Something Doesn't Add Up

The other day when Mitt Romney was whining about how Barack Obama keeps picking on him, he said:

I just have to say, given the challenges that America faces — 23 million people out of work, Iran about to become nuclear, one out of six Americans in poverty — the fascination with taxes I paid I find to be very small-minded.

Small-minded?

• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on keeping his tax returns secret, in comparison to his father's release of 12 years of tax returns. Most other presidential candidates in the last 40 years have released five to 30 years.
• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, even as we were fighting two wars, and recovering from a recession that has hit the poor and middle class especially hard, while corporations have been wallowing in cash.
• Small-minded is the Republican fascination with the personal lives of gay people, and their insistence on dictating who they can marry.
• Small-minded is the majority of Republicans who insist that Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is false, that Obama is a Muslim, that Obama is a anti-colonialist born in Kenya. Apparently, 64% of Republicans are latched on to this fantasy (and still think Saddam had WMDs).

But back to Romney's tax returns: something just doesn't add up. In 2010 and 2011 Romney made $42.5 million, or $21 million a year. Estimates of Romney's wealth are between $190 and $250 million. Now, he's been "retired" since 1999, which means that he's quite probable that he's been making in the ballpark of $20 million a year for the last 12 years.

If you multiply $20 million times 12 years, you get $240 million, or Romney's current worth. What happened to the money that Romney made during the 20 or so years he worked at Bain and other jobs?

Unless Romney's got an incredibly profligate lifestyle, or made a lot of really terrible investments, there seems to be a lot of missing money. It looks like Romney's got a ton of money socked away in places we don't know about.

This is why we need to see Romney's tax returns for the last 10 years, if not 20 years. Something just does not smell right here.

Mitt Comes Clean

So Governor Romney has come clean and said that he looked through his taxes and paid around 13 percent every year for the last 10 years. Harry Reid's response? Prove it.

I'm trying to figure out why he would make any sort of comment at all if he's not going to release his other returns which he says he won't. He did say he would release 2011 but the deadline for that is Oct 15, 2012 (I guess he got an extension). That also makes no sense as it is right before the election. And, what if the returns do come out and Harry Reid is right or partially right? Then Mitt would be caught in a lie.

With the white board weirdness yesterday, their campaign plan seems haphazard bordering on the bizarre. Why aren't they out there talking more about Paul Ryan, who clearly has energized the crowds and the base?

Oh, Really?

Here is a link with all the letters in PDF format.

What...In...The...

A Billboard In Minneapolis

By A Landslide

On pretty much every political and social site out there, it won't take you long to see a reference to Barack Obama as the Goldman Sachs president. In 2008, he received around 10 million dollars in contributions compared to McCain who got around 7 million dollars so there was cause to call him this back then.

But after Dodd-Frank and his continued call for actually enforcing regulations on the financial sector, the party's over for the president. As of last June, Mitt Romney has raked in 37 million dollars from the financial sector compared to Obama's paltry 5 million dollars. 

So, if you are one of those folks falling all over themselves to look for a "Wall Street" candidate, it's Mitt Romney by a landslide. And please join us in the year 2012 and stop being childishly dishonest.

From Russia, Without Love

Ayn Rand is back in the news now that Rand acolyte Paul Ryan has been chosen as Mitt Romney's running mate. I found this link to an Ayn Rand interview on the Tonight Show from 1967. Hearing her speak is entertaining because she sounds exactly the way you would expect a Soviet spy to sound.

The usual slam on Ayn Rand is that her Objectivist philosophy is a selfish adolescent power fantasy. And there's good reason for that. The Russian Revolution took place when Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (Rand's birth name) was 12 years old. It completely shattered her world and scarred her for life. Objectivism was literally born in the mind of an teen-aged girl whose father's pharmacy was confiscated when the Bolsheviks came to power.

Her family were non-practicing Jews. She decided in high school that she was an atheist, no doubt under the influence of the Soviet school system. Rand went to Petrograd State University and was purged with other bourgeois students, but managed to get a degree due to the intervention of visiting foreign scientists. She went to the United States in 1925 and eventually became a Hollywood screenwriter.

Rand believed that reason is the primary human attribute. She rejected absolutely any form of religion, and believed the very concept of altruism was incompatible with human life and happiness.

