Obama Hates America (an excerpt)

THE PRESIDENT:  Now, one last thing -- one of the biggest differences is how we pay down our debt and our deficit. My opponent, Mr. Romney’s plan is he wants to cut taxes another $5 trillion on top of the Bush tax cuts.

AUDIENCE: Booo --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, like I said, the only way you can pay for that -- if you’re actually saying you’re bringing down the deficit -- is to cut transportation, cut education, cut basic research, voucherize Medicare, and you’re still going to end up having to raise taxes on middle-class families to pay for this $5 trillion tax cut. That’s not a deficit reduction plan. That’s a deficit expansion plan.

I’ve got a different idea. I do believe we can cut -- we’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make some more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently. (Applause.) Not every government program works the way it’s supposed to. And frankly, government can’t solve every problem. If somebody doesn’t want to be helped, government can’t always help them. Parents -- we can put more money into schools, but if your kids don’t want to learn it’s hard to teach them. (Applause.)

But you know what, I’m not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy to give tax breaks to me or Mr. Romney or folks who don’t need them. So I’m going to reduce the deficit in a balanced way. We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more. (Applause.) And, by the way, we’ve tried that before -- a guy named Bill Clinton did it. We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires.

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. (Applause.)

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. (Applause.)

So all these issues go back to that first campaign that I talked about, because everything has to do with how do we help middle-class families, working people, strivers, doers -- how do we help them succeed? How do we make sure that their hard work pays off? That’s what I've been thinking about the entire time I've been President.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-virginia

Ezra Klein has this to say. Listen up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/13/the-white-houses-medicare-plan-isnt-that-hard-to-find/

The Republican ticket’s big Medicare myth

Posted by Ezra Klein on August 13, 2012 at 10:04 am

I’ve got a modest proposal: You’re not allowed to demand a “serious conversation” over Medicare unless you can answer these three questions:

1) Mitt Romney says that “unlike the current president who has cut Medicare funding by $700 billion. We will preserve and protect Medicare.” What happens to those cuts in the Ryan budget?

2) What is the growth rate of Medicare under the Ryan budget?

3) What is the growth rate of Medicare under the Obama budget?

The answers to these questions are, in order, “it keeps them,” “GDP+0.5%,” and “GDP+0.5%.”

Let’s be very clear on what that means: Ryan’s budget — which Romney has endorsed — keeps Obama’s cuts to Medicare, and both Ryan and Obama envision the same long-term spending path for Medicare. The difference between the two campaigns is not in how much they cut Medicare, but in how they cut Medicare.

This brings us to the big myth of this campaign, or at least of this particular conversation: That Republicans, but not Democrats, have a plan to cut Medicare costs. As Ryan pointedly put it in his first speech as Romney’s vice-presidential pick, “We won’t duck the tough issues. We will lead!”

Obama’s Medicare reform plan isn’t that hard to find. It’s largely in Title III of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The basic strategy has three components: First, figure out what “quality” in health care is. Second, figure out how to pay for quality rather than paying for volume. Third, make it easier for Medicare to quickly update itself to reflect both advances in knowledge about what quality is and how to pay for it.

And so, in Title III, you’ll find dozens of different efforts to achieve these goals. The most famous of them is Section 3403, which establishes the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). But there’s also Section 3021, which creates the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, and Section 3025, which cuts hospital reimbursements if too many of their patients are readmitted, and Section 3001, which establishes value-based purchasing for hospital services, and Section 3015, which collects data on quality, and Section 3502, which advances the medical home model.

Some of the efforts are outside Title III. The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute is actually in Title VI of the law. And then there are the subsequent reforms the administration has proposed to save more money. Those can be found on pages 33-37 of the president’s 2013 budget proposal. They include expanding IPAB’s mandate such that it can change Medicare’s benefit package and setting a growth cap on Medicare of GDP+0.5 percentage points — which is, by the way, the same growth cap that Rep. Paul Ryan imposes in the latest iteration of his budget.

As for Romney’s plan? Well, it’s 902 words long, and basically sketches a less-detailed version of the plan Ryan released in his 2013 budget proposal (which is, for the record, much more moderate than the plan in his 2012 budget).

