In the wake of her state's vote to ban marriage equality last week, North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue caused quite a stir when she declared "We look like Mississippi." In response, Mississippi's Republican chief executive Phil Bryant call Perdue's remark "disappointing" and warned "I think she'll regret that after she's had some time to reflect on it."

If so, that regret will pale in comparison to the remorse Americans will feel if they deliver the White and Congress to the Republicans in November. After all, from the state's union-busting right to work law and draconian curbs on women's reproductive rights to its under-funded education system and shameful Medicaid policies, Mississippi is the laboratory for the radical Romney-Ryan agenda Republicans aim to implement nationwide.

The frightening results of the Republican experiment there are now in. As the numbers show, incomes, working conditions, educational performance and health care are worst where Republicans poll best. And by almost any of those measures of social dysfunction, it is Mississippi - the most conservative state in the nation - where the GOP race to the bottom leads.

Mississippi may not be a Hobbesian dystopia where life is nasty, brutish and short. But as a quick glance at the poverty and income data show, life there isn't easy. The Census Bureau's 2011 Statistical Abstract (which is based on 2008 data), shows poverty and median household income is worst where GOP's laissez-faire crowd finds its strongest support. Financially speaking at least, life is no heaven on earth in America's most religious state.

Of course, Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the Union and has been for some time. According to the 2011 data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Mississippi ranks first in the number of people living below the poverty line. Unsurprisingly, its 50th ranking median household income of $37,790 is the lowest in America, and over $14,000 below the national figure. Per capita income is similarly dismal. It's with good reason that in 2007, Mississippi ranked fourth in per capital federal aid.

That need for federal funding is especially acute when it comes to one of the Magnolia State's greatest failures: education.

The education of its children provides just one of many heart-breaking stories of failure for the people of Mississippi. At $7,890 per student per year, Mississippi ranks 45th in school funding. (And even that meager figure is only made possible by substantial funding from the federal government.) According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests administered by the U.S. Department Education, only 22% of Magnolia State fourth graders read at or above grade level. By eighth grade, the figure falls to 19%. (Only the District of Columbia does worse.) It's no surprise that Mississippi has the lowest mean score on the ACT college admissions test taken by 96% of the state's high school graduates. And as it turns out, only 63% of its children even graduate, less than the national average of 69% (and much lower than the 81% in, for example, that target of right-wing retrograde reform, Wisconsin.)

And if the pitiful schooling of its children is ultimately a driver of Mississippi's crippling poverty, so too are the abysmal conditions for workers. One of the nation's so-called "Right-to-Work" states (which prohibit employees from being required to join a trade union as a condition of employment and make it illegal for workers and employers to negotiate a contract requiring everyone who benefits from a union contract to pay their fair share of the costs of administering it), in Mississippi private sector and public sector employees alike face lower pay and more unfriendly work environments.

Just how unfriendly was documented six years ago by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. The report, titled "Decent Work in America: The State-by State Work Environment Index 2005", offers an assessment of the best work environments in the United States. The top five states were Delaware, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont and Iowa, at the bottom were Mississippi, South Carolina, Utah, Arkansas Texas and Louisiana. (For the full data tables, analysis and methodology, see the report's technical background paper.)

As a rule of thumb, if your state voted for John McCain in 2008, workers there don't have it very good. All of the top 5 states voted for Barack for President; all 10 bottom dwellers are residents of George W. Bush's Red America.

There are few surprises among the worst performing states in the Work Environment Index. Virtually all below the Mason-Dixon Line, the WEI laggards feature dismal pay and an outwardly hostile environment towards union organizing, workers' rights and collective bargaining. Red America is the home of the Right-to-Work (RTW) states. A leader in the Right-to-Work movement, Bush's home state of Texas was ranked 50th, with the percentage of workers with health and pension benefits running a full 10% below the top WEI performers.

And compensation for state and local public employees is worst among the usual suspects. As the New York Times documented two weeks ago, state workers without a college degree generally make more than their private sector counterparts ($34,000 versus $32,000, or a 6.3% gap), while college graduates make much less (a -19.9% gap). But in the reddest of states, public employees experience a pay deficit regardless of education level. In Mississippi, the pay penalty for state workers without a college degree is 11.9%; for college graduates the deficit is 16.9%.

(Click here to see full size image.)

Then there's the cataclysmic failure of the Mississippi health care system.

In its 2009 state scorecard, the Commonwealth Fund ranked Mississippi dead last in its assessment of health care access, prevention, equity, affordability and lifestyles. In December, the "America's Health Rankings" project also put Mississippi at 50th among the states. And in 2009, another UnitedHealth Group funded study concluded that Haley Barbour's home state had the unhealthiest residents in America.

And nationwide, health care is worst where Republicans poll best.

Two years ago, the Commonwealth Fund released its 2009 state health care scorecard. There, too, Mississippi led the Republican south -and the entire country - in providing dismal health care. Again, while nine of the top 10 performing states voted for Barack Obama in 2008, four of the bottom five (including Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Louisiana) and 14 of the last 20 backed John McCain. (That at least is an improvement from the 2007 data, in which all 10 cellar dwellers had voted for George W. Bush three years earlier.)

It is sadly ironic that, for the most part, the states suing to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act are the ones whose residents need it most. Among the leaders of that Republican effort? Mississippi.

Sadder still, Mississippi is also a leader of the GOP effort to gut the Medicaid program serving 60 million poor and elderly Americans. GOP nominee Mitt Romney and Congressman Paul Ryan have called for slashing the federal Medicaid budget and converting it into block grants to the states. As Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic warned:

That's not to say plenty of governors wouldn't take advantage of block grant status to change their Medicaid programs in ways they cannot now. They surely would--by capping enrollment, thinning benefits, increasing co-payments, and so on.

