Kevin Drum has a post outlining how FEMA has done under the past four presidents. Here’s an even shorter summary (to be fair, both HW and W tried to improve FEMA after its inept response to a disaster–Andrew in HW’s case and Katrina in W’s):
George HW Bush: it sucked
Bill Clinton: it worked well
George W Bush: it sucked
Barack Obama: it has worked well so far
Kevin points to these twoarticles that talk about the change. The takeaway is that Clinton and Obama treated FEMA like professional organization by appointing professionals in disaster preparation, while the two Bushs treated it like an afterthought and appointed people based on their politics (so they did not have a background in disaster planning). Romney, of course, is more like the Bushs (look down a couple posts). Republicans say that FEMA isn’t that important, that states can do the job themselves. Look at the first article Kevin links to see why that’s not true:
In Florida, the hurricane so overwhelmed state officials that they didn’t even know what had happened, let alone what help they needed. Initially, Andrew was expected to hit Miami. But when the hurricane hit 20 miles south of the city the morning of August 24, most Floridians breathed a sigh of relief. “The storm surges were not as bad as anticipated,” said one spokesperson for Governor Lawton Chiles. One National Guard major issued this report the day after the hurricane: “Florida has not requested any support from other states or federal agencies, nor do we project a need.”
Florida was slow to realize its own dire straits because many of its emergency workers were among the storm’s victims. Half of the members of the Dade County Police and Fire Departments had lost their homes. Most of the area’s fire and police stations were destroyed. Like their fellow southern Floridians, disaster management workers were looking for food, water, shelter, and medical care. The state was unable to issue specific requests for aid because it had no one available to assess the damage.
Finally, as the full extent of the damage–and the lack of federal action–prompted heavy criticism, President Bush circumvented FEMA and formed a hurricane task force led by Secretary of Transportation Andrew Card. Card and the task force flew down to Florida to assess the damage. As the Department of Transportation airplane passed over southern Florida, the members of the task force were stunned by the extent of the damage. “This eerie silence came over the plane as we flew over mile after mile of pure devastation,” remembers Shelley Longmuir, the task force’s chief of staff. “You got the feeling that you were no longer in the United States, but in some far away, mystical place because there were none of the reference points of civilization…. It looked like Beirut.”
Some disasters are just too big for one state to deal with.
By the way, this might be a good time to give to the Red Cross.
The Boston Globe has a story about Sandy and how it might affect the Presidential race:
His campaign announced that in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, it was collecting storm-relief supplies. “In Virginia, we are loading storm-relief supplies onto the Romney bus to be delivered,” a statement said.
In another statement announcing the cancellation of Ann Romney’s planned stops in Derry and Manchester, N.H., today, his staff said, “The Romney campaign’s bus will be used for relief efforts throughout the East Coast.”
Ann Romney was redeployed to Michigan, her homestate and another key presidential battleground.
The Romney campaign also halted fund-raising e-mails in states affected by the hurricane, and the Romneys sent an e-mail encouraging donations to the Red Cross.
“For safety’s sake, as you and your family prepare for the storm, please be sure to bring any yard signs inside. In high winds they can be dangerous, and cause damage to homes and property,” their joint statement added.
Then, adopting a presidential tone, Romney added: “I’m never prouder of America than when I see how we pull together in a crisis. There’s nothing that we can’t handle when we stand together.”
You might think the Globe would mention that Romney thinks FEMA should be shut down, but I guess they decided that’s not relevant to a story on disaster relief.
It looked like Mitt Romney might be pivoting to the center, but I guess he decided he needed to shore up his conservative flank because he’s back to crazy land:
Romney minimized the harm for Americans left without health insurance.
“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’ ” he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of “Obamacare,” which he has pledged to repeal.
“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”
He pointed out that federal law requires hospitals to treat those without health insurance — although hospital officials frequently say that drives up health-care costs.