Romney would give Medicare beneficiaries a voucher permitting them to choose between traditional Medicare and private plans. Romney’s people tell me his plan will use competitive bidding, in which the value of the voucher is tied to the lowest-cost (or, in some versions, second-lowest cost) plan. If beneficiaries want a more expensive plan, they’ll have to pay the difference out of pocket. On his Web site, however, it just says that Romney “is exploring different options for ensuring that future seniors receive the premium support they need while also ensuring that competitive pressures encourage providers to improve quality and control cost.”

Which is fine. I actually think that on Medicare, unlike on other issues, Romney has provided an acceptable level of detail to evaluate where he’d like to take the system. But that’s not the same as saying it’s detailed.

These plans get at the basic disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on Medicare.

Democrats believe the best way to reform Medicare is to leave the program intact but vastly strengthen its ability to pay for quality. Republicans believe the best way to reform Medicare is to fracture the system between private plans and traditional Medicare and let competition do its work.

It’s worth saying there’s no particularly good evidence for either option. Competition hasn’t worked very well in the health-care system. Indeed, Medicare currently includes private options through the Medicare Advantage program. The idea was these private, managed-care alternatives would be cheaper than traditional Medicare. As it turned out, they ended up costing about 20 percent more.

As for the pay-for-quality revolution that the Obama administration envisions, that hasn’t been proven at Medicare’s scale, either.

Both Ryan and Obama — but not Romney — have proposed to back up their promises with an enforceable cap on the program’s future growth. Whether future Congresses would actually enforce such caps is, of course, an open question.

So there’s a conflict of policy visions. But it’s simply a conservative myth that the White House hasn’t put forward a Medicare reform plan. What that line really means is that White House hasn’t put forward some variant of Ryan’s plan, which in many Republican circles, has come to be seen as the only policy change that counts as “entitlement reform.”

But Obama’s plan is, without doubt, far more detailed than anything Romney has put forward, and Republicans are well aware of its existence. One Republican accused Obama of a “bureaucratic approach to controlling Medicare costs” which “empowers a board of 15 unelected officials — the

Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB — to hold the growth of Medicare spending.” He said the cuts would be so severe that they “would simply drive Medicare providers out of business, resulting in harsh disruptions and denied care for seniors.”

That Republican? Paul Ryan.

I still don't know what deductions we're eliminating.

Understanding TPC’s Analysis of Governor Romney’s Tax Plan

Donald Marron | Posted on August 8, 2012, 4:50 pm

The Tax Policy Center’s latest research report went viral last week, drawing attention in the presidential campaign and sparking a constructive discussion of the practical challenges of tax reform. Unfortunately, the response has also included some unwarranted inferences from one side and unwarranted vitriol from the other, distracting from the fundamental message of the study: tax reform is hard.

The paper, authored by Sam Brown, Bill Gale, and Adam Looney, examines the challenges policymakers face in designing a revenue-neutral income tax reform. The paper illustrates the importance of the tradeoffs among revenue, tax rates, and progressivity for the tax policies put forward by presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It found, subject to certain assumptions I discuss below, that any revenue-neutral plan along the lines Governor Romney has outlined would reduce taxes for high-income households, requiring higher taxes on middle- or low-income households. I doubt that’s his intent, but it is an implication of what we can tell about his plan so far. (We look forward to updating our analysis, of course, if and when Governor Romney provides more details.)
The paper is the latest in a series of TPC studies that have documented both the promise and the difficulty of base-broadening, rate-lowering tax reform. Last month, for example, Hang Nguyen, Jim Nunns, Eric Toder, and Roberton Williams documented just how hard it can be to cut tax preferences to pay for lower tax rates. An earlier paper by Dan Baneman and Eric Toder documented the distributional impacts of individual income tax preferences.