That is to say, exactly what Mississippi has been doing for years.

A year ago, former Governor and RNC chairman Haley Barbour also trumpeted Medicaid block grants for the states to control. To make his case, Governor Barbour updated Ronald Reagan's old myth of the "welfare queen" for his own state:

"We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can't afford their co-payment."

That whopper didn't merely earn a "Four Pinocchio" rating from the Washington Post. It also obscured the fact that Haley Barbour's Mississippi is already home to perhaps the least generous Medicaid program in the nation:

Mississippi provides some of the lowest Medicaid benefits to working adults in the nation. A parent who isn't working can qualify only if annual family income is less than 24 percent of the poverty line. Working parents qualify only if they make no more than 44 percent of the federal poverty level. Seniors and people with disabilities are eligible with income at 80 percent of the poverty line...

Translated from the federal poverty guidelines, that means a working Mississippi couple with one child could earn no more than $8,150 a year and still qualify for Medicaid, seniors and people with disabilities could earn no more than $8,700, and a pregnant woman could earn no more than $20,000 a year.

It's no stretch to conclude Amendment 26, the so-called "personhood initiative" handily defeated in Mississippi last year, would have only made that bad situation worse. With some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation, Mississippi is now home to only one clinic providing the procedure. (Thanks to new regulations signed by Governor Bryant, who recently claimed Democrats' "one mission in life is to abort children," that one clinic will likely be forced to close.) But as it turns out, Mississippi is also home to the most depressing statistics for out-of wedlock births in the entire nation. As the numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau show, Mississippi has the highest percentage of total births to teen mothers (17.1 percent, compared to the national average of 10.5 percent) and unmarried women overall (53.7 percent, compared to 39.7 percent nationally).

Last May, Haley Barbour criticized President Obama, declaring, "What I learned as governor of Mississippi is that 'winning the future' doesn't start in Washington, D.C." (Apparently, in Mississippi the future starts in a woman's body and, judging by the numbers, ends there.) Barbour went on to explain:

"We still have more to do in Mississippi. But we have made great progress and are laying a foundation for the future."

And under President Romney and a Republican Congress, Mississippi's nightmare present could well become America's future.

—Perrspective 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

But while Barack Obama proclaims "my mother was the single, most important influence in my life" on his web site, Lenore Romney doesn't appear to be featured at all. Which is too bad. After all, as the New York Times explained in February, "in style, temperament and outlook, Mitt Romney is very much his mother's son." Especially, it turns out, when it comes to Mitt's evolution - or more accurately, devolution - on the issue of abortion rights.

As the Times suggested, Lenore Romney was a trailblazer in her own way. Almost 50 years before her son announced that his wife Ann "reports to me regularly" what women voters care about, the Michigan First Lady championed their role in the political process:

In 1963, three decades before Hillary Rodham Clinton's infamous "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" remark, Mrs. Romney told Time magazine that as Michigan's first lady, she did not "expect to be a society leader holding a series of meaningless teas." By 1966, she was traveling the state asking audiences, "Why should women have any less say than men about the great decisions facing our nation?"

As Salon's Justin Elliott documented in "The Abortion That Mitt Doesn't Talk About Anymore," it was his own family story which informed his pro-choice position during his 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. When Kennedy labeled him "Multiple Choice Mitt," during their debate, Romney responded with a tale of personal loss:

"On the idea of 'multiple-choice,' I have to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that."

Running for Governor in 2002, Mitt Romney went to great lengths to reassure the pro-choice voters of Massachusetts that he was on their side. He even enlisted his wife Ann in the effort.

ANN ROMNEY: I think women also recognize that they want someone who is going to manage the state well. I think they may be more nervous about him on social issues. They shouldn't be, because he's going to be just fine. But the perception is that he won't be. That's an incorrect perception.

MITT ROMNEY: So when asked will I preserve and protect a woman's right to choose, I make an unequivocal answer: yes.

But voters who missed those Massachusetts campaigns wouldn't know of the existence of Ann Keenan, the sister of Romney's brother-in-law who died at the age of 21 in 1963 after a botched, illegal abortion. Of course, as this 2007 exchange with Tim Russert showed, Mitt Romney no longer wants you to know about her, either:

RUSSERT: You talked about your family relative who died from an illegal abortion, and yet President Romney is saying is saying ban all abortion. And what would be the legal consequences to people who participated in that procedure?... So back to your relative.

ROMNEY: Mm-hmm.

Romney went on to explain the consequences (loss of license and possible prison time for doctors, though not patients) of his new found anti-abortion views. But he never did get back to his relative.

As it turns out, Mitt Romney also threw his mother under the right-wing's anti-abortion bus. When Governor Romney was challenged in 2005 about his mother Lenore's supposedly pro-choice views, he went so far as to re-release her statement from her own 1970 Michigan Senate run. But as the Globe's Joan Vennochi pointed out four years ago:

In response to the column, Romney produced a statement of his mother's position at the time: "I support and recognize the need for more liberal abortion rights while affirming the legal and medical measures need to protect the unborn and pregnant woman." The statement is ambiguous and Romney never accounted for the ambiguity.

He hasn't talked much about his mother on the campaign trail since.

Tracing Mitt's turnabout on abortion, the New York Times on February 11, 2012 recounted that:

In 2005, Governor Romney shocked constituents by writing an opinion article in The Boston Globe that declared: "I am pro-life." Running for president two years later, he struggled to explain that turnabout. "I never said I was pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice," Mr. Romney told George Stephanopoulos of ABC during a Republican debate. "I changed my position."

As it turns out, Mitt wasn't the first Romney to admit that change. As the Times pointed out in another article two weeks later:

On one issue -- abortion -- Mr. Romney has explicitly cited his mother's views as the basis for his own. During his 1994 race against Mr. Kennedy, and again in 2002 when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he told voters that his mother personally opposed abortion but had taken "a very bold and courageous stand" in arguing that "a woman should have her own right to choose." He said he felt the same way...