Republicans must think this is a winning idea, since Bush, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum have all said basically the same thing. Of course, Romney disagrees with his past self. There are several problems with this idea: by definition, emergency rooms are for emergencies–you’re not going to get treatment for chronic conditions there which is why people without insurance are more likely to die than those who have it; emergency rooms are expensive so it’s not the way to rein in health costs; hospitals will still try to charge the patient–there’s a reason so many bankruptcies are because of health; emergency rooms can often be overcrowded which is why people sometimes die waiting for care. Just wait a few days though, Romney will probably change his stance.
Yet in 2010, in an appearance on MSNBC, Romney said almost exactly the opposite: “It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility,” he said at the time.
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He used even more colorful language back in 2007, talking to Fox News host Glenn Beck. “When they show up at the hospital, they get care; they get free care paid for by you and me,” he said. “If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is.”
Pelley: Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don’t have it today?
Romney: Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people– we– if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.
Pelley: That’s the most expensive way to do it.
Romney: Well the–
Pelley: In an emergency room.
Romney: Different, again, different states have different ways of doing that. Some provide that care through clinics. Some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state, we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn’t take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, “You’ve got to take the Massachusetts model.”
So, Romney is now agreeing with Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and President Bush that using emergency rooms is an acceptable way to provide ‘healthcare’. There are a few major problems with this stance. The first I have noted a few times before:
The uninsured might get the emergency care, but they don’t get the routine care and they don’t get all the medications they need–so they are denied care. And studies have shown that the uninsured do have a higher risk of dying:
As medical care has improved for people with health insurance, the consequences of being uninsured have worsened, according to a new study that says the lack of coverage translates into nearly 45,000 deaths each year among working-age Americans.
The NPR article also notes another problem:
But in addition to flip-flopping, Romney is missing a key fact about the uninsured and emergency room care, says health policy professor Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago. Just because hospitals are required to see patients in the emergency room doesn’t mean that care is required to be free.
“The emergency room is perfectly entitled to send you a whopping bill,” said Pollack. “And there are many people across America who are facing significant financial problems from serious bills that they’ve received for emergency care.”
It’s only when the uninsured don’t — or can’t — pay those bills that the costs come back to the taxpayers. Pollack also says Democrats and Republicans largely agree that emergency rooms are wholly inappropriate places for most people to get health care.
“It’s just about the least cost-effective way you can get your medical care. And we also have really damaged the institution of emergency department care by expecting it to take on these burdens it’s not really designed to assume — to provide primary care to low-income people,” he said.
In essence it means that if you don’t have insurance either you will be stuck with a huge bill or you will go bankrupt. Lovely system that.
Earlier in the day, Romney tried to draw a distinction between himself and Obama. ‘‘The question of this campaign is not who cares about the poor and the middle class. I do. He does,’’ Romney said at an Atlanta fund-raiser. ‘‘The question is who can help the poor and the middle class. I can. He can’t.’’
Romney has said he was talking on the video about support for his campaign, a point he returned to Wednesday at the Miami forum hosted by the Spanish-language television network Univision.
‘‘I know that I’m not going to get 100 percent of the vote and my campaign will focus on those people we think we can bring in to support me, but this is a campaign about helping people who need help,’’ Romney said.
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
Romney went on: “[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
“This is a campaign about the 100 percent,” Romney said at the forum, the first time in five days that he had a public event in a battleground state. “And over the last several years you’ve seen greater and greater divisiveness in this country. We had hoped to come back together, but instead you’ve seen us pulled apart, and politics has driven us apart in some respects.”
“[George Romney] was on welfare relief for the first years of his life. But this great country gave him opportunities,” Lenore Romney said in the video, which apparently dates back to George Romney’s 1962 run for governor of Michigan.
Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
Romney went on: “[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
If he becomes president will it still be his job to not worry about those people?
During the freewheeling conversation, a donor asked Romney how the “Palestinian problem” can be solved. Romney immediately launched into a detailed reply, asserting that the Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”
Romney spoke of “the Palestinians” as a united bloc of one mindset, and he said: “I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there’s just no way.”
