The
Romney campaign this week is basing its message off of former
President Reagan’s “are
you better off?”
question from his 1980 campaign, even though Romney himself admitted
in an interview earlier this year that “of
course [the economy is] getting better”
under President Obama. And the numbers don’t lie.
While
the economy is only recovering slowly, the trend lines when it comes
to jobs, wealth, and the success of American business are all moving
in the right direction, as
these charts
by the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Christian Weller
show:
The
Romney/Ryan proposal to transform Medicare’s guaranteed benefit
into a “premium support” structure for future retirees could
increase
costs by almost $60,000for
seniors reaching the age of 65 in 2023,
a new report from the Center for American Progress finds. Current
seniors would also have to pay more for preventive, hospital, and
physician services should
Romney and Ryan repeal the Affordable Care Act, facing an increase in
health spending of between $7,900 and $18,600 over the course of
their retirement.
Current
seniors will pay more.
The premium support structure does not kick in until 2023, so current
seniors will remain in the existing Medicare program. But should
Romney/Ryan repeal the Affordable Care Act’s savings, beneficiaries
will face higher cost sharing and premiums
(particularly for preventive services) and seniors
who have received prescription drug discounts, will now pay more for
their medications.
What’s more, Romney/Ryan would lower Medicaid spending
significantly beginning next year, shifting federal spending to
states and beneficiaries, and increasing costs for the 9 million
Medicare recipients who are dependent on Medicaid.
Robert
Reich breaks down the Romney-Ryan economic plan into 5 measures that
all spell disaster for America.
1.
More unemployment through austerity measures.
2.
Taking from the poor to give to the rich. Higher federal taxes on
lower income taxpayers, slashing medicaid, food stamps, and
children's health care in order to give up to a $500k tax cut to
millionaires and billionaires.
3.
Turns Medicare into vouchers that won't keep up with the rising cost
of health care and shifting the burden onto seniors, ending their
guaranteed health care, and leaving them at the mercy of private
insurers. By contrast, Obama's Affordable Care Act saves money on
Medicare by reducing payments to providers such as hospitals and drug
companies.
4.
Add money to defense spending. The plan would add money to defense
spending while cutting spending on education, infrastructure, and
basic research and development.
5.
Debt: The Romney-Ryan budget doesn't even reduce the federal budget
deficit. While adding to military spending, giving tax cuts to the
rich, and stifling economic growth by cutting spending too early, the
plan would push public debt to over 175% by 2050.
No
wonder Mitt Romney doesn't want to talk about his budget until after
the
election!
That cynical ploy of the Romney/Ryan plan to gut Medicare, but to keep the senior vote by putting those cuts off on the next batch of retirees, is looking increasingly empty. That's because their plan to repeal Obamacare, and to "restore" the $716 billion in provider cuts, means that Romney/Ryan will either have to make up those funds with revenues or with cuts to current seniors, because without that money, Medicare becomes insolvent by 2016. The Republican allergy to new revenue pretty much determines they'll squeeze that money out of seniors, and Romney advisers are admitting it.
Avik Roy, an outside health care adviser to the Romney campaign, admits that committing to billions of dollars in higher Medicare spending in the near-term will make it difficult for Romney to achieve its separate goal of reducing overall federal spending to modern lows. But he notes that Romney could make up the difference elsewhere in the budget or, by “mak[ing] other changes to the Medicare program, such as increased means-testing, that don’t alter the program’s basic structure.”
Means testing would apply to people on Medicare now, and it would be a cut to benefits, benefits that retirees earned through years of work and contributing to the system.
That's not the only thing seniors would be losing under Romney/Ryan. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, with it goes the $4.1 billion seniors and disabled people have saved on prescription drugs. That amounts to an average of $768 in annual savings for Medicare patients, a significant chunk of money for anyone on a fixed income. Also gone with repeal are the free cancer screenings, mammograms and other preventive services.
Romney and Ryan are lying, no surprise, when they say that anyone on Medicare now won't see a change in their benefits. They're playing a shell game with American seniors.