But in 1972, two years after she lost, Mrs. Romney made her personal opposition clear, much as Mitt Romney eventually did after he was elected governor.

"I am not for destroying life," she told an interviewer then, describing her response when the question came up during speeches on college campuses. "And then I ask them, if later, they would want to kill all the old or abandoned people in the world."

Like mother, like son.

Now, Mitt Romney likes to talk about his father George, the former American Motors CEO and Michigan Governor whose life lessons and political defeats shaped his son's worldview and personal ambition. But to better understand Mitt Romney the candidate (as opposed to Mitt Romney the CEO), this Mother's Day voters might want to focus instead on his mom.

—Perrspective 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Like the force of gravity or the sun rising in the east, Mitt Romney's pathological lying is now taken for granted. As Steve Benen among others can attest, documenting Romney's runaway mendacity may now be America's greatest growth industry.

Explaining the causes of Mitt's daily dissembling may be another. Rick Perlstein looked to Shakespeare, seeing Romney as an undoubting Hamlet determined to avenge his father's defeat most foul in 1968. Jonathan Chait turned to Freud, explaining there's even a clinical term for Mitt's compulsive aversion to the truth known as "fundamental attribution error." And last month, David Javerbaum cited particle physics in his "Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney."

But largely overlooked in the assessments of Romney's dependence on the Big Lie is his casual use of the Small Lie. That is, Romney's frequent falsehoods aren't just a cover for his flip-flopping past and unpopular future policies, but extend to even the most mundane and inconsequential aspects of his life. All, perhaps, in the vain hope of making the most unlikable presidential candidate in recent history slightly more acceptable to voters.

Whether or not Mitt Romney has any recollection of his days as a prep school bully, it's what he does remember - or more accurately, misremember - that is so problematic.

Romney recalled he was "probably 4 or something like that" the day of the Golden Jubilee, when three-quarters of a million people gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the American automobile. "My dad had a job being the grandmaster. They painted Woodward Ave. with gold paint," Romney told a rapt Tea Party audience in the village of Milford Thursday night, reliving a moment of American industrial glory. The Golden Jubilee described so vividly by Romney was indeed an epic moment in automotive lore. The parade included one of the last public appearances by an elderly Henry Ford.

Unfortunately, as the Toronto Star pointed out, Mitt wasn't alive to see it:

And it took place June 1, 1946 -- fully nine months before Romney was born.

The timelines suggest Romney could well have been conceived that day. But it is inconceivable he was actually there.

(Zygote Mitt's love of a good parade might explain why the formerly pro-choice Romney came to support so-called "personhood" amendments.)

In 2007, Romney had to acknowledge that he had not watched his father march with Martin Luther King Jr., as he had asserted in a nationally televised debate. Romney said at the time that his father had told him that he had marched with King and that he was using the word "saw" in a "figurative sense."

"I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort," Romney said then.

But historical evidence and news reports showed that George Romney never did march with King. The civil rights leader was supposed to march in Detroit, but he declined to attend.

Of course, the legend of George Romney plays another vital role for his son: human shield. Apparently, Mitt also had "the sense of being aware" that his father "grew up poor." As he put it recently:

"I'll tell you about how much I love this country, this extraordinary land, where someone like my dad, who grew up poor and never graduated from college, could pursue his dreams and work his way up to running a great car company. Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of the state in which he once sold paint from the trunk of his car."

As the AP reported, "that's not the whole story."

Over time, though, Mitt's grandfather, Gaskell Romney, became prosperous, building some of the finest homes in Salt Lake City, according to the Globe book, but along with many other Americans suffered financial setbacks during the Great Depression.

(As an aside, it's worth noting that Mitt's great-grandfather Miles Park Romney fled to Mexico to avoid prosecution, not persecution.)

Despite his best efforts to use his dad to close the empathy gap plaguing his campaign, the truth remains that Mitt Romney is living his American Dream; that is, being born to a father who achieved his own.

While "Dad used to regale us kids with claims that one year in Idaho his family lived on nothing but potatoes -- for breakfast, lunch and dinner," those privations were nothing compared to what young Mitt Romney endured during his 1960's church mission in France.

"You're not living high on the hog at that level. A number of the apartments that I lived in when I was there didn't have toilets - we had instead the little pads on the ground - OK, you know how that works, pull - there was a chain behind you with kind of a bucket, bucket affair. I had not experienced one of those in the United States."

But when Mitt claimed that "I lived in a way that people of lower middle income in France lived and I said to myself, 'Wow. I sure am lucky to be born in the United States of America,'" he was luckier than he let on. As the Boston Globe documented in 2007, when France was paralyzed by strikes in 1968 "Romney led a group of missionaries into Spain to find an open bank" to cash "checks sent from their parents." As the Globe also reported, "In spring 1968, Romney moved to the French mission headquarters, a grand building in the tony 16th arrondissement of Paris. The building is now the embassy of the United Arab Emirates." The Telegraph detailed just how tony:

"It was a house built by and for rich people," said Richard Anderson, the son of the mission president at the time of Mr Romney's stay. "I would describe it as a palace"...

"They were very big rooms," said Christian Euvrard, the 72-year-old director of the Mormon-run Institute of Religion in Paris, who knew Mr Romney. "Very comfortable. The building had beautiful gilded interiors, a magnificent staircase in cast iron, and an immense hall"...

Mr Anderson said that as well as a refrigerator, the mansion had "a Spanish chef called Pardo and a house boy, who prepared lunch and supper five days a week".

Of course, Romney was only able to save souls in the vineyards of France because of multiple deferments that kept him out of the rice paddies of Vietnam.