The new study applies those insights to Governor Romney’s tax proposal. To do so, the authors had to confront a fundamental challenge: Governor Romney has not offered a fully-specified plan. He has been explicit about the tax cuts he has in mind, including a one-fifth reduction in marginal tax rates from today’s level, which would drop the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent and a cut in capital gains and dividend taxes for families with incomes below $200,000. He and his team have also said that reform should be revenue-neutral and not increase taxes on capital gains and dividends. But they have not provided any detail about what tax preferences they would cut to make up lost revenue.

As a political matter, such reticence is understandable. To sell yourself and your policy, it’s natural to emphasize the things that people like, such as tax cuts, while downplaying the specifics of who will bear the accompanying costs. Last February, President Obama did the same thing when he rolled out his business tax proposal. The president was very clear about lowering the corporate rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, but he provided few examples of the tax breaks he would cut to pay for it. Such is politics.

For those of us in the business of policy analysis, however, this poses a challenge. TPC’s goal is to inform the tax policy debate as best we can. While we strongly prefer to analyze complete plans, that sometimes isn’t possible. So we provide what information we can with the resources available. Earlier this year, for example, we analyzed the specified parts of Governor Romney’s proposal and documented how much revenue he would have to make up by unspecified base broadening (or, possibly, macroeconomic growth) and how the rate cuts would affect households at different income levels.

The latest study asked a different question: Could Romney’s plan maintain current progressivity given revenue neutrality and reasonable assumptions about what types of base broadening he’d propose? There are roughly $1.3 trillion in tax expenditures out there, but not all will be on Governor Romney’s list. He has said, for example, that raising capital gains and dividend taxes isn’t an option and has generally spoken about lowering taxes on saving and investment. Based on those statements, the authors considered what would happen if Romney kept all the tax breaks associated with saving and investment, including not only the lower rates on capital gains and dividends, but also the special treatment for municipal bonds, IRA and 401ks, and certain life-insurance plans, as well as the ability to avoid capital gains taxes at death (known as step-up basis). The authors also recognized that touching some tax breaks is beyond the realm of political possibility, such as taxing the implicit rent people get from owning their own home.

Given those factors, the study then examined the most progressive way of reducing the other tax breaks that remain on the table—i.e. it rolls them back first for high-income people. But there aren’t enough of those preferences to offset the benefits that high-income households get from the rate reductions. As a result, a revenue-neutral reform within these constraints would cut taxes at the high-end while raising them in the middle and perhaps bottom.

What should we infer from this result? Like Howard Gleckman, I don’t interpret this as evidence that Governor Romney wants to increase taxes on the middle class in order to cut taxes for the rich, as an Obama campaign ad claimed. Instead, I view it as showing that his plan can’t accomplish all his stated objectives. One can charitably view his plan as a combination of political signaling and the opening offer in what would, if he gets elected, become a negotiation.

To get a sense of where such negotiation might lead, keep in mind that Romney’s plan is not the first to propose a 28 percent top rate. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 did, as did the Bowles-Simpson proposal and the similar Domenici-Rivlin effort (on which I served). Unlike Governor Romney’s proposal, all three of those tax reforms reflect political compromise. And in all three cases, part of that compromise was eliminating some tax preferences for saving and investment, which tend to be especially important for high-income taxpayers. In particular, all three reforms resulted in capital gains and dividends being taxed at ordinary income tax rates.
TPC’s latest study highlights the realities that lead to such compromises.

http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2012/08/08/understanding-tpcs-analysis-of-governor-romneys-tax-plan/

Kay Bailey's response to our GOP platform query.

After directing the inquiry re. the Texas GOP platform to Senator Hutchison's press secretary, here's the response we got:

“There are a number of planks in the Texas Republican Party platform that Senator Hutchison strongly supports, but she is not running for re-election. These questions are better put to those who are seeking office.”

Hey, wait a minute!  That's just a refusal to answer the question.  I guess we'll never know whether she supports or opposes US withdrawal from the United Nations. Luridtransom is deeply disappointed in Senator Hutchison.  We look forward to working with Senator Ted Cruz. Thanks to Senator Hutchison's press secretary for being courteous and helpful, even though his boss hates American voters and thinks she's above answering questions.

Open Letter to Harry Reid.