Ironically, this flies in the face of reason. Altruism is essential for human and animal communities to survive and grow, and even for the evolution of life itself. Since Rand's death there's been a great deal of research into altruistic behavior in other species, which exists even in bacterial colonies. There may even be an altruism gene. Without altruism, the only nations that could field an army and wage wars would be pirate states that conquered other countries for profit, and doled out the spoils of war to soldiers. Otherwise, why risk your life to defend your country? Let the addle-brained fools who believe in God and an afterlife get themselves killed on the field of battle. Better to stay home and get rich selling weapons to the government.

And, of course, altruism is the very basis of Christianity ("Christ died for our sins"). 

At its core Rand's philosophy is a childish refutation of Soviet Russia's revolution. Objectivism is Bizarro communism: the exact opposite of communism in every respect except its embrace of pseudo-rationality and rejection of religion. Rand's philosophy epitomizes what communists portray capitalists as: supremely selfish, narcissistic, profit-seeking automata.

The problem with Objectivism is that it is inherently weak and cannot work for large groups. It glorifies selfishness instead of loyalty and steadfastness. If there is no altruism, there is no love, no trust. All alliances are fleeting conveniences, to be abandoned instantly when reason indicates selfish gain is to be had. Life for objectivists is one long Machiavellian pissing contest.

Objectivism is so preposterous that it must be the product of a Hollywood screenwriter. Which, in fact, it is.

The cynic in me says that Ayn Rand is just the L. Ron Hubbard of capitalism. But it makes me wonder: was Ayn Rand really a Soviet mole sent to Hollywood to sabotage the West with a form of capitalism that was so toxic and self-destructive that it would collapse under the sheer weight of its selfishness?

Может быть, товарищ. Может быть...

Taking One for the Team

Early next year fiscal Armageddon is scheduled to take place when the budget is sequestered -- which means automatic spending cuts to everything. Conservatives have been screaming bloody murder about how this will gut the Defense Department, claiming that the budget will be "slashed by more than $600 billion."

Turns out this claim is false.

The oft-repeated higher figure of $600 billion is actually the total in projected deficit reduction that the government would get by cutting $492 billion from the military. The extra $108 billion in projected savings would come via interest payments the government wouldn't have to make. Since the government would be spending less, it could borrow less and thus save on interest. [...]

Both a Congressional Budget Office report and the head of the Office of Management and Budget concur that the proper figure for the cuts is $492 billion, or about $55 billion annually over nine years.

Now the Defense Department's budget is $550 billion, so a $55 billion annual cut could easily be achieved by cutting a few junkets by DoD honchos, shutting down a few useless bases and eliminating a few worthless weapons systems that are sops to powerful congressmen funneling earmarks to their districts. In addition, the war in Afghanistan is drawing down, so defense spending just doesn't need to maintain its current levels.

Depending on how you want to count, the United States spends as much as the next 10 or 12 countries on defense. Yes, we are in a special situation, and we do have a larger responsibility to ourselves and the rest of the world for defense. But defense is just another government program, and is quite prone to overcharging and outright deception by private contractors to whom most of the defense budget flows. As someone who's worked in the industry I've seen firsthand how it works.

This whole problem could be solved if all those patriotic defense contractors pitched in and cut their prices by 10%. It would best for them in the long run to avoid having to make hard choices about which programs to cut, wouldn't it?

As Republican keep telling us, it's about time the people sucking on the government teat took one for the team.

Stop Them From Selling Their Potion

Yeah, Not So Much

Remember all that business about how voter fraud was rampant and every state needed to pass laws to stop this awful law breaking.

Yeah, not so much. 

The analysis of 2,068 reported fraud cases by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, found 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation since 2000.

10? Good grief, someone call the CDC. This epidemic is out of control!!!

With 146 million registered voters in the United States, those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.

Well, now I can see why this was such a concern and why we now need photo ID's.

Oh, wait. Here's why.

Placing the Blame Where It Belongs

There's an interesting article from Bruce Bartlett, a policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, in the New York Times.

In "Blaming Obama for George W. Bush's Policies," Bartlett points out that it was Bush's tax cuts, Bush's wars in the Middle East, and Bush's Medicare Part D that turned the $236 billion surplus Bill Clinton bequeathed to Bush into a $1.3 trillion deficit in 2009. And it was Dick Cheney, Bush's VP, who said that deficits don't matter.

Bartlett then likens the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama managed to push through Congress to an inadequate dose of medicine. Obama's advisors (and economists like Paul Krugman) said this was too small. It was like a tuberculosis patient taking only half the antibiotics: the disease is suppressed, but not cured. That's why there aren't more jobs: consumers don't have enough cash on hand to increase demand for products, so businesses can't hire more people to increase production.

