Sunday, July 8, 2012

The Only Thing "Inevitable" About Mitt Romney Is This

22 comments:

  1. The only thing enevitable about romney is that his gop congressional cohorts will screw the middle class to try and elect their weasle. These people care nothing about the working class and poor in this country.
    Politics and our pork barrels are the omnipotent force that guide us.
    F the people, give business everything so we become wealthier and the poor and working become poorer so as to solidify our power and keep the rest of the public down and at the mercy of business, the ones that provide our salaries and re-election.
    "In Jeeeeeuuuusus, john smith, brigham young we puuuhray!"

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  2. Oh yes, because it has only been the GOP that has "screwed the poor". Seems to me that the Democrats have a lead in this (but granted, the Republicans have made themselves hardly better).

    And as for the "poor": it's time to start making some distinctions. I have nothing but love for my working poor peers and those who are down on their luck, but the ones who for lack of character are in the position they are (and whinging about it) -- they need to be told to shove it. Nobody owes anybody a living; I'm sick of those miserable, entitled acting sots being pandered to at the expense of decent people who have to drag their miserable backsides around. An opportunity and the ability to not be overly harassed while pursuing it is what true freedom is about (and that is where I am getting fair sick...that the opportunity to at least work and do something with oneself has become increasingly difficult to accomplish).
    Thanks largely do to whinging, fat, lazy oafs who would gladly vote for any panderer who they thought would allow them to stay on their couches, growing obese from overeating, and watching freaking Oprah rather than out getting their sweat on, by the way.
    In a sense, both Barry and Mitt are their types of guys. spit

    PW

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  3. ...and also:

    There is a very big difference between honest business and crony corporatism and scams. The former is the life blood of a free society; the latter kill it.
    Perhaps a trifling detail, but then again, perhaps an important distinction to make.
    PW

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  4. Once again, Mr. Romney is stating that the wealthy and corporations will create jobs with trickle-down, supply-side economic policy.
    Wht in the hell has business and the wealthy done for unemployment in the last four years?
    This is a man that refuses to supply his tax information, likely because he is aware that it will uncover discrepencies regarding his investments and their legality, not to mention tax liability.

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  5. Again, there is a difference between honest business and crony corporatism/scams.

    Guess which one the Mittster supports?
    Hence the reason Mitt is a terrible person to be voting for ;)
    Along with some other equally valid reasons, which all seem to be connected within the personage of the Mittster.
    PW

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  6. And . . . what?. Vote for Nader? It's not news to say that voting for a particular politician is a bad compromise, but the alternative here is genuinely worse, not more of the same.

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  7. Everybody can vote for whoever they want to -- it's still a (somewhat) free country.

    But this old tired line of having to vote for Mitt because OMG Obama! is just that: old and tired. Obama stinks on ice, so does Mitt -- and if people don't want to vote for either one, well, that's their choice. If they don't want to vote at all; that's a choice too (although I'm kinda into the "use it, don't lose it" frame of mind still).

    And by the way: just what kind of voter encouragement is "vote for our guy, he isn't ____" (rather than "vote for our guy; he's xyz)? Kinda telling isn't it?

    I swear to God, if Mitt does get in and spends time saying "if it wasn't for Obama's term, I'd be doing better" I'll laugh my ass off.
    PW

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  8. Can we afford a president that put his foot in his mouth every time he opens it? NO. Mr. Romney has no skill doing the job he is attempting to gain.

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  9. Once again, romney has showed his international pskills at dealing with politics, (none as far as international affairs are concerned). Ha has also again confirmed his commitment to the 1%, (the welathy that control 42% of our wealth), that own business and have hired little to no employees and simply stockpiled their money.
    Is this who you want deciding economic policy for this country?

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  10. It's not just that Mitt Romney is incredibly rich with ill-gotten money -- though he certainly is that. Earning about $380,000 puts you in the top 1% of American earners. Romney makes that every WEEK.
    Romney has lived in a strange bubble of wealth for his entire life. He simply doesn't know what it's like to live as a normal person.
    He claims he has had to worry about pink slips (with $250 million stashed away, much of it in the tax-sheltered Cayman Islands.

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  11. Romney is tearing down his $12 million mansion in Country Club, California to build one 3 1/2 times larger (11,000 SF) on the same land, his other house on a lake in New Hampshire is only worth $10 million. And come one, we all know that most of the value of expensive houses is in the land anyway. So, pretty much like any other struggling family.