Update: Here’s a graph with the total amount of taxes people pay by income compared to how much they have:
Another way to look at is the total percent of a person’s income that goes to taxes (same link):
during middle age, almost all workers face a tax burden. When looking at those in middle-age, 84 percent faced a net payroll and income tax bill in 2007. This general theme also holds true for low-income households: even households that receive the child-related EITC generally only receive it temporarily, usually when their children are young. On net, even these families face a positive tax bill over time (Dowd and Horowitz 2008).
Just 54 percent of all tax units will pay federal individual income tax in 2011, leaving about 46 percent paying no federal income tax or receiving a net refund.
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Of all nontaxable units, half would still owe no tax in 2011 if all tax expenditures were repealed and only these standard income tax provisions applied. The other half owes no tax because of tax expenditures. Those proportions vary across income categories. Virtually all nontaxable units in the lowest income group pay no tax because of the standard income tax provisions alone, but this share diminishes rapidly with income and nearly all nontaxable units with incomes above $30,000 pay no tax because of tax expenditures.
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Of the 38 million tax units made nontaxable by the addition of tax expenditures, 44 percent are moved off the tax rolls by elderly tax benefits and another 30 percent by credits for children and the working poor.
Mitt Romney today accused President Obama of mishandling the initial response to the attack on the US Embassy in Egypt and a consulate in Libya, saying his administration had sent “mixed signals” to the world and had initially taken on an apologetic tone.
Last night after 10:00 pm ET, Romney released a statement on the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya. After saying he was “outraged” by these attacks and the death of an American consulate worker, Romney said, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” Yet after learning every piece of new information about those attacks, the Romney statement looks worse and worse — and simply off-key. First, Romney was referring to a statement that the U.S. embassy in Egypt issued condemning the “efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” But that embassy statement, which the White House has distanced itself from, was in reference to an anti-Islam movie and anti-Islam pastor Terry Jones, and it came out BEFORE the embassy attacks began. Then this morning, we learned that the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and others died in one of the attacks.
There’s video of Romney showing how he reacts to a crisis on the anniversary of 9/11 here.
I like Kevin Drum’s formulation (such as here) about Romney’s plans, they’re secret. That’s certainly in effect here:
“Contrary to what the Democrats are saying, I’m not going to increase the tax burden on middle-income families,” Romney said. “It would absolutely be wrong to do that.
Romney proposes a 20 percent across-the-board reduction of income tax rates but also aims to maintain current levels of tax revenue. He has not described in detail how he plans to accomplish both goals, except to say that he will broaden the tax base and close unidentified loopholes.
The bolded part is a bit of an understatement since he has not given ANY deductions he’ll get rid of.
The same is true of healthcare:
Romney tried to fend off another charge by Obama’s reelection campaign: that by repealing the 2010 health care law, Romney would leave young adults and people with preexisting health conditions without insurance. Under the law championed by Obama,insurance companies cannot deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
Romney emphasized that he will work not only to repeal the law but also to replace it with reforms of his own, which he said would include those popular provisions.
As this post notes, he doesn’t say how he’s going to do that:
According to an aide,“Gov. Romney will ensure that discrimination against individuals with preexisting conditions who maintain continuous coverage is prohibited.”
This has long been Romney’s position, and it’s not clear if it’s meaningful or not. This kind of protection has been the law of the land since 1995 for people with group coverage. And people who lose group coverage already qualify for individual COBRA coverage for 18 months. So the only way Romney’s statement means anything is if he’s saying he would pass a law that requires insurance companies to offer permanent individual coverage at a reasonable price to people who lose their group coverage. Needless to say, Romney has never actually committed to that particular detail.
It’s very simple now under Obamacare, starting in 2014 healthcare can not be denied to anyone with a preexisting condition.
responding to criticism that he failed to say even a single word about Afghanistan in his acceptance speech:
I find it interesting that people are curious about mentioning words in a speech as opposed to policy. And so I went to the American Legion the day before I gave that speech. I went to the American Legion and spoke with our veterans there, and described my policy as it relates to Afghanistan and other foreign policy and our military. I’ve been to Afghanistan, and the members of our troops know of my commitment to Afghanistan and to the effort that’s going on there. I have some differences on policy with the president. I happen to think those are more important than what word I mention in each speech.