Bartlett ends his piece with:

But it was Republican policies during the Bush administration that brought on the sickness and Republicans in Congress who have denied the economy an adequate dosage of the cure. Now they want to implicitly blame President Obama for causing the recession and the failure of stimulus to fix the problem, asserting that fiscal stimulus is per se ineffective.

There is a word for this: chutzpah.

There's another word for it: sabotage. Republicans have done everything they can to keep the economy in the tank to gain partisan advantage in the 2012 election.

Now Paul Ryan, the apostle of Ayn Rand, has been anointed to deliver the ultimatum of economic blackmail: give the wealthy gigantic tax cuts or they'll tank the economy again.

They Like Him But...

Nearly all of my conservative friends are overjoyed at the pick of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's VP. I'm still trying to figure out why Mittens picked someone to fire up the base. With all of them foaming at the mouth about making President Obama a one term president, was he really worried that they wouldn't turn out and vote for him?

These same conservative friends of mine cry foul when I point out facts about Congressmen Ryan. They think I'm lying when I say he has never really worked in the private sector. They think I'm lying when I say that he has been a career politician. They really get pissed when I demonstrate how he used Social Security benefits to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

How pissed will they be when they read this? 

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

That's not some raging liberal writing here. That's David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's OMB guy from 1981-1985. In true propeller head fashion, Stockman breaks down the numbers of the Ryan Budget and shows it for all it is...a plan that won't reduce the debt or the deficit.

Folks, here are the facts about The Great Thinker's plans. His Road Map didn't see a balanced budget until the 2060s and added 60 trillion dollars to the national debt. His revised plan was at least a little better with a balanced budget in the 2030s and 14 trillion dollars to the debt. I challenge anyone to take a hard look at these plans and check the numbers.

So what does his plan actually do? Here's an excellent primer from The Christian Science Monitor.

It's True

Here's a photo that has been making the rounds lately...

Is it true? As we say in Minnesota, "You betcha!"

When Paul Ryan's dad died suddenly of a heart attack when the VP pick was 16, he used the Social Security death benefits to pay for college. Once again, I find it enormously frustrating that someone on the right shits all over the nice place in which he lives simply because he read Ayn Rand and is on an adolescent power trip.

Oh, and I also don't want to hear any more bitching about the "liberal media" after this piece in the New York Times. 

His self-reliance followed him to summer camp, where as a counselor he canoed and hiked, and into young adulthood, where he took up deer hunting, a fact noted in his engagement notice in 2000 in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “Ryan is an avid hunter and fisherman,” the paper reported, “who does his own skinning and butchering and makes his own Polish sausage and bratwurst.”

Self reliance aided by...someone else...and something else...Social Security. In fact, isn't Paul Ryan a living example of what President Obama meant by not doing everything on your own?

Ryan Plan Reduces Taxes on 1% to 1%

Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's pick for vice president, wants to make Harry Reid an honest man. His tax plan would eliminate taxes on wealthy people like Mitt Romney:

In his 2010 “Roadmap for America’s Future,” Ryan proposed eliminating taxes on corporate income, estates, dividends, interest and capital gains. He would simplify the individual income tax system into a two-rate structure topping out at 25 percent and impose what is effectively an 8.5 percent value-added tax.

Under Ryan's tax plan Romney would pay less than 1% in taxes because so little of his income is earned; most of Romney's income is in dividends, interest and capital gains. He earned a paltry $593,996 in 2010, while making $21.9 million dollars and paying only 13.9% in taxes. This is because the Bush tax cuts include a 15% capital gains tax rate, which means rich guys like Romney can loaf around and do nothing while people who actually have to bust their asses doing real work pay up to 35%.

Talk about picking winners and losers.

Poor people who currently pay no taxes would pay drastically more with a VAT tax, which is a sales tax on everything.

Middle-class workers would see the price of everything they buy go up almost 10% because of the VAT, and their net taxes would actually go up because loopholes like the home interest deduction would have to be eliminated in order for the Ryan plan to work at all. That's because, even though corporations are people, my friends, they would pay no taxes under Ryan's plan, and someone has to pay for the gigantic military budget increases Romney is promising.

Meanwhile, rich people could simply rearrange some deck chairs with their fund managers to pay zero tax.

And that's why porn star Jenna Jameson endorsed Mitt Romney from the stage of a strip club, saying "When you're rich, you want a Republican in office."