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  12. Romney told a crowd, ""I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired,. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip." But, pressed by reporters, he couldn't name any such time.
    Mitt Romney was born rich -- his dad was the the CEO of American Motors, and later governor of Michigan -- but Mitt got much richer by through ill-gotten gains. In some cases, the companies that he ran made him rich through outright fraud and criminal behavior, but most of the time he it was his technically legal predatory capitalism at Bain & Co.-- leveraged buyouts, taking over companies by borrowing against their own assets, stripping them of resources, firing workers, busting unions and getting rid of workers' pensions. Meanwhile, he himself gets a multimillion dollar annual pension from Bain, which he pays minimal taxes on due to tax shelters and hiding his money in shady, foreign tax havens (such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Swiss bank accounts) that have extreme secrecy.

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  13. Romney fiercely resisted releasing his tax returns, and then only released one year -- 2010 -- when it looked like he might lose the presidential race if he didn't. This, even though his dad George Romney started the practice of politicians releasing tax returns in the first place, when he ran for president in the 1960s. Since Mitt has been running for President since 2006, he had plenty of time to make sure that one year looked good. Now we have an idea why he didn't release any returns earlier. Because even that one, carefully prepared year has plenty of dangerous items. It revealed his overseas secret bank accounts, and his low overall tax rate of under 15%. But there's worse.
    Since Mitt has been running for President since 2006, he had plenty of time to make sure that one year looked good. Now we have an idea why he didn't release any returns earlier. Because even that one, carefully prepared year has plenty of dangerous items. It revealed his overseas secret bank accounts, and his low overall tax rate of under 15%.

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  14. The biggest concern is that Swiss bank account, one of the items not on his financial disclosure. Mitt had it from 2003 to 2010, when his adviser shut it down. He closed it in the middle of an amnesty that the IRS had declared for owners of previously unreported Swiss bank accounts -- if they came clean, they would not face criminal prosecution for not reporting it in previous years (which was illegal - plus most weren't paying taxes on that money). Was the sudden shutdown of Romney's secret Swiss bank account part of this amnesty program? We can't know unless and until he releases prior returns, like his dad who released 12 years of prior returns. And Mitt is still fiercely refusing to do so.

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  15. Romney can't even make a speech that has been prepared by writers and spoon fed from a tele-prompter. He introduced Ryan as the next President of the United States.
    Romney appointed his vice-presidential running mate today, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Ryan said at the end of his speech that they (Romney, Ryan and by default, the Republicans generally), were going to tell the people the truth.
    This has to mean that Romney will be releasing his previous 10 - 15 years of tax returns and stop lying to everyone about the amount of tax, if any, he has paid.
    But that was a lie as well, since Ryan is of the same substance as Romney.
    If these two are will run this government, we will be in a terrible state, very, very soon and 1% will control over 50% of our wealth shortly. Poverty has never seen such a state, even during the depression of the 1930's.

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  16. Mr. Romney's economic plan is built on:
    ■A tax plan solely for the 1 percent, raising taxes on nearly everyone else
    ■Massive yet unspecified spending cuts that threaten our economic competitiveness, future prosperity, and public safety
    ■Fiscal policies that will only exacerbate our federal budget challenges
    ■Extreme plans to exempt businesses from adhering to the most basic safety, health, environmental, and workplace rules and regulations

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  17. A tax plan solely for the 1 percent

    The key element of any good supply-side economic plan is lower taxes for the rich and Gov. Romney’s blueprint absolutely delivers. The main element of his tax proposals consists of massive cuts for those at the very top. The total magnitude of the Romney tax cuts exceeds even that of the Bush tax cuts, a fact made all the more startling when you realize that Gov. Romney wants his new tax cuts in addition to, not instead of, the Bush tax cuts.

    The Romney tax plan also reflects an unfortunate corollary of supply-side’s main argument—since the rich are the key to prosperity, everyone else doesn’t matter very much. In essence, supply-siders believe while tax cuts for everyone would be nice, it’s really only the ones for the top that matter. Though Gov. Romney’s specific proposals would, in fact, give everyone a tax cut, he has also promised to keep overall revenues where they were under President George W. Bush’s tax policies. Though Gov. Romney declines to explain how he would accomplish this feat, under any reasonable assumptions (and even most unreasonable ones) taxes for the middle class would have to go up.

    The Republican presidential candidate’s tax plan, therefore, is a perfect illustration of supply-side theory—dramatically lower taxes for the rich, higher taxes for everyone else.

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  18. Promises of massive unspecified spending cuts

    Gov. Romney combines his specific tax cut proposals with promises of extremely vague spending cuts. Instead of detailing which programs should be reduced or eliminated and which should be maintained, he sets forth a broad target for federal spending: 20 percent of gross domestic product, the broadest measure of overall economic activity. Gov. Romney proposes a handful of specific spending cuts but by and large, he declines to explain how he would meet that target.

