Erika Johnsen @ Hot Air:
The biggest item with which Team Obama was able to come out swinging following last week’s presidential debate (except for something about Mitt Romney being too “aggressive” and possibly trying to cheat on live television) was playing up theirhilariously-contrived claim that Mitt Romney’s plan for ‘$5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy must necessarily raise taxes on the middle class or increase the deficit’ — a claim with which Robert Samuelson took umbrage:
To justify its $5 trillion figure — the estimated tax loss over a decade — the Obama campaign had to cherry-pick Romney’s proposal and the TPC analysis. It had to ignore any revenue raised by reducing tax breaks and assume that, faced with a conflict between the rich and the middle class, Romney would automatically side with the rich — as opposed to shielding the middle class from any tax increase. On Wednesday, Romney promised to protect the middle class.
The TPC report was widely interpreted as saying Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class. It didn’t, says the TPC’s Howard Gleckman. It simply pointed out that he couldn’t keep all “his ambitious campaign promises.” He’d have to make choices and modifications. So what else is new?
Despite its highly imaginary derivation, Obama has continued to use the figure on the stump and the campaign has touted it as point-of-fact fodder (even though, when pressed, the logic starts to fall apart, heh), so the Romney camp is finally hitting back with an ad of their own disputing Team Obama’s numbers:
That is precisely what anyone who believes a word Romney and Ryan have said up until now should assume.
The TPC calculated a yearly revenue loss of $480 billion, based on Romney’s stated intentions. Over 10 years, that would result in an additional accumulation of debt approaching $5 trillion. The Obama administration’s “highly imaginative derivation” process is something commonly known as simple multiplication.
Romney is covering the gaping hole in his arithmetic by asserting he will reduce or close totally unspecified tax breaks and loopholes.
Given that republican thinking about taxes revolves around the idea that upper level and corporate taxes are far too high already, and that this is one of the main problems that must be corrected in order to assure economic growth, any assumption that he plans to fill the projected $5 trillion hole by increasing the taxes paid by the highest earners is totally ridiculous.
If that hole is filled, most likely the middle class and working class will fill it. It’s more likely, though, that we’ll just see another $5 trillion added onto the current national debt.
@Greg:
Greg, you keep referring to an article posted at Tax Policy Center that was written for CNN.com and by William G. Gale. Gale, who is employed by the Brookings Institute, is a left winger who was educated at the London School of Economics, which was started by the Fabian Socialists. Gale was, for a very, VERY short time, a advisor to the Economic Counsel under President Geo. H.W. Bush. Gale is by no means an impartial spectator in the area of economics, being trained in the Fabian Socialist style of economics, or in the political arena.
Major fail on your part but then, you seem to gravitate toward any Socialist POV.
@retire05, #2:
If you’re trying to say that the Tax Policy Center is not an extension of the right-wing propaganda machine, you are correct.
Your candidate is full of hot air. He has provided minimal details, and has subsequently disavowed those that he has previously provided. Nothing he says about his intentions regarding tax policy adds up.
Of course, anyone who points out the obvious is probably a communist.
@Greg:
Your TPC article is based on some false assumptions, one of them being that there will be ZERO economic growth in the upcoming years. ZERO. Let that sink in, Greg.
Oh, but wait………………… an economist, from a disguished Ivy League school is taking your TPC article apart.
https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/228rosen.pdf
As to TPC not being part of the right wing; you’re correct. It currently is not, but has been at certain points in its history. Now it has gone to the far left supporting the Global Initiative that supports UN control over all nations (Agenda 21), has been anti-Iraq war, but then also fought against FDR’s New Deal policies that it considered socialistic in scope.
No, I don’t think you are a Communist, just a delusional left winger that believes the Socialist utopia can be achieved if only the right people are in control of it.