Dear Harry Reid,

You are a liar and a hypocrite.  Don't blame me, blame yourself.  Luridtransom will retract these charges when you do the following:

(1) Identify the anonymous Bain investor that told you Mitt Romney has paid zero taxes over the last decade, or prove this allegation to be true; and

(2) Release your own tax returns.

You are the poster child for what's wrong with partisan politics.  Actually, one of many poster children if that makes you feel better.  Luridtransom has ZERO respect for you.  Do you hear that?!  ZERO.  We can only assume you loathe integrity and intellectual honesty, and your only concerns are polls, approval ratings, and sound bite politics.  ZERO respect.

Regards,
Luridtransom

Response from Kay Bailey Hutchison

Dear Friend:

     
Thank you for contacting me regarding national politics. I welcome your thoughts and comments on this issue.

    
I believe I share with the majority of Texans a desire for limited but effective government, low taxes, a strong commitment to national defense, and government policies and programs that encourage, rather than hinder, the development of the values and virtues that make Texas and America great.

     
I appreciate hearing from you and hope you will not hesitate to keep in touch on any issue of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Kay Bailey Hutchison
United States Senator

2012 Texas GOP Platform. Do you support or oppose these selected planks? (Also sent to Sen. Cornyn and Lamar Smith).

Dear Senator Hutchison,

Below I have listed a number of planks of the 2012 Texas Republican Party platform. Please let me know whether you support, or do not support each of the planks listed. Feel free to explain your support or opposition all you want - in fact, I encourage full explanations of all your answers. But be clear as to each plank whether you support or oppose it. Below are the planks, verbatim from the platform.

Term Limits - We urge Congress, the Legislature, and the Republican Party to institute Term Limits.

U.S. Department of Education – Since education is not an enumerated power of the federal government, we believe the Department of Education (DOE) should be abolished.

Education Spending – Since data is clear that additional money does not translate into educational achievement, and higher education costs are out of control, we support reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education institutions.

Capital Gains Tax – We favor abolishing the capital gains tax.

Ethanol – We support the repeal of legislation mandating ethanol as fuel additives and/or primary fuel.

Sound Money – Our founding fathers warned us of the dangers of allowing central bankers to control our currency because inflation equals taxation without representation. We support the return to the time tested precious metal standard for the U.S. dollar.

United Nations – We support the withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations and the removal of U.N. headquarters from U.S. soil.

Foreign Aid – We oppose foreign aid except in cases of national defense or catastrophic disasters, with Congressional approval.

International Organizations – We support U.S. withdrawal from the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank.

Thank you for your candid reponses.

Regards,
luridtransom

Dear Lamar.

Dear Lamar,

This is from your website. (Click on Issues, then On The Issues, then Budget.) Here's the link: http://www.lamarsmith.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=28988

When then Senator Obama was running for president, he pledged to cut the deficit in half, yet the national debt has more than doubled since he took office. On February 13, 2012, President Obama released his FY2013 budget request. His $3.8 trillion budget proposal for FY2013 marks the fourth straight year of a projected deficit over $1 trillion. It increases spending, taxes, and the deficit. On Wednesday, March 28, 2012, the House unanimously rejected President Obama's FY2013 budget proposal by a vote of 414-0.

Each year, Congress is responsible for setting the federal budget and appropriating funds for all government functions. It has been nearly three years since the Senate has passed a federal budget. The last time the Senate passed a budget was on April 29, 2009, when the total national debt was $11.15 trillion. Today, the total national debt is $15.2 trillion.

Debt of this level will stifle our economic growth. The solution for reviving our economy is straightforward: cut job-destroying government spending to allow employers to create jobs.

Let's look at the last paragraph of your Budget position. How does government spending destroy jobs? Doesn't government spending create jobs? Government spending has a stimulative effect on the economy, right? Take, for instance, military spending here in San Antonio. That creates lots of jobs. On the flip-side, I can't think of an example of "job-destroying government spending." Can you give me an example? I think you're trying to say you want to cut the defecit and pay down the national debt by cutting spending and not raising taxes. Is that what you're trying to say? Or did you actually mean what you said, and you think government spending destroys jobs?

Regards, luridtransom