In 1966, Stanford student Mitt Romney takes part in his only college protest, one in favor of the Vietnam War. But like many Mormon men of his age, the New Republic reported, Mitt received a 4-D draft exemption as a 'minister of religion or divinity student' that protected him from the draft from July 1966 to February 1969. As he explained in 2007, Romney supposedly felt guilty about it. "I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there," Romney lamented, adding, "In some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam." A 2007 Time magazine profile recounted Mitt's fateful choice between God and country:

The closest he has ever come to a personal religious crisis, he recalls, was when he was in college and considering whether to go off on a mission, as his grandfather, father and brother had done. Mitt was deeply in love with Ann, his high school sweetheart and future wife, and couldn't bear to spend more than two years away from her. He says he also felt guilty about the draft deferment he would get for it, when other young men his age were heading for Vietnam.

But in a 1994 interview with the Boston Herald, Romney suggested he wasn't feeling nearly as guilty as he later claimed:

"Romney, however, acknowledged he did not have any desire to serve in the military during his college and missionary days, especially after he married and became a father," the newspaper wrote. "'I was not planning on signing up for the military,' he said. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft. If drafted, I would have been happy to serve, and if I didn't get drafted I was happy to be with my wife and new child.'"

Thirteen years later, candidate Mitt Romney explained he passed on that tradition to his five boys:

"My sons are all adults and they've made decisions about their careers and they've chosen not to serve in the military and active duty and I respect their decision in that regard. One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president."

"I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life."

Pressed for details by a skeptical media, Romney two days later owned up to his poser status as a hunter:

"I'm not a big-game hunter. I've made that very clear. I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will. I began when I was 15 or so and I have hunted those kinds of varmints since then. More than two times."

(Romney's gun troubles only deepened in December 2007 when he wrongly claimed a 2002 endorsement from the National Rifle Association he did not in fact receive.)

Mitt Romney's small lies even extend to his big houses. Running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Mitt narrowly avoided a residency crisis by paying $54,000 in property taxes on the Utah resort home he had claimed as his primary residence. History almost repeated itself in 2010, when the Massachusetts Secretary of State's Elections Division had to look into vote fraud allegations against Romney after he sold his luxurious Belmont estate. (That's the one about which he would later explain, "I can't have illegals. I'm running for office for Pete's sake.")

Nevertheless, Mitt's tall tales about his huge houses continued into the 2012 campaign. Unlike John McCain, Mitt Romney at least knows how many homes he owns. (Which state he lives in, votes in and pays taxes in is another matter.) When Mitt sold two of their four multi-million dollar mansions in 2009, spokesman Eric "Etch-a-Sketch" Fehrnstrom said the Romneys were "downsizing and simplifying."

Sadly for Fehrnstrom and the Romney campaign. Mitt Romney himself cited his purchase of a $12 million, 6,000 square foot beachside home in California as proof hadn't been planning to run for president a second time. As Romney told the Wall Street Journal last December:

The Republican presidential candidate says he never intended to run for office again after 2008--"I went back and bought a home which was far too expensive and grandiose for the purposes of another campaign," he jokes. He was drawn back into public life amid Mr. Obama's bid to "fundamentally transform" the country, to use the president's own words, into "an entitlement society," to use Mr. Romney's.

Right. And I have a bridge to sell. (Perhaps Mitt Romney would buy it to connect the car elevator he hopes to build for the California home he bought when he intended to sit out the 2012 election.)

And so it goes.

Last week, delicate conservatives were getting the vapors after David Maraniss' non-revelation that Dreams of My Father author Barack Obama admitted penning a "composite" of his college girlfriends in order to protect their privacy. But what for Obama was an episode of artistic license is now a lifestyle for Mitt Romney. No part of Romney's biography is too small to be burnished, rewritten or just made up out of whole cloth.

And that tells you a lot about the man. After all, if integrity is what you do when no one's watching, the truth is what you say whether it matters or not.

—Perrspective 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

For months, Mitt Romney, John Boehner and other Republican leaders have falsely claimed that "President Obama made the economy worse." The same crowd which for years cried that George W. Bush "inherited a recession" accused Obama of blaming his predecessor for the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, the GOP has seized on President Obama's comment that "sometimes I forget" the magnitude of the calamity he faced on January 20, 2009.

But while the Republican revisionists are intentionally erasing the context of Obama's remark, they are also inviting Americans to remember the depth of the cataclysmic Bush recession that began in late 2007. The GOP propagandists may regret having done so. After all, even after George W. Bush presided over the worst 8-year economic record in modern presidential history, Mitt Romney promises to double-down on the same policies that helped produce it. Meanwhile, the facts and the overwhelming consensus of economists - including John McCain's 2008 brain trust - show that Barack Obama saved the United States from "Great Depression 2.0" and put the nation on the path to recovery.

Back in December, President Obama used a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas to remind voters that Republican trickle-down economics "never worked." On Thursday in Seattle, he asked Americans to remember the devastation those policies produced:

We'd seen a record surplus that was squandered on tax cuts for people who didn't need them and weren't even asking for them. Two wars were being waged on a credit card. Wall Street speculators reaped huge profits by making bets with other people's money. Manufacturing was leaving our shores. A shrinking number of Americans did fantastically well, but a lot more people struggled with falling incomes and rising costs and the slowest job growth in a century.

So it was a house of cards, and it collapsed in the most destructive, worst crisis that we've seen since the Great Depression. And sometimes people forget the magnitude of it, you know? And you saw some of that I think in the video that was shown. Sometimes I forget. In the last six months of 2008, while we were campaigning, nearly 3 million of our neighbors lost their jobs; 800,000 lost their jobs in the month that I took office. And it was tough. But the American people proved they were tougher. So we didn't quit. We kept going. Together we fought back.