And here is the sum total of what Romney said about Afghanistan in that speech:
Of course, we are still at war in Afghanistan. We still have uniformed men and women in conflict, risking their lives just as you once did. How deeply we appreciate their sacrifice. We salute them. We honor them. We respect and love them.
Given how much he’s changed his opinions since he ran against Kennedy in 1996, this is probably a smart move. He doesn’t want to give a proposal and then have to change it a few times before the election.
Mitt Romney would never make abortions illegal as president, Jane Romney said when National Journal asked her about the subject after a “Women for Mitt” event. “He’s not going to be touching any of that,” she said. “It’s not his focus.”
Democratic warnings that abortion rights are under threat are an ungrounded fear tactic, Jane Romney said. “That’s what women are afraid of, but that’s conjured,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think abortion should be used as a football in the political arena.”
and Mitt Romney himself:
has said he supports legal abortion in cases of rape and incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger. As for the fate of abortion rights, “Recognize this is the decision that will be made by the Supreme Court,” he said in an interview with CBS News this week. “The Democrats try and make this a political issue every four years, but this is a matter in the courts. It’s been settled for some time in the courts.”
The thing is Romney will select judges for the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade which would allow states to outlaw abortion and several states have shown they would do so. Also, several Republicans, such as his Vice-President, have shown that they want to outlaw abortion. Romney might not initiate it, but I would be very surprised if he would be willing to veto such a bill. If Romney is elected there will be stricter laws on abortion with the very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned–that’s why women should be afraid.
Wading into a debunked conspiracy theory, Mitt Romney raised the issue of President Barack Obama’s citizenship Friday by joking that ‘‘no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.’’
At a rally in the suburbs of Detroit, Romney told a crowd of about 5,000 that he and his wife were happy to be back near their childhood home. ‘‘They know that this is the place that we were born and raised,’’ the candidate said.
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Top Romney adviser Kevin Madden tried to walk the comments back shortly after, saying: ‘‘The governor has always said, and has repeatedly said, he believes the president was born here in the United States.’’
Yeah, he’s just saying Obama isn’t a real American if you know what I mean … no, no, it has nothing to do with race.
Of course, if you’re looking for the real crazies you gotta go to Texas:
Head and County Commissioner Mark Heinrich appeared Tuesday night on a local television news broadcast to promote the tax increase, when the judge expressed concerns civil unrest of the worst proportions would break out if Obama wins a second term.
“He’s going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N., and what is going to happen when that happens?” Head asked.
“I’m thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we’re not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.
“Now what’s going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He’s going to send in U.N. troops. I don’t want ’em in Lubbock County. OK. So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here’.”
This, of course , also has nothing to do with race. You would have to be crazy to think so, so ask Head.
In a video clip released in advance of the show, Ms. Morales broached the subject of the Romneys’ finances and tax returns by acknowledging that it’s “not a question that’s welcome,” before asking, “Why not be transparent?”
“Have you seen how we’re attacked?” Mrs. Romney said, leaning forward in her chair. “Have you seen what’s happened?”
Mr. Romney has agreed to release just two years of his tax returns — from 2011, and an estimate from 2012 — but when pressed by Ms. Morales, Mrs. Romney stood her ground, echoing some of her husband’s talking points.
“We have been very transparent to what’s legally required of us,” she said. “But the more we release, the more we get attacked, the more we get questioned, the more we get pushed. And so we have done what’s legally required, and there’s going to be no more tax releases given.”
Romney’s mantra is to do what’s legally required but nothing more. Such as with taxes:
Mitt Romney’s reluctance to reveal his income and tax information received center-stage attention once again at last night’s debate. After weeks of immense scrutiny and criticism from his opponents, Romney caved and agreed to release his tax returns from 2010 and the projections for his 2011 return.
“I pay all the taxes owed. And not a penny more,” Romney said at the debate. “I don’t think we want someone running for president who pays more taxes than he owes.”
