Just To Be Clear
Republican presidential candidate Gordon Gekko supports his would-be vice president’s budget. And why not — I’d be inclined to support a budget that would virtually eliminate my federal tax burden entirely too.
This also seems like a good time for one of my periodic reminders that the new Republican orthodoxy opposing taxes on investment income is an excellent example of the fact that they’re just pro-plutocrat, not pro-”free market.”
Romney spokesman: That is a highly unfair characterization. Governor Romney doesn’t suffer any such conflict of interest because he doesn’t pay any federal taxes under the current system anyway.
Man, THIS trickle-down’s gonna be awesome!!!
Get your Hazmat suits ready.
They’re getting ready to pee out our heads and tell us it’s raining, fart and tell us it’s thunder, and that that brown stuff coming down is fertilizer to help us grow our little dreams.
So, Reagan redux?
Of course he does. To the extent that we have any specifics, as opposed to vague and unspecified generalities, for either the Romney or the Ryan budgets, they are the same: slash programs for the poor and middle classes and give the rich massive tax cuts.
If anyone dares to point this out, the Fact Chucks of the world will insist that it is dishonest to tie Paul Ryan’s plan around Rmoney’s neck because Rmoney has his own, different tax plan that would merely slash his taxes, not nearly eliminate them like Ryan’s plan would. They’ll award four Pinnochios On Fire or whatever.
“Market forces” are so powerful Republicans have no choice but to engineer government policy so as to lavish favors on the owners of capital and select members of senior management while at the same time smashing organized labor, work safety rules, wages and benefits, and so on.
Ryan did take this beyond the limit in 2005. His Social Security bill would have started as a huge gift to Wall Street, but turned into the Trustees controlling every publicly traded company in the country.
Comrade Ryan, or useless idiot? Only his hairdresser knows.
This is absolutely true, but they have spent several decades telling people you can’t be in the club without believing those two are one and the same.
Those willing to actually vote for Romney (I was genuinely perplexed when I saw a Romney bumpersticker: I thought there were Obama-haters, but I guess there are actually Romney-supporters), would much rather cling to the congnitive dissonance than be labeled as, GASP, a RINO.
Scott, there’s something weird going on with your linked post (along with sporadic posts pre-dating the linked one) — it looks like some spam text and links have been inserted into the body of the post. Probably a bear to actually fix them all, but it might be worth investigating how they’ve been added.
I think Farley once said that the spam text was part of supporting the vast holdings of LGM, LLC, a Bermuda holding company which keeps the principles supplied with gin, not vodka.
The thought of a Romney-Ryan administration fills me with despair. The suffering will be immense.
At least the nomination makes clear what a Romney presidency means. There will be no MA style moderation to this conservative’s tenure if elected. We’ll get full wingnut. More radical than Bush on the domestic financial front. Simply amazing.
You know what? I’m actually kind of glad about that. At last, Republicans are up front about who they are. No compassionate conservatism. No Contract with America. No tri-corner hats.
Romney and Ryan will be out there the next few months pushing a plan that will pay for upper-class tax cuts by gutting services and increasing taxes on the middle class and poor. No way around it – it’s all out there.
Barring some sort of 2000-style EC calamity, a Romney/Ryan win would say that, yes, this is actually what people want. It will be a disaster for 95% of Americans but the ugly face of the GOP will be exposed.
I don’t think that’s what people want, but we’ll see. If they lose, no doubt some will say that it is because Romney/Ryan weren’t pure enough, but that’s even more unbelievable today than it was last week.
The problem: we rely on the media and the Dems to actually point out to people what that budget entails. Most don’t have the time, energy or inclination to look closely. With the media in the tank and the Dems as effective at communication as a Trappist with laryngitis, I’m still not too sanguine.
I think Obama has been making the case admirably.
The Dems have enough to destroy the GOP short-term just on Ryan’s Medicare proposal (and no, “it won’t affect people over 55 today” is not good enough). If they don’t do it, well, they deserve to lose.
But they’ve done it once before, right? It led us to learning one character trait about Ryan – he is thin-skinned and gets butthurt easily. He was incredulous the last time Dems said that his plan would destroy Medicare. Why wouldn’t they do that again?
I am looking forward to him getting destroyed in the VP debates on this issue and then getting upset about it on national TV. That will not play well.
I used to think that Conservatives were lying and knew they were lying when the proposed stuff like “cut taxes to 0% and see tax revenues increase”.
But now I think they actually believe this stuff. The key tell to me was when Paul Bremer was made proconsul of Iraq and figured he’d solve everything but cutting taxes and slashing the government budget. Yes, that’s right, the place is in ruins without electricity or clean water, he’s fired all the police on the grounds that they worked for Saddam and that they cost too much, public services are dead no one is paying taxes anyway because there is no enforcement, but he figures if the gets the tax rates down to 15% it will be a Randian paradise, business will boom, and everyone will be happy.
I’m sure even now he has some excuse for why it didn’t work – possibly that the American left wing poisoned the well by being anti-war or something.
This is a group, after all, who believes that their taxes have gone up under Obama, that Obama has tried to confiscate guns, that Obama’s mother smuggled him in from Kenya as a baby, that the earth is getting cooler, and that CNN is liberal. So they really will believe anything that is convenient.
I think Bremer might be too stupid to care.
I always looked at the idiotic Iraq economic policies through the lens of politics. The neocons were so sure that Iraq was going to be a smash success so they could move on to Iran, right? Well, same with the economic policies. They were so sure that their supply-side policies would turn Iraq into an Asian Tiger-like power on steroids that they could point to it and bring all those policies home.
The Bush administration was actually holding seminars for businesses to instruct them on how to get in on the ground floor of the economic paradise they were so sure Iraq was soon to become.
Warren Buffet said that he knew of no investor who would pass up a deal because of the capital gains tax rate, even when it was 40%. But what does he know?
The idea that if you were taxed on the money that money earned, you wouldn’t put your money to work never made sense to me either. What are the riches going to do with it? Put it in a giant safe and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck?
O hai, if U tax me on mah profitz, I won’t invest mah monee!
WTF?