    Unfortunately for the vast majority of Americans, the only way for a Romney administration to hit that target would be to implement massive cuts to most services, programs, benefits, and government assistance—everything from air traffic controllers to food safety inspectors, federal funding for education to investments in basic research and development, as well as a variety of assistance programs that enable low-income Americans to grasp a hand up into the middle class. And though Gov. Romney says he wants to protect Social Security and Medicare for current retirees and those soon to enter retirement, the math simply won’t work. Gov. Romney’s spending cap will, sooner or later, lead to enormous cuts for those two programs as well.

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  19. Rhetoric about fiscal responsibility, but policies that lead to more debt

    The age of permanent federal budget deficits started with the first supply-side president, Ronald Reagan, and accelerated with the last one, George W. Bush. Gov. Romney’s policies promise another round of supply-side budgeting: big tax cuts financed by more debt. Gov. Romney certainly embraces the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility—as, of course, did President Bush—but the actual policies he proposes would inexorably lead to more debt.

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  20. An extreme deregulation agenda

    After low taxes for the rich, the second tenet of faith among the followers of supply-side theories is that corporations must be as free as possible from regulation and oversight. Gov. Romney’s plan embraces that ethos with gusto. His agenda includes proposals to repeal existing regulations, to make it nearly impossible to enact any new regulations, and to allow the executive branch to decline to implement any new rules or requirements that Congress does manage to pass. Gov. Romney also proposes to roll back many environmental regulations and worker protections.

    Combined with spending policies that would inevitably slash the operation budgets of many regulatory agencies, Gov. Romney’s deregulation agenda would effectively give corporations nearly free reign. These policies flow from the belief that what’s good for the bottom lines of the Fortune 500 is necessarily good for everyone. They decidedly reject the notion that fair and efficient markets depend on a level playing field, clear rules, and impartial referees.

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  21. Understanding Romney’s economic worldview

    Each of these elements in Gov. Romney’s economic policy proposals, in their own way, seeks to bolster those at the top. After all, that is the underlying premise of supply-side economic theory. Tax cuts that are paid for with middle-class tax hikes and cuts to middle-class programs or else not paid for at all—leaving it to future generations of Americans to pay off the debt. Less oversight of corporations and fewer rules about how those corporations can treat their customers, workers, and even shareholders.

    And just as it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Gov. Romney’s economic plan is a reflection of supply-side theory, it also shouldn’t surprise us when that plan fails to generate growth. After 30 years of economic experimentation, we know that a focus on the rich doesn’t yield broad prosperity; it only results in more inequality. Instead, a growing body of economic research points to very different ingredients for growth, chief among them a strong middle class.

    But Gov. Romney doesn’t have a plan for a strong middle class. Quite the opposite. The middle class would have to pay, one way or the other, for the enormous tax cuts he promises to deliver to the rich. Average Americans would also have to shoulder the burden of any deficit reduction that occurs under a Romney administration. Middle-class workers and those aspiring to join the middle class benefit from the labor standards and fair pay laws and regulations that Gov. Romney would like to see scaled back or eliminated. It is the 99 percent who depend on the environmental protections that Gov. Romney thinks are “job killers.” And it’s largely the middle class who will be asked to pick up the tab when Wall Street inevitably gets in trouble again after Romney repeals the financial reforms enacted in the wake of the housing and financial crises that nearly brought the world economy tumbling down.

    Ultimately, Gov. Romney’s economic policies are heavily tilted toward the rich and corporations because that’s who he thinks are important for economic growth. The result of implementing those policies would be higher costs, fewer services, and weaker protections for the middle class as well as for lower-income Americans aspiring to the middle class. Gov. Romney believes that the positive effects of lower taxes for the rich and looser regulations for big businesses will more than offset the increased burden for the middle class. Both recent history and empirical economic evidence demonstrate why he’s wrong.

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  22. And now we have a new man on the ticket that wants to cut medicare and medicaide to the point that people must buy it themselves.
    Along with giving the wealthiest wage earners and corporations tax cuts at the expense of the middle class and low wage earners, they can pay two or three thousand dollars more every year, they make more money collectively. The rich and business will create jobs and make the problem go away, just like they have for the last fifty years. Get a clue, the middle class will be paying the bill, just as we always have, just more now.

    That reminds me of a little song;

    This land is your land (as long as you are rich)!

    This land is my land, it's not your land,
    if your filthy rich, I'm one of your fans,
    from the Swiss banks, to the Cayman Islands,
    This land was made to keep us rich,

    As I was walking, across my acerage,
    I thought of my money, and the tax incentives,
    the power it brings me, and quality of my life,
    we'll keep the working people poor,

    Supply-side economics, has kept us wealthy,
    while ursurping power, from the middle-class,
    to keep them working, and never gaining,
    that's how we suck them all dry,

    And now I'm walking, across more acerage,
    Avoiding taxes, with all the shelters,
    the offshore leverage, while being in the Caymans,
    This model, will keep us rich for all time.

    In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
    By the relief office I seen my people;
    As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
    Is this land made for you and me?

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