Since he’s very rich and can afford to hire professionals to do his taxes, that means he probably paid the absolute minimum he could. That’s not possible for most of us and most of us don’t bother detailing all the expenditures that might possibly be deductible (in fact, for most of my life I used the EZ form since my possible deductions were probably nowhere near as large as the standard deduction–of course a tax pro might have been able to do better).
And this is what the tax release is about, do no more than the minimum required. The ideal of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics was to be as transparent as possible, but it wasn’t explicitly written that Romney keep all documents … so he got rid of lots of them. Massachusetts also tries to be transparent by keeping all the records of public officials, but some of the laws don’t explicitly apply to the governor’s office … so he destroyed lots of records and had aides buy their hard drives so they weren’t left behind where others could see what was on them.
So, it seems Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan as his running mate. It’s an interesting pick since neither one has been honest in their budgets. Kevin Drum talks about Ryan’s last budget (via the CBO here):
Well, it turns out that the Congressional Budget Office has put a concrete number to “whacked hard” here.Medicaid and CHIP (children’s healthcare) would decline from 2% of GDP today to 1% of GDP in 2050, and everything else — that is, everything other than Social Security and Medicare — would decline from 12.5% of GDP today to about 4% of GDP in 2050.
This is, to put it mildly, nuts. Defense spending alone amounts to 4% of GDP, and it’s vanishingly unlikely that this will ever fall much below 2-3% of GDP. This means that all domestic spending will decline from about 8% of GDP to 1-2% of GDP by 2050. That’s prisons, border control, education, the FBI, courts, embassies, the IRS, FEMA, housing, student loans, roads, unemployment insurance, etc. etc. It’s everything. Whacked by about 80% or so.
By the way, Romney wants the Defense budget to be at least 4%.
Also, both of them are eager to tell you that they’re going to cut taxes, but a little less eager to tell you how they plan to make up for the lost revenue. It could be because the only way would show that they will be cutting taxes on the rich and raising them on most of the rest of us. I’m sure this won’t come up though, since Ryan is a Very Serious Person.
Kevin Drum’s reaction is here, Charles Pierce’s is here, and you should probably read Paul Krugman (Mark Thoma has gathered a few relevant posts here).
The analysts at the Tax Policy Center provide a pretty good clue today. Romney himself won’t say anything about the credits and deductions he’d target, so they made the most progressive assumptions they possibly could about them by “starting at the top.” That is, they made a list of all the possible credits and deductions and then completely eliminated them for the highest income group. This would produce the largest possible increase for the wealthy. Then they worked their way down, and by the time they got to the bottom group they reduced the credits and deductions only enough to make the whole plan revenue neutral. This produced the smallest possible increase for the non-wealthy.
So: the biggest possible increase for the wealthy, the smallest possible increase for the less wealthy. For technical reasons, they could only model this down to $200,000, but that’s enough to show what Romney’s plan would do. You can see it in the chart on the right. When you combine the decrease in rates and the increase from credits and deductions, millionaires would get a tax cut of 4.1%. Everyone under $200,000 would get a tax increase of 1.2%.
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And Romney, of course, will hide behind the fact that he himself hasn’t endorsed any particular basket of tax increases to make up for his rate cuts, so the Brookings analysis is just guesswork.
Still, it’s the most sympathetic analysis possible. Any other basket of credits and deductions would make things even better for the wealthy and even worse for the non-wealthy.
The report published Wednesday estimated households with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $87,117 under Romney’s plan, while those earning $200,000 or less would pay higher taxes.
Brookings analysts concluded that Romney’s plan favors high earners “even when we bias our assumptions about which and whose tax expenditures are reduced to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible.”
“For instance,” analysts said, “even when we assume that tax breaks — like the charitable deduction, mortgage interest deduction, and the exclusion for health insurance — are completely eliminated for higher-income households first, and only then reduced as necessary for other households to achieve overall revenue-neutrality, the net effect of the plan would be a tax cut for high-income households coupled with a tax increase for middle-income households.”
The Romney campaign dismissed the report as a liberal study. “President Obama continues to tout liberal studies calling for more tax hikes and more government spending,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said.