Sometimes people do forget the magnitude of the Bush economic disaster and that, in the face of total GOP obstructionism in Congress, the Americans people fought back. In 2012, Republicans should be hoping for amnesia on both counts.
To better understand why, it's worth taking a second look at just how dire the U.S. economic situation was when Barack Obama took the oath of office. As The Economist and the Washington Post's Ezra Klein detailed, in early 2009 the American economy was not only in much worse shape than almost anyone imagined; it was literally on the brink of collapse. As The Economist explained the run-up to the passage of the $787 billion recovery program:

The White House looked at the economic situation, sized up Congress, and took its shot. Unfortunately, the situation was far more dire than anyone in the administration or in Congress supposed.

Output in the third and fourth quarters fell by 3.7% and 8.9%, respectively, not at 0.5% and 3.8% as believed at the time. Employment was also falling much faster than estimated. Some 820,000 jobs were lost in January, rather than the 598,000 then reported. In the three months prior to the passage of stimulus, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers, not 1.8m. In January, total employment was already 1m workers below the level shown in the official data.

As Klein points out, it "wasn't until this year that the actual number was revealed" for Q4 2008 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As The Economist lamented, the Obama administration was "flying blind" when it made its fateful prediction that unemployment would peak at 8 percent.

But whether the White House should have known the unemployment picture was going to be much, much worse (as Joseph Stiglitz and Jared Bernstein argued) or that the February 2009 stimulus package itself was too small and too laden with tax breaks (as Paul Krugman warned at the time), there is little question that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act worked largely as designed.

Start, for example, with the conclusions of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Despite Republican mythmaking that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) "created zero jobs," in November the CBO reported that the stimulus added up to 2.4 million jobs and boosted GDP by as much as 1.9 points in the previous quarter. As The Hill explained, the CBO has found that "President Obama's 2009 stimulus package continues to benefit the struggling economy":

The agency said the measure raised gross domestic product by between 0.3 and 1.9 percent in the third quarter of 2011, which ended Sept. 30. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that GDP in that quarter was only 2 percent total...

By CBO's numbers, the $800 billion stimulus added up to 0.9 million jobs in 2009, 3.3 million jobs in 2010 and 2.6 million jobs in 2011.

Mark Zandi, an adviser to John McCain in 2008, was adamant on positive role of the stimulus. Federal intervention, he and Princeton economist Alan Blinder argued in August 2010, literally saved the United States from a second Great Depression. In "How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End," Blinder and Zandi's models confirmed the impact of the Obama recovery program and concluded that "laissez faire was not an option":

The effects of the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising 2010 real GDP by about 3.4%, holding the unemployment rate about 1½ percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls. These estimates of the fiscal impact are broadly consistent with those made by the CBO and the Obama administration.

But their modeling also suggests that the totality of federal efforts to rescue the banking system dating back to the fall of 2008 prevented a catastrophic collapse:

We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs, and inflation are huge, and probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0. For example, we estimate that, without the government's response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

Even Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the CBO and chief economic adviser to John McCain during the 2008 election, acknowledged the impact of the stimulus. Certainly no fan of either Barack Obama or the design of the ARRA, Holtz-Eakin told Ezra Klein that:

"The argument that the stimulus had zero impact and we shouldn't have done it is intellectually dishonest or wrong. If you throw a trillion dollars at the economy it has an impact, and we needed to do something."

In the face of united Republican opposition, President Obama and the Democrats did do something. But thanks to GOP stonewalling in Congress and in governor's mansions across the country, steep cuts in state and local government payrolls offset the gains of the federal stimulus. "In fact, if it weren't for this destructive fiscal austerity," Krugman explained in March, "Our unemployment rate would almost certainly be lower now than it was at a comparable stage of the 'Morning in America' recovery during the Reagan era."

We're talking big numbers here. If government employment under Mr. Obama had grown at Reagan-era rates, 1.3 million more Americans would be working as schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, etc., than are currently employed in such jobs.

And once you take the effects of public spending on private employment into account, a rough estimate is that the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points lower than it is, or below 7 percent -- significantly better than the Reagan economy at this stage.

Looking at a report from the Congressional Budget Office last fall, Paul Krugman described how the austerians of the Republican Party had produced an "anti-stimulus" by state and local and local governments:

What it tells us is that the US federal government has been practicing destructive fiscal austerity since the middle of 2010 (and that's not even talking about what's happening at the state and local level). Here's the average of CBO's high and low estimates of the impact of the ARRA on the level (not the rate of growth) of GDP by quarter:

And you wonder why the economy isn't recovering strongly?

On Thursday in Seattle, President Obama simply reminded Americans who brought the U.S. economy to its knees by January 2009 and who's been fighting to fix it ever since. That's history Republicans should want voters to forget.

—Perrspective 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Two funny things happened this week on Mitt Romney's way to the White House. First, the man who cried "let Detroit go bankrupt" announced "I'll take a lot of credit" for President Obama's million-job saving rescue of the American auto industry. But just as telling was the Republican's claim that, despite Obama's "Forward" campaign slogan, it was the President who was "looking backward." After all, Mitt Romney isn't merely offering an even more reactionary resurrection of George W. Bush's failed policies. As it turns out, from his charges on immigration reform and women's issues to labeling Obama an out of touch "Marie Antoinette" and so much, Romney's strategy is call to the kettle black.

• "Looking Backward"
• "Fairness"
• "Out of Touch"
• "Spent Too Much Time at Harvard"
• "Hide-and-Seek Campaign"
• "Broke His Promise to Hispanics"
• "Respect Women in All Those Choices That They Make"

"Looking Backward"

In April, the RNC's Alexandra Franceschi gave away the game when she explained that even after the calamitous Bush recession which began over four years ago, the2012 GOP economic platform would be the Bush program, "just updated." As a quick glance at Mitt Romney's proposals shows, Franceschi has a gift for understatement.

