  He pointed out that many of the job losses that have occurred while Obama has been President have been in the Public Sector and that's has disproportionately affected police, firemen, nurses and Teachers who are overwhelmingly female.

    I asked Geithner about the technical accuracy of the Romney claim and he explained “this crisis was a very damaging crisis, hurt everybody.  And it began in, as you know, in early 2008.  And a lot of the early job losses in 2008 affected men, because they affected construction and manufacturing. And as the crisis spread and state and local governments were forced to cut back on services and fire a lot of teachers, that caused a lot of damage to women, too.”

Politifact Rated the Romney claim as Mostly False and correctly noted that it come from the BLS:

    Romney’s campaign pointed to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment figures from January 2009, when Obama took office, and March 2012, for all employees and for female employees.

    Here they are:

    * Total Nonfarm Payroll Jobs:

    January 2009: 133,561,000

    March 2012: 132,821,000

    Net loss: 740,000 jobs.

    * Total Female Nonfarm Payroll Jobs

    January 2009: 66,122,000

    March 2012: 65,439,000

    Net loss: 683,000 jobs.

    They then divided the net loss among women by the total net loss and came up with 92.3 percent.

Although the number is technically true, it doesn't tell the complete story as noted by former Reagan Official Bruce Bartlett:

    "To the extent there have been excessive job losses among women, a lot of it has to do with the fact that there has been an enormous reduction in state and local government employment," Bartlett said. "The decline ... has been especially pronounced in this recession as opposed to other recessions."

This is what the loss of public sector jobs looks like compared to private sector gains under President Obama.

It's not like the GOP has necessarily been a fan of job growth among the public sector.

    "Over the last two years since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs," Boehner said. "And if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We're broke. It's time for us to get serious about how we're spending the nation's money."

And the Center for Budget and Policy points out, State Budgets have been hit hard by this Recession.

    The Great Recession that started in 2007 caused the largest collapse in state revenues on record. Since bottoming out in 2010, revenues have begun to grow again, but states are still far from fully recovered. As of the third quarter of 2011, state revenues remained 7 percent below pre-recession levels, and are not growing fast enough to recover fully soon.

    Meanwhile, states' education and health care obligations continue to grow. Next year, states expect to educate 350,000 more K-12 students and 1.7 million more public college and university students in the upcoming school year than in 2007-08.[2] And some 5.6 million more people are projected to be eligible for subsidized health insurance through Medicaid in 2012 than were enrolled in 2008, as employers have cancelled their coverage and people have lost jobs and wages.[3]

    Consequently, even though the revenue outlook is trending upward, states are still addressing large budget shortfalls by historical standards as they consider budgets for the upcoming year. In some states with two-year budget cycles, projected shortfalls for fiscal year 2013 have already been closed through spending cuts and other measures scheduled to take effect in the next fiscal year, but in the majority of states they must be closed through legislative action in the coming months in order to meet balanced-budget requirements. Extremely large shortfalls addressed in recent years have led to deep cuts in critical public services like education, health care, and human services; the new shortfalls likely will prompt legislators to make further cuts in those areas on top of those already enacted.

And in which states have those public sector cuts been the worst?  You guessed it - in Republican Controlled States.

    The 11 states that the Republicans took over in 2010 laid off, on average, 2.5 percent of their government workforces in a single year. This is compared to the overall average of 0.5 percent for the rest of the states. [...] [T]hese 11 states as a whole account for a total of 87,000 jobs lost, reflecting around 40.5 percent of the total.

    ...

    Texas and the 11 newly-Republican states accounted for a total of 71.5 percent of the year’s public sector job losses, even though they account for less than one-third of the nation’s public sector workers.

    ...

    Many government job losses were due, indeed, to the recession’s impact on state budgets. But in many of the newly-Republican states, the GOP made the problems worse. In Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Maine, Republican-controlled legislators not only cut public sector jobs, they led assaults on public sector unions, targeting government workers under the guise of balancing their budgets. In those and others, Republicans exacerbated their states’ deficits with tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, thus leading to even more public sector layoffs that didn’t take place in states that didn’t pursue similar policies.

In several states the attack on public sector jobs has exempted police and firefighters, which leaves teachers and nurses unions to take the majority of the brunt simply so that GOP could give their corporate and Wall Street buddies Bigger Tax Breaks.

The bottom line is that President Obama attempted to stop these types of job losses by extending his emergency stimulus funding to the states.  Guess who stood in the way of that?  I'll let Jeff Hayes of the Institute for Women's Policy Research say it via Politifact:

    "If you break out the 683,000 jobs women lost between January 2009 and March 2012, 64 percent were in government and only 36 percent in the private sector."

    That leads us to a point made by Eileen Appelbaum with the left-leaning Center on Economic and Policy Research. She noted that after the first wave of money in the president’s stimulus bill had run out, Obama asked for another $23 billion in "emergency aid" for state and local governments. The money was sought to avert the layoffs of as many as 300,000 public school teachers, but House Republican leaders stripped it.

    "You could hardly blame Obama for that," Appelbaum said.

There you have it, we now see who killed all those jobs for women.  It wasn't President Obama.  It wasn't Col. Mustard in the Kitchen with a candlestick.

It was the G.O.P., in the Legislature, with a Tax Cut.

Lots of charts at the link. Conservatives cannot have it both ways - cutting jobs that disproportionately affect women and older workers, then turn around and claim someone else is to blame. When a political movement is constantly contradicting itself, telling the public long convoluted stories that bury the truth in bullsh*t, that political movement never has the best interests of the people at heart.

Ann Romney's and the Conservative Republican war on women has an actual body count.