The analysis was conducted by three Brookings economists, including William G. Gale, an economic adviser to President George H. W. Bush, and Adam Looney, who served on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.
It’s a reporters job to make a story clear. A good reporter would add in the last bit that KD did to make it clear that Romney’s tax plan, the parts he has made explicit, guarantee that the rich will get tax cuts and the rest of us will pay higher rates–the only reason to include a quote from Romney’s spokesman is if they can show how the report is wrong by explicitly showing which tax breaks could be eliminated (in a revenue neutral way as Romney claims he wants) that do not raise the taxes that the non-rich pay.
Here’s part of a speech (via here) President Obama gave a week ago:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.
It’s a pretty typical speech (it’s just a variation of JFK’s ‘Ask not …’ line), which means Republicans claim it shows Obama is anti-business. Here’s Mitt Romney:
Flanked by denim-clad workers in a garage bay at Middlesex Truck & Coach, Romney praised company owner Brian Maloney and his family, asserting “they did build this business.”
Romney’s brief address was a direct assault on a remark Obama made during a campaign event in Virginia last Friday. “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that,” the president said. “Somebody else made that happen.”
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But Romney contended Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment betrays a belief “that people who build enterprises like this really aren’t responsible for it.”
“Come here and talk to Brian, and you’ll learn that in fact he did build this business,” Romney said. “Someone else isn’t responsible for what he did here. He’s the one that took the risk. He’s the one that built this enterprise.”
Added Maloney, “I take umbrage at the suggestion that people don’t start and build businesses.”
“We don’t need any more of government’s help,” he continued. “We haven’t had any.”
If you look at part of the quote above you see that Obama specifically says “when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”. And yet they claim that Obama said that people don’t build their own business, which is an obvious lie. Typical.
Oh, and just for fun:
In the late 1970s, according to a 1986 Globe profile of the business, “he approached Boston city officials because a preferential bank loan was possible if his firm relocated to the Crosstown Industrial Park,” where Middlesex Truck & Coach remains to this day.
In its first year at the new location, Maloney’s company accepted a $560,000 federal government contract to overhaul 10 buses. Within a half-decade of the move, Maloney reported, his company had quintupled its annual revenue.
So, Maloney is also lying about getting no government help.
Former governor Mitt Romney’s administration in 2006 blocked publication of a state antibullying guide for Massachusetts public schools because officials objected to use of the terms “bisexual’’ and “transgender’’ in passages about protecting certain students from harassment, according to state records and interviews with current and former state officials.
Romney aides said publicly at the time that publication of the guide had been delayed because it was a lengthy document that required further review. But an e-mail authored in May of that year by a high-ranking Department of Public Health official – and obtained last week by the Globe through a public records request – reflected a different reason.
“Because this is using the terms ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgendered,’ DPH’s name may not be used in this publication,’’ wrote the official, Alda Rego-Weathers, then the deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
Because the Department of Public Health was the primary sponsor and funding source of the guide, the move effectively blocked its publication. Rego-Weathers said in the e-mail that she had been consulting with Romney’s office on the issue.
It was one of the many ways that he changed course as he prepared to run for President (when he was running against Kennnedy for the Senate, he claimed he would be more effective getting gay rights). It also shows his political cowardice. If this had gone through it might have hurt his chances for becoming President and if he publicly said why it was being blocked that would have caused another outcry in Massachusetts:
In a highly publicized incident in May 2006, Romney threatened to shut down the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth because it issued a press release with his name on it promoting a parade to celebrate gay, bisexual, and transgender teens. He quickly backed off the threat. In July 2006, Romney vetoed a $158,000 budget line item that was earmarked for counseling violence victims in the “LGBT community.’’ The appropriation was intended to prevent sexual violence and rape, and also for suicide prevention.
‘‘We have two courses we can follow: One is to follow in the pathway of Europe, to shrink our military smaller and smaller to pay for our social needs,’’ Romney said outside the city’s Veterans Memorial Center and Museum. ‘‘The other is to commit to preserve America as the strongest military in the world, second to none, with no comparable power anywhere in the world.’’