Romney, after all, is promising massive tax cuts which would deliver the lion's share of their winnings to the very richest Americans, his family included. (His 20 percent across-the-board tax cut is simply a tired retread of Bob Dole's failed 1996 plan, one that nevertheless steers a third of its benefits to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of Americans.) He nevertheless pledges to balance the budget even while boosting defense spending. And this latest scion of a proud Republican family would like to privatize Social Security and leave Americans to fend for themselves in the private health insurance marketplace.

Undaunted, Romney slammed the President this week in East Lansing, Michigan:

"Looking backward won't solve the problems of today, nor will it take advantage of the opportunities of tomorrow," Romney said. "His are the policies of the past. The challenges of the present and the promise of tomorrow must be met by a new and bold vision for the future, and I will bring it."

Despite the conclusion of the nonpartisan CBO and the overwhelming consensus of economists that Obama's actions saved the U.S. from "Great Depression 2.0," Romney has insisted for months that the President "made the economy worse." Unfortunately for Mitt, "we are not stupid."

"Fairness"

Barack Obama has made "fairness" a central theme of his reelection campaign. And with good reason. After all, at a time of record income inequality and the lowest federal tax burden since 1950, Both Mitt Romney and his budgetary twin Paul Ryan would deliver a massive tax cut windfall for the rich, paying for it by gutting the social safety net each pretends to protect. Each would end Medicare as we know it with a premium support gambit that would dramatically shift health care costs to America's seniors. While increasing defense spending, the House Budget Chairman and the GOP frontrunner would repeal the Affordable Care and leave at least 30 million people without insurance. And despite their mutual pledges to end many tax loopholes and deductions to fund their gilded-class giveaway, neither Paul Ryan nor Mitt Romney has the courage to say which ones. As a result, these supposed deficit hawks would actually add trillions more in red ink to the national debt.

Nevertheless, Romney used the occasion of his Northeast primary sweep three weeks ago to portray himself as the crusader for fairness:

"We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends' businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next."

Afterwards, The Democratic Strategist translated Romney's cynically transparent gimmick, "We will twist and distort the concept of fairness to justify bashing government workers, crushing labor unions and privatizing public schools."

"Out of Touch"

Four years ago, the campaign of John McCain - a hundred-millionaire who literally lost count of how many homes he owned - unsuccessfully tried to portray Barack Obama as an out-of-touch, arugula-eating elitist who vacationed in exotic Hawaii. Now Mitt Romney has branded President Obama a modern day Marie Antoinette, an "out of touch" occupant of the White House whose message to financially struggling Americans is "let them eat cake."

That might not be the wisest strategy.

To be sure, Romney's repeated and comical failures to present himself as a "man of the people" have only deepened his yawning empathy gap. Romney, who explained that over the last decade "my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past," joked with jobless voters that "I'm also unemployed." The $250 million man similarly declared himself part of "the 80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class, when just the "not very much" $374,000 he earned in speaking fees last year puts him in the top one percent of income earners. Whether or not he really enjoys firing people, Mitt Romney almost certainly never pooped in a bucket during his time as a missionary at a toney Paris mansion. (Who else would lecture a child about his plans to divvy up his estate among his 16 grandchildren or endorse rooftop canine waterboarding?) And there's no doubt that the man who spent $12 million to buy his third home (none of which are located on "the real streets of America") didn't win any friends when he offered this prescription for the housing market crisis:

"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

It's no surprise Mitt Romney believes income inequality should only be discussed in "quiet rooms." But it certainly didn't help matters when his wife Ann joked "Mitt doesn't even know the answer to that" when asked how many dressage horses she owns while her husband slanders Democrats as "the party of monarchists." It's no wonder his ally and Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown urged Romney to release his tax returns:

"He's in a category, a lot of those folks are in categories that we don't really understand."

Brown was only saying what most Americans were thinking when he acknowledged that Romney is living in "a different world from me."

"Spent Too Much Time at Harvard"

Part of Romney's different world centered on Harvard. In 1971, Ann and Mitt Romney headed to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, Mitt completed a "terrific" four year program to get his JD and MBA at Harvard Business School.

Thirty seven years later, Romney continues to claim Barack Obama "spent too much time at Harvard" learned what he knows about the economy by "hearing about it at the faculty lounge at Harvard."

Ironically, even with small children and Mitt in school, Ann avoided the "dignity of work" because "Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. The stock came from Mitt's father." That history might explain why Romney offered this advice in March to college students struggling to pay for his education:

"If you can't afford it, scholarships are available, shop around for loans, make sure you go to a place that's reasonably priced, and if you can, think about serving the country 'cause that's a way to get all that education for free."

Pell grants, schmell grants.

Later, Mitt told college students to borrow money from their parents to start a business, advice his son Tagg took to the tune of $10 million.

"Hide-and-Seek Campaign"

Following the dust-up over Obama's open mic comments to former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Mitt Romney accused the President of running a "hide-and-seek campaign."

"He does not want to share his real plans before the election, either with the public or with the press," Romney said. "By flexibility, he means that 'what the American public doesn't know won't hurt him.' He is intent on hiding. You and I will have to do the seeking."

Romney must have been looking in the mirror. Because hiding his past record and future plans is a cornerstone of the Romney 2012 campaign.

Mitt didn't merely arrange for his computers in the Massachusetts governor's office to be scrubbed. After delivering 23 years of tax returns to John McCain in the vain hope of securing the number two slot on the ticket four years ago, so far Romney has only released two to the American public. And as he and his wife Ann ("unfortunately" the world now knows how "successful in business" Mitt has been.) made clear, even that limited disclosure was done grudgingly:

"I don't put out which tooth paste I use either. It's not that I have something to hide."