The ticket Republicans will nominate in Tampa next week is uniquely connected to the "vulture capitalist" constituency, and uniquely committed to protecting the interests of today's robber-baron class.
He could easily have made his way into the private sector -- doing business with family and friends, as have generations of wealthy Ryans.
But Paul was always the starry-eyed, perhaps wild-eyed. idealist. He read Austrian economic texts and far-right authors with a passion, committing to memory the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and his intellectual heartthrob, Ayn Rand. Reading Rand, the newly-minted Republican vice presidential contender once said was "the reason I got involved in public service."
Rand's greed-is-good thinking plays well with hedge-fund managers, private equity players and the "vulture capitalist" class that enjoys taking a break from pillaging to plod through novels about, well, guys like them.
But, as the youngest Ryan child, Paul got a little mavericky. Much as he talks up the private sector, Paul Ryan forged a career in the public sector. He's worked as a congressional aide and congressman -- with brief breaks as a conservative "think tank" associate and a speech writer for Jack Kemp's 1996 presidential campaign -- since leaving college.
But older brother Tobin followed the more tradition route for sons of privilege.
Tobin Ryan joined the Bain & Co. team after Romney moved to the private-equity firm that the consulting firm spawned, Bain Capital. But the connection has raised eyebrows, and spawned plenty of headlines, in the financial press.
The Ryan brothers are, in Tobin's words, "very close." Indeed, they live "about a three-wood away from each other" in the town where the Ryans have for decades been a preeminent (construction and contracting) business family. Tobin, a frequent media spokesman and surrogate for his brother, refers to Paul's first U.S. House race as "our first campaign."
"So we've now got a former private equity executive running for president alongside the brother of a current private equity executive,"" observes Fortune senior editor Dan Primack.
And Paul Ryan, like Mitt Romney, is politically committed to the aiding the masters of the universe who run the private-equity empires that now so dominate the U.S. economy.
The "Roadmap for America's Future" budget plan that Ryan wrote in 2010 -- the document that, arguably, launched into orbit as a Republican star -- pledges to change tax policies to create "an enhanced investment climate."
Specifically, Ryan proposed to:
* eliminate taxes on "interest, capital gains, or dividends" and estate taxes
* allow investments to be "fully deducted immediately" by corporations
" eliminate the corporate income tax entirely" and replace it with "a single-digit consumption tax" that businesses and investors would calculate themselves.
* repeal the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to assure that millionaires and billionaires who take advantage of tax-code loopholes will have to pay something
How good would a Romney-Ryan administration be to the private-equity constituency?
The Romney-Ryan approach, forged and advocated for by candidates with personal and family ties to private-equity concerns, will yield great benefits for those very wealthy Americans who understand private equity as a personal reality.
But as the Joint Economic Committee report says, "House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan claims that the policies outlined in his budget will reform the broken tax code and put 'hardworking taxpayers ahead of special interests.' In reality, the Ryan plan gives the largest tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and will pay for those tax cuts by raising the tax burden on middle-class workers."
Indeed, the report concludes, "The richest households would receive the greatest benefit from these changes. The top 0.1 percent, for example, would receive an estimated average federal tax cut of close to $1.18 million per taxpaying household in 2015."
America's robber barons have had to wait for more than a century -- since Teddy Roosevelt went rogue and joined the anti-trust campaigners -- for a Republican ticket that would truly represent their interests.
But every indication is that the Romney-Ryan ticket will be of, by and for the private-equity managers who have become the masters of America's economic universe.
The Romney-Ryan ticket rejects not just the American faith of Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt but of Republican presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt.
"The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power," Teddy Roosevelt warned at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910. "The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise."
That remains the prime need.
Now, unfortunately, the party of Teddy Roosevelt is preparing to nominate a ticket that is passionately at odds with the principle that the general welfare must prevail over the passions of men 'whose chief object is to hold and increase their power."
Reverend D. James Kennedy (Left) and Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO).
Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) spiritual mentor Reverend D. James Kennedy harbored extreme and sometimes flatly misogynistic views about rape and abortion, according to a ThinkProgress review of Kennedy’s sermons on the topic. The Senate candidate, who set off a massive controversy by claiming this weekend that victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant, has deep ties to Reverend Kennedy, having cited some of his sermons as key intellectual influences and having been named in Kennedy’s book How Would Jesus Vote? as one of the Reverend’s “favorite statesman.”
Kennedy, who the Anti-Defamation League has termed a “Christian supremacist,” repeatedly railed against legalized abortion, calling it the “American Holocaust” and suggesting that it would lead inevitably to genocide in the United States. But Kennedy’s discussions of rape and abortion in particular betray extraordinarily disturbing views about rape victims:
1. Kennedy believed that rape victims who chose abortion are “hysterical.” In “Abortion: Myths and Realities,” Kennedy labels victims of rape who chose unsafe abortions when safer procedures are illegal “hysterical,” saying “We are told by some of the radical feminists that the women will become hysterical, that they will abort themselves with coat hanger.” Abortion rates are, in fact, higher in nations where the procedure is criminalized, and men describing women whose choices they disapprove of as “hysterical” has a storied sexist history.
2. Kennedy suggests rape victims can be responsible for being raped. In “Life: An Inalienable Right,” Kennedy expresses concern that rape victims who chose to get an abortion are occasionally responsible for their own rape, saying that “Even if they want to say the woman had some part in it—which in most cases they probably don’t—surely the baby did nothing wrong, so the only innocent party is killed and the rapist often goes free.” He doesn’t elaborate on how this might be true, but another Kennedy sermon says “the immodest woman is contributing to the lust of other people” by wearing revealing clothing.
3. Kennedy held that the Bible should set our laws about rape and abortion. Kennedy is very explicit on this point, saying “In the Bible, the child of rape was allowed to live and the rapist was put to death. Today, we find that the penalties against rape have become more and more lenient, whereas the child is now the subject of capital punishment. Justice has been totally destroyed and perverted in that the guilty are practically allowed to go free and the innocent are killed.” This fits with Kennedy’s general view that we should “rebuild America based on the Bible.”
4. Kennedy thought husbands should determine if their wives can have abortions. Though not specifically addressing rape, Kennedy approvingly cited a Roman prohibition on abortion motivated by the husbands should have control over women’s reproductive choice, saying “That newly created life is as much the husband’s as it is the wife’s. Historically, it is interesting to note that when the Roman Empire did away with laws that allowed abortion, it was done not because of the woman or the harm that abortions were doing to women (and indeed they do vastly more harm than most people are aware of), but because the husband was being defrauded of his progeny.” Interestingly, Akinhas worried that criminalizing marital rape provides women “a legal weapon to beat up on the husband.”
Given that Akin’s rhetoric and policy views bear clear marks of Kennedy’s influence, it’s perhaps no surprise that Akin co-sponsored (with Paul Ryan) a bill that could, by limiting federal funding of abortion to cases of “forcible rape,” make rape survivorsgive birth to their rapist’s child.
After Mitt Romney's campaign issued the mildest statement possible to "disagree" with Republican Rep. Todd Akin's statement that women have magical rape sperm protection shields in their ladyparts, Mitt Romney slept on it and decided to clarify his disagreementfurther with the National Review. (Yeah, the National freakin' Review.)
“Congressman’s Akin comments on rape are insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong,” Romney said. “Like millions of other Americans, we found them to be offensive.” [...]
“I have an entirely different view,” Romney said. “What he said is entirely without merit and he should correct it.”
Holy crap! Mitt Romney doesn't just disagree; he has an entirely different view! Those are some fightin' words. And it only took him 12 hours to think about it, watch the entire country—including his own party—condemn Akin's statement, and then decide he was offended.
By the way, Mitt still hasn't explained how his view is "entirely different." Todd Akin wants to outlaw abortion in all circumstances; Mitt Romney does too, at least in his current incarnation as Republican presidential candidate in the year 2012. He has a tendency to change his mind on this issue.
But at least Mitt has worked up enough anger to go from disagreement to entirely different view, with some "I'm offended" thrown in. Way to go, Mitt. Maybe a week from now you might even be able to explain why.
