Circumlocution

Mitt Romney is happy that domestic oil production has increased in recent years, but he wants to make sure we don’t thank the president for it. Today, Romney pointed out that the Red Sox won the World Series while he was the governor, but he doesn’t get to take credit for it, so Obama doesn’t get to take credit for increased oil production.

In the same speech, Romney blamed Obama for high gasoline prices and the lack of jobs. In fact, blaming the president for everything bad that has happened during his term is basically what all of Romney’s speeches are about. Even when something good happens, such as a drop in the unemployment rate or an increase in oil production, Romney blames the president for not making things even better. In other words, we can give the president blame but not credit for anything that happens while he’s in office.

According to Romney’s logic, even though he can’t take credit for the Red Sox, we can blame him for everything bad that happened during his term as governor. He can also take the blame for everything that might have been better. The famous Big Dig ceiling collapse of 2006? Romney’s fault. And why didn’t the Red Sox win every year while Romney was in office? What was he doing to hinder them?

Veering into the realm of fantasy, Romney said, “All of the decline in the rate of unemployment, from 10 percent at its peak to 8.1 percent now, is due, not to job creation, it’s been due to people dropping out of the workforce.” Even when the statistics show that things are clearly improving, you can blame the incumbent. All you have to do is pretend that the numbers are lying.

President Obama’s recent decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline has environmentalists celebrating, while Speaker Boehner is accusing the president of destroying our economy. Both reactions are completely out of proportion to what the president actually did, but that’s not surprising. The two sides were already talking about things that had little to do with the proposed pipeline, so of course their reactions had little to do with what the president said.

By imposing an arbitrary deadline, Congress required the president to make a premature decision on a proposal that doesn’t even have a definite route yet. The president did the only reasonable thing he could do — he turned down the proposal but invited the developer to resubmit it. He didn’t put a halt to the pipeline; he just put a halt to Congress’s ploy.

Despite the fact that the idea of a pipeline is still alive, environmentalists were quick to claim victory, and Republicans were quick to claim defeat.

To environmentalists and Republicans alike, this was never really about a pipeline. Sure, some environmentalists are concerned about where the pipe will go, but mostly we hear about where the oil is coming from before it goes into the pipe. Extracting oil from tar sand takes a lot of energy, which translates into more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere for each barrel of oil produced. But targeting a pipeline is, to put it mildly, a rather oblique way of fighting climate change.

To Republicans, the fight is supposedly about creating jobs and lowering the price of gasoline. In reality, the pipeline would only be a drop in the bucket for jobs or prices, but it’s a convenient way to make Obama look like he wants to kill jobs and make us all miserable. By putting a deadline on approval before the plan is finalized, Boehner and his allies made it clear that either they don’t give a hoot where the pipeline goes or they fully expected Obama to deny it. You might think they were trying to sabotage the proposal, rather than support it.

Personally, I think the pipeline proposal has little to do with jobs, prices, or carbon dioxide. I care about where the pipeline goes and how much damage the actual pipeline, not the tar sands in Canada, might do. I care about greenhouse gases, but that means I want to reduce the demand for oil, not make it harder for suppliers to meet that demand. And from a strategic perspective, if a war in the Middle East — or a blockade — cuts us off from major oil suppliers, we might be really glad if we have a pipeline from Canada.

The Tax Policy Center has reviewed the tax plans proposed by Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. All three would drastically reduce taxes on corporations and wealthy taxpayers. Romney would take things a step further by actually raising taxes on the poor, while Gingrich and Perry might raise taxes on the poor.

Romney would eliminate the taxes on capital gains and dividends for couples earning under $200k, while Gingrich and Perry would eliminate them for everybody. All three candidates would eliminate the estate tax and drastically reduce the corporate tax rate. All three would also eliminate the 0.9% tax introduced with the 2010 health care legislation, which only affects individuals earning over $200k and couples earning over $250k.

But enough about capital gains and dividends — how do these plans affect poor people? Romney has said that although he would extend the Bush tax cuts — the ones that mostly help rich people — he would allow the more recent tax cuts and credits to expire. The expiration list includes a tax credit for education, the expanded child tax credit, and the expanded earned income tax credit. Gingrich and Perry haven’t really specified how they would handle expiring tax cuts. Depending on what assumptions you make, each candidate’s plan might raise taxes on poor people (see examples for Romney, Gingrich, and Perry, and note the “percent change in after-tax income”). No matter what assumptions you make, all three plans are fantastic for rich people and corporations.

All three plans would drastically increase the deficit. The cost of the tax cuts would be somewhere between $180 billion and $1.28 trillion, depending on which plan you look at and what assumptions you make. NPR cited the lowest of these numbers, then reported that “Romney’s campaign disputes the estimate, saying tax cuts in the plan would help improve the economy, leading to more revenue.”

Ah yes, cutting taxes leads to more revenue. That’s what Reagan said, and it’s what George H. W. Bush called “voodoo economics.” We’ve already tried it for thirty years, and all we’ve succeeded in doing is destroying the economy.

In the 1950s, the top tax rate was over 90%. In the ’70s, it was 70%. Was the economy better in the ’70s as a result? I don’t think so. Under Reagan, the top tax rate went down to 28%, and it’s now 35%. According to Reagonomic theory, the economy should be much better now than it was in the ’50s. Rick Perry would like to have a flat tax at 20%, and Gingrich would like 15%. For corporations, the current tax rate is 35%, but Romney would like to reduce it to 25%, Perry to 20%, and Gingrich to 12.5%.

Supposedly, Republicans hate deficit spending, even though they created the current deficit. They love to complain about the 2009 stimulus package and its one-time cost of $787 billion. The tax cuts that the candidates are proposing would cost a similar amount every year. But instead of helping the economy and keeping teachers and construction workers employed, the tax cuts would simply be a gift to the wealthiest Americans. As Robert Reich pointed out eloquently in his book Aftershock, giving more money to rich people doesn’t help the economy — it just makes the economy more volatile.

When you vote, remember this: If your income is under $200k, these candidates’ plans would not help you. If your income is under $50k, the plans are likely to cost you money. And no matter what your income is, consider the effect on the economy when deficits rise and spending falls at the same time. Revenues are already unrealistically low; we can’t afford to slash them further. Cutting taxes on the rich while cutting benefits for the poor is exactly the opposite of what we need to do.