Romney's penchant for withholding vital information from voters is no accident. As the former Massachusetts Governor inadvertently revealed in an interview with the Weekly Standard, his opacity is by design, a lesson learned from losing the 1994 Senate race:

"One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don't care about education," Romney recalled. "So I think it's important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we'll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I'm not going to give you a list right now."

Asked to get specific about his self-proclaimed "bold" tax plan, Mitt Romney decided discretion is the better part of valor. As he explained earlier this month, Romney in essence responded, "I'm not going to tell you":

"So I haven't laid out all of the details about how we're going to deal with each deduction, so I think it's kind of interesting for the groups to try and score it, because frankly it can't be scored, because those kinds of details will have to be worked out with Congress, and we have a wide array of options."

Mitt revealed why he was refusing to lay out "all of the details" during a very revealing December interview with the Wall Street Journal:

"I happen to also recognize," he says, "that if you go out with a tax proposal which conforms to your philosophy but it hasn't been thoroughly analyzed, vetted, put through models and calculated in detail, that you're gonna get hit by the demagogues in the general election."

Unfortunately, what Mitt Romney branded "demagogues" most Americans call "voters."

"Broke His Promise to Hispanics"

"We're going to be able to get Hispanic voters," Mitt Romney assured big-dollars donors last month, adding, "We're going to overcome the issue of immigration." How the Republican presidential nominee plans to do that is another matter.

After all, John McCain captured only 31 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008. A recent Pew Research poll shows Democrats enjoy a three-fold (and growing) advantage among registered Latino voters. As it turns out, the GOP's list of Republican Latino candidates includes some who are neither. Worse still, Mitt's high-profile backing by SB 1070 author Russell Pearce may put GOP stronghold Arizona in play. And on top of it, Romney is rapidly alienating Hispanics with his hardline rhetoric on immigration, talking points that include vetoing the DREAM Act and encouraging even long-time illegal immigrants to "self-deport."

But Mitt Romney may still have one or two more cards up his sleeve.

The first approach is to blame President Obama for failing to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the face of total Republican opposition. As MNSBC reported in April:

Romney nonetheless predicted that, by November, the economy would trump immigration as a driving issue for Hispanic voters, and he vowed also to remind the Hispanic community that, despite promises of comprehensive immigration reform by Obama, Democrats ultimately fell short in passing legislation in their two years in control of Congress and the White House at the start of the president's term.

The second gambit is for Mitt Romney to simply do what he does best: change positions. As conservative columnist Fred Barnes explained, that's part of the plan:

According to a Romney adviser, his private view of immigration isn't as anti-immigrant as he often sounded.

Bettina Inclan, the Republican National Committee's Hispanic outreach director, confirmed that a Romney turnabout is imminent:

"I think as a candidate, to my understanding, he's still deciding what his position on immigration is. I can't talk about what his position is going to be."

It will be whatever it needs to be. After all, he's running for office, for Pete's sake.

"Respect Women in All Those Choices That They Make"

For months, the now pro-life Mitt Romney has trailed President Obama by large margins among women voters. Seeking to capitalize on the manufactured flap over Hilary Rosen's offhand remark last month that Ann Romney "has actually never worked a day in her life," Mitt proclaimed that "all mothers are working mothers." As it turns out, Romney's Rule is means-tested. Put another way, on Mitt's Animal Farm, some mothers are more equal than others. As he explained during his 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy:

"This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to be able to have mom at home and dad at work. Now mom and dad both have to work."

Now, as the severely conservative and severely condescending Romney insisted in January, women who receive welfare must work outside the home, even if their children are very young:

"I wanted to increase the work requirement," said Romney. "I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, 'Well that's heartless.' And I said, 'No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work."

Just not if the individual is his wife.

As Ann Romney explained in an October 1994 interview, their dignity was provided by Mitt's father George:

"Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. The stock came from Mitt's father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt's birthday money year to year -- it wasn't much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education."

$250 million dollars later, the dignified Mrs. Romney now claims their wealth can't be quantified. As she lectured voters in January:

"I understand Mitt's going to release his tax forms this week. I want to remind you where our riches are: our riches are with our families," Ann Romney said. "Our riches, you can value them, in the children we have and in the grandchildren we have. So that's where our values are and that's where our heart is -- and that's where we measure our wealth."

As Rosengate reached its crescendo, Ann Romney explained, "My career choice was to be a mother." She then added:

"We have to respect women in all those choices that they make."

Just not when those choices involve their own bodies and their own health. And that message to the women of America is the exact opposite of the one Mr. and Mrs. Romney sold to the women of Massachusetts.

In March, Governor Romney caused a firestorm when he casually announced, "Planned Parenthood, we're going to get rid of that." While he later clarified that "what I want to get rid of is the federal funding of Planned Parenthood," he shouldn't have stopped there. After all, Mitt Romney wants to end all funding for Title X, the only federal program devoted to family planning. But as Ruth Marcus documented last year, that's only a small part of the health care services Title X provides for lower-income American women:

The inevitable result of eliminating Title X funding would not only be more abortions - it would also be higher bills for taxpayers footing Medicaid and welfare costs for poor children. Guttmacher found that every public dollar invested in family planning care saves $3.74 in Medicaid expenditures for pregnant women and their babies during the first year of care. Imagine the lifetime savings.

And then there is the other "important work" that Pence cited: 2.2 million Pap smears, 2.3 million breast exams, nearly 6 million tests for sexually transmitted infections.

Mitt's positions on Planned Parenthood, women's health care and reproductive rights have always depended on whether he was running for office inside or outside of liberal Massachusetts. Now, they happen to be the opposite of Barack Obama's - and the opposite of respecting all the choices women make.