@Greg:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/tax-policy-center-decides-romneys-tax-plan-is-less-impossible/2012/08/16/39f3a6ee-e7ef-11e1-936a-b801f1abab19_blog.html
Unlike Obama, Romney has said there are many ways in which deductions can be eliminated and the base broadened, but he wants to actually work with congress to come up with the right methods. So, instead of calling a meeting and asking everyone to bring their ideas, and then telling the opposition party that “elections have consequences and I won,” he is going to actually use the ideas. That is typically how legislation works. The executive comes up with a plan, the congress crafts the plan, the senate crafts a plan, and then there is a conference. The result is a bill passed by both houses that can be presented to the president to sign into law.
Check it out yourself……..(Hoping someone will embed this great classic)
[As you requested:]
greg keeps lying about Romney being vague in the hopes we won’t notice that obama has been downright secreteive with his plans for a second term.
However, we know what a socialist like him will do which is why greg wants him and we don’t. We love freedom, greg loves socialism.
Now the official leftist marching orders are to claim that that Romney lied in the debate and is vague about his plans. Hence why we see greg arguing those thing endlessly.
Greg still assumes that Obama knows anything about economics although the entire Congress, Democrats included, rejected the Obama budget.
Of course, a federal budget is a Constitutionally mandated duty of the Congress yet Harry Reid feels he is above the Constitution. How many days now without a federal budget so that Obama can continue to spend like a drunken sailor (no slander toward drunken sailors intended) without restraints put on him?
CA had taxed and taxed and taxed.
Guess what they are learning?
It doesn’t work past a certain point.
Our gasoline must be separately blended from the rest of the nation.
Our gasoline is highly taxed and is set to be even more highly taxed in the near future.
People will not pay the price.
One guy started a scam whereby he was able to trick the pump into not billing his latest purchase.
Between him and everyone else using that one pump over 1,000 gallons were given away.
Others are figuring out how to do similar things at pumps all over the state.
Falsely liberals thought they could funnel drivers into giving up their cars.
But their own criminality bit them on the butt.
People are still driving.
They are just stealing gas.
Obama hasn’t put forward a budget that passed or even got a vote in over three years.
He doesn’t dare.
His intentions would turn more Americans into criminals who would join the underground economy just to avoid the consequences of his high taxes.
@Nan G:
I left SoCal in 1996. I admit that I missed it for about a year and I still miss a lot of things. I miss In-N-Out burgers, I miss being able to run down to Ensenada and Rosarito. I don’t ride a motorcycle any longer, but when I did, I missed driving up to the little German village in Idyllwild.
I don’t miss the gangs, the crime, the taxes, and the outrageous prices for just about everything. I love Georgia!
@retire05, #7:
According to FactCheck, the spending “inferno” Romney accuses Obama of is an increase of around 18 percent. Further, they point out that Obama isn’t actually responsible for most of the increase in spending that has occurred since he took office. The majority of the increase is directly attributable to specific actions taken by George W. Bush. The Congressional Budget Office had already calculated that there would be a $1.2 Trillion deficit for 2009 2 weeks before Barack Obama took office.
FactCheck has calculated that Obama is directly responsible for adding only around $140 billion to the the 2009 deficit.
They go on to point out that by historical standards, subsequent spending increases for 2010, 2011, and 2012 have actually been quite modest.
FactCheck presented the results of their analysis in a June 2012 article: Obama’s Spending: ‘Inferno’ or Not? Spending is high by historical standards — but rising slowly. And revenues are low.
I’m pretty sure FactCheck is on the right’s ignore list by now. Any facts they present are most likely automatically branded as anathema.
@Greg:
Factcheck.org., part of the Annenburg Public Policy Center, the very group that supported William Ayers and Barack Obama, Jr. in their goal to destroy public education even worse than the progressives have managed to do already, sold its soul to the Devil a long time ago.
What you cannot deny, although Factcheck.org will try, is that this president has increased our national deficit more in his 3 1.2 years in office than George Bush did in 8 years. Even the CBO is showing how Obama took the annual deficit past $1 trillion, something no other president has ever done.
Now, you do a lot of blathering about 2009. Guess what? This is 2012 and the deficit creating policies we are seeing now all belong to Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Or will you find some left wing idiology supporting website that disputes that?