He doesn’t say this explicitly but, since he says he wants to cut taxes and lower the deficit, he is implicitly saying he wants to cut payments for ‘social needs’, that would be welfare, schools, healthcare–the whole safety net. Of course, he’s not going to come right out and say that–he doesn’t have any political courage.
Mitt Romney has the typical Republican stance on regulation of banks (pay link) and regulations in general:
Republican Mitt Romney is pledging, if he is elected president, to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, a position favored by donors on Wall Street who have sent millions the candidate’s way. But he is nearly silent on how – without the regulation – he would prevent Wall Street from once again engaging in the risky practices that helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.
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The industry objects to the new rules and restrictions, and Romney said in May 2011 that the law “scared the dickens out of the financial sector and caused banks to pull back from lending.’’ He has joined his Republican presidential rivals in calling for an outright repeal of the legislation.
Romney has criticized both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is designed to monitor things like credit card applications and home mortgages, and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is supposed to monitor for systemic risks in the markets. Romney says both are too powerful and run by unelected bureaucrats.
Republicans would like to get rid of almost all these regulations without replacing them. The problem is that the financial industry crashed the world economy and so people don’t much like it. Therefore they pretend that they’ll replace it with something–of course it has to be generic, because anything specific will cause problems with the financial industry which gives them so much money (they also give Democrats a lot of money which is why the regulations were watered down). If you believe that the financial industry will now be responsible then Romney’s your guy. If you think they’ll do most anything to make a bigger profit, then … ok neither candidate is really for you, but Obama is a bit better.
There are two stories at NPR and both show, in different ways, the problems with the current reporting.
The first looks at Ann Romney as part of the Romney campaign:
The Romney campaign was thrilled last week when Ann Romney became the subject of a big misfire from Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, who said Romney’s wife had “actually never worked a day in her life.”
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While Romney focuses on macro issues like the deficit and jobs — where he is the strongest — the Obama campaign is focusing on micro issues like contraception or Romney’s promise to get rid of Planned Parenthood. Those issues, says Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, drove female voters away from the Republicans this year.
This is almost like a Romney ad–Romney cares about what women really care about … jobs, while Obama cares only about little things. Putting aside the fact that contraception and health care are ‘micro issues’, the other article shows what this one misses:
Bullock was a personal care assistant in Massachusetts; that day, she called in sick. The next day, she had to take her daughter to the hospital, where she was hydrated. The third morning, her daughter seemed better and Bullock got ready to leave for work.
“As I was walking out the door, she vomited again,” Bullock says. “And I was like, ‘I just have to take her to the hospital.’ And so I called in — and when I called in, the care manager that I spoke to said, ‘You just might as well not come back.’ “
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Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, head of the mother’s advocacy group MomsRising, says having a baby is a leading cause of temporary poverty. Many women with no maternity leave end up quitting their jobs to care for a baby.
“And when they lose those needed jobs, it’s very hard to get back into the labor force,” she says, “because all of a sudden, we have a cascading impact of motherhood. Right now, child care costs more than university costs in many states in our nation.”
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Combine that with women’s unequal pay — and it’s worse for mothers — and, Rowe-Finkbeiner says, some see no choice but to stay home, because they can’t afford child care.
The problem in this article is it doesn’t tell us where the parties or candidates fall on these issues. So, here’s some information:
Romney waffles on whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter law, while it was signed by Obama.
Obama is working to expand (and here) coverage of the medical leave. Romney? Who knows?
Obama is trying to extend the Violence against Women Act. Romney? Hard to say? Republicans are against it.
paying for childcare sucks in the US right now, which is why most women don’t have a choice:Across the country, 70 percent of married women over the age of 25 with children work outside the home. The median income of those households is about $87,700, compared with $64,000 for households where the mother stays at home, according to an analysis by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “The biggest difference is education,” he said.
According to the Census Bureau’s 40-year review, “Those with the least education are now the most likely to stay out of the labor force as stay-at-home mothers.”
Childcare is anything by cheap in this country. The National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies reports that the average annual cost of putting an infant in full-time care can hit $18,200 on the high-end, and the cost for a four-year-old can be as much as $14,050.
I would tell you exactly where the candidates stand, but the newspapers are too busy talking about idiotic stuff to tell us about this ‘micro issue’.
Let me make this very clear. As President of the United States, I will devote myself to an American Century. And I will never, ever apologize for America.
So, if there’s another My Lai or the US mistakenly bombs civilians or if it’s strategic for the US to prop up a dictator, don’t expect any apology from Romney. Also, don’t expect him to apologize about our past mistakes even if they affect current events (such as in Cuba or Iran).
Anyway, on we go:
There is no one approach to these challenges. There is no Wall that the next President can demand to be torn down. But there is one unifying thread that connects each of these possible threats: when America is strong, the world is safer.
Ronald Reagan called it “Peace through Strength” and he was never more right than today. It is only American power—conceived in the broadest terms—that can provide the foundation of an international system that ensures the security and prosperity of the United States and our friends and allies around the world.
American strength rises from a strong economy, a strong defense, and the enduring strength of our values. Unfortunately, under this President, all three of those elements have been weakened.
As President, on Day One, I will focus on rebuilding America’s economy. I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts. Time and again, we have seen that attempts to balance the budget by weakening our military only lead to a far higher price, not only in treasure, but in blood.
There have been no “massive defense cuts” under Obama, although he has slowed the projected rate of increase and in April asked the Pentagon to identify an additional $400 billion in reductions over the next 12 years. When he took office, the defense budget was $513 billion, not counting $153 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the budget year that ended Sept. 30, the figure was $530 billion, with an additional $159 billion to pay for the wars.
For the current fiscal year, Obama requested $553 billion for the defense budget, exclusive of war costs. But in a deal worked out by Congress and the White House as part of a deficit-reduction plan in August, he was forced to come down to $513 billion.
So, an increase in the defense budget is a ‘massive cut’ to Romney. I shudder to think what the defense budget will be under a Romney presidency (he wants it to be at least 20% of the budget). Since he’s also against any tax increase, this means he’s for large cuts in everything else.
Let me tell you some of the highlights of what I will do.
Beginning on day one of my presidency, I will take bold action to help grow our economy and create jobs.
I will issue an executive order that directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to grant a waiver from “Obamacare” to all 50 states. Obamacare is a wolf in wolf’s clothing—it’s expensive, intrusive and unconstitutional. And that is why I will fight to repeal it.
he doesn’t like people having insurance (and he’s also saying the same thing about the insurance program in Massachusetts, since that’s what it’s modeled on)
I will put an end to the job-killing regulations imposed by the Obama administration.
he’ll allow banks, who are the ones to crash the economy, to do whatever they want again with even fewer restrictions
I will open production of energy across the country. I’ll remove the barriers to developing our coal, oil, and natural gas resources. I welcome renewable energy. But as an old venture capitalist myself, I can tell you this—there will be no more Solyndras!
wow, so in all his years he lost no money in investments
I will promote free trade and open markets. And, for stealing our designs, patents and know-how, and for manipulating their currency to unfairly attack our industries and our jobs, I will finally clamp down on China.
Ha ha ha, he’s says he’s going to clamp down on China, that’s funny.
I will protect the right of American workers to vote by secret ballot. And I will fight to stop union bosses from using the dues of their union members to support those bosses’ favorite campaigns.
he’ll gut unions and worker rights. He doesn’t want there to be any counterweight to corporations.
What’s pathetic, is that Romney is one of the more reasonable Republicans and even he’s crazy.
You know, there was a time in this country when we didn’t celebrate attacking people based on their success and when we didn’t go after people because they were successful.
There’s a reason Romney is protective of the rich, they give him a lot of money. You can also see which side he’s on here:
In the back-and-forth with business people, Romney repeated his slams against the Obama administration: decrying its “job-killing” economic policies, saying he believes officials intend to have a government-run health care system, and blasting Democrats as being beholden to special interests like public worker unions.
Ya see, corporations are people but unions are special interests.