—Perrspective 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) |

After this week's election results in France and Greece, press, pundits and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are questioning the future of draconian austerity policies in Europe. As well they should. Euro-region unemployment has reached its highest levels in 15 years. Across the channel, David Cameron's Tories have led the UK back into recession, with joblessness there forecast to increase through 2016.

But while the U.S. economy under President Obama continues to outperform the austerians in Europe, American growth and employment numbers could have been much better. Better, that is, if steep cuts by state and local governments hadn't undone the indisputable job creation benefits of the federal stimulus. Thanks to intransigent Republican governors and their obstructionist GOP allies in Congress, the shrinking American public sector has slowed the recovery from the Bush recession and added a full point to the U.S. unemployment rate.

In the three months ended April, it shows that there were an average 20.3 million people engaged in government work, 1.2 million fewer than the average for the three months ended December 2008. That is more than double the job losses registered by the establishment survey.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn't been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.

Back in March, Paul Krugman expressed the same point, but with some inconvenient historical context for the Party of Reagan. "In fact, if it weren't for this destructive fiscal austerity," Krugman explained, "Our unemployment rate would almost certainly be lower now than it was at a comparable stage of the 'Morning in America' recovery during the Reagan era."

We're talking big numbers here. If government employment under Mr. Obama had grown at Reagan-era rates, 1.3 million more Americans would be working as schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, etc., than are currently employed in such jobs.

And once you take the effects of public spending on private employment into account, a rough estimate is that the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points lower than it is, or below 7 percent -- significantly better than the Reagan economy at this stage.

A month ago, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) showed how much better with the chart above. Noting that the private sector had gained 2.8 million jobs while federal, state and local governments shed 584,000 just since June 2009, EPI concluded that the public sector job losses constituted "an unprecedented drag on the recovery":

"The current recovery is the only one that has seen public-sector losses over its first 31 months."

Then last week, Krugman's New York Times colleague Floyd Norris offered more detail on "the Incredible Shrinking U.S. Government."

For the first time in 40 years, the government sector of the American economy has shrunk during the first three years of a presidential administration.

Spending by the federal government, adjusted for inflation, has risen at a slow rate under President Obama. But that increase has been more than offset by a fall in spending by state and local governments, which have been squeezed by weak tax receipts.

In the first quarter of this year, the real gross domestic product for the government -- including state and local governments as well as federal -- was 2 percent lower than it was three years earlier, when Barack Obama took office in early 2009.

To be sure, state and local governments were hit by a triple during the Bush recession that began in December 2007. Tax revenues plummeted even as demand for services including health care and unemployment benefits skyrocketed. While President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) helped fill some of the gaps in state and local budgets, that aid was largely finished by the end of FY 2011. Even though state tax receipts jumped by 8.9 percent last year, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that 30 states still face budget shortfalls in the coming year. Once inflation is factored in, state and local tax revenue has yet to reach pre-recession levels. The result will be continued government job losses in the states.

The budget axe fell and the ranks of former public sector employees grew across the country. But Republican policies have made the crisis worse than it needed to be. In states like Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma and Florida, GOP governors have already or are seeking to cut income and business taxes, often shifting the burden to lower income residents. The result, as The Nation documented, is a hemorrhage of jobs in red states:

Nearly all of the job losses took place at the state and local level, and they were most severe in a handful of GOP-controlled states. In other words, erosion of public sector employment isn't a problem affecting the entire country equally--it's a problem in particular states, thanks to very particular legislators. As the following chart shows, seven states laid off more than 2.5 percent of their own state and local workforce. Other states lost, on average, less than half a percent of their workforce.

Last fall, columnist George Will exulted that the public sector "happily shrank" and cheered "that's good." For his part, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called those layoffs a "local problem." And to ensure that local problem didn't become Washington's problem, McConnell's Republican friends in Congress didn't merely vote against the February 2009 stimulus bill. During his admitted debt ceiling hostage-taking last summer, McConnell explained, "I refuse to help Barack Obama get re-elected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy." And when President Obama rolled out his $447 billion American Jobs Act including new assistance to state and local governments, Republicans made it clear why they opposed a bill former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi forecast that could create up to 1.9 million jobs and add two points to U.S. GDP:

"Obama is on the ropes; why do we appear ready to hand him a win?"

In response, a frustrated Obama couldn't only ask:

"Are they against putting teachers and police officers and firefighters back on the job? Are they against hiring construction workers to rebuild our roads and bridges and schools?"

In a word, yes. Even at a time of economic crisis when the government in America continues to shrink, Republicans from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on down remain the anti-stimulus.

—Perrspective 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Mitt Romney is now claiming paternity for President Obama's auto industry rescue that saved over a million jobs nationwide. But while he most certainly isn't the father of a reborn Detroit, the successful 2006 health care reform law he signed in Boston has become Mitt Romney's bastard love child.

Americans should give credit where credit is due. And on health care, as we'll see below, Mitt Romney deserves a lot. But Barack Obama's efforts to save GM and Chrysler owe nothing to Romney and his Republican allies, who fought the President every step of the way.

Detroit, Who's Your Daddy? Not Mitt Romney

"Without government financing -- initiated by President George W. Bush in December 2008 -- the two companies would not have been able to pursue Chapter 11 reorganization. Instead they would have been forced to cease production, close their doors and lay off virtually all workers once their coffers ran dry."

Rattner wasn't alone in highlighting Romney's delusional belief in that a "managed bankruptcy" leading to an injection of capital from private markets could save Detroit without intervention from the federal government. In admitting the success of President Obama's 2009 rescue of GM and Chrysler, USA Today concluded, "On what planet would the automakers have found private lenders willing to provide tens of billions of dollars in needed bankruptcy financing at the