And I noticed that you did not want to address the fact that a annual federal budget is a Constitutionally mandated requirement of the Congress, yet Harry Ried has refused to allow a budget to even get a floor vote. Instead, you go off on some tangent about 2009 and of course, George Bush.
Guess what, Greg? George Bush is no longer president and hasn’t been for 3 years and 9 months. Barack Obama is, and the direction of the nation falls squarely on his shoulders. I remember how the left wingers blamed dandruff on George Bush when he was president. Now the excuse is that things were sooooo bad that it will take Obama at least 8 years to make them right. We should start calling the Democrats “The Party of Ever Changing Excuses.”
@retire05, #11:
The long-term effects of what George W. Bush did have lingered long after George W. Bush’s 8 years ended. He nearly doubled the total debt himself, as I recall. He authorized enormous new spending commitment in September 2008 that were already in place before Obama arrived in 2009. He advocated and authorized an additional $700 billion bank bailout in October 2008. (It was Obama who reined that spending in, by reducing the authorized $700 billion Bush authorized in 2008 to $475 billion in 2009.) Bush also left two unresolved and unpaid for wars in his wake, and a rapidly worsening recession that had already been underway for over a year. Nearly 600,000 jobs were lost in the final month of the Bush administration alone.
The assertion that this somehow all became the fault of Barack Obama the moment he stepped into the Oval Office is absurd. What it became was his responsibility. Those are two entirely different things. (Even though they’re synonyms.)
Wanting to go back to the same policies that got us to were we were at the end of 2008 is, to my way of thinking, just plain crazy. How is Romney any different?
About that study….
Princeton Economist: Obama Campaign Is Misrepresenting My Study on Romney’s Tax Plan | The Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/princeton-economist-obama-campaign-misrepresenting-my-study-romneys-tax-plan_653917.html
Ooops. Another meme, mauled.
Who were the main culprits in causing the recession?
Here’s one. Obama is another, but we’ve been over that.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/12/exploding-myths-about-saint-bill-clinton/?intcmp=obinsite
The Weekly Standard articles are bullshit. Anyone thinking that you can cut federal taxes by 20% across the board without any reduction in the total of revenue collected is completely delusional. It’s the same lunacy republicans have been pushing since the days of Ronald Reagan. It has never worked in practice.
We’ve already got some of the lowest high-end tax rates we’ve had since the 1950s. Why on earth would any reasonable person think an enormous cut on top of that is somehow necessary to improve the national economy?
And how, exactly, is Romney going to cut taxes by 20%, while boosting defense spending up through the roof? The last two wars we got ourselves into were conducted on borrowed money, remember?
Wow… try to read a few articles, and I keep running in to you, Greg. Having a bad “stuck on stupid or lazy” day, guy?
Curt also put that article up on a Most Wanted post. And a curious soul would have sought out the source via the links, and gotten to Harvey Rosen’s paper analyzing the Romney plan from the Princeton site. retire05 even made it easy for you to get to it…. but noooooooo.
So instead of whining constantly about how, “exactly” the revenue neutral plan wouldn’t or couldn’t work, why don’t you just go read the study? If you did, you’d find out that the approach is to stimulate the economy (not finance it via dollar devaluation and borrowed fake stimulus cash) and effect GDP growth… while not reducing the same anticipated revenue flow.
As I said on the other thread, my tolerance level for those with kindergarten level economic understanding is at an all time low.
Now, if your next straw man is you want a laundry list of exactly what loopholes will go… something that generally Congress will decide the frame, and regulators the details… then I want to know why you weren’t complaining when everyone had to wait to read O’healthcare until after it slithered thru the Congressional doors in the dark of night. And how about Dodd-Frank, which kept ol’ Barney busy in his basement while Congress kept everyone focused on O’healthcare as a dodge. No one got to read that one, and we didn’t get “exactly what specifics” were in that either.
I guess I missed your whining and criticisms then….
Or maybe it’s that your demand for answers and specifics only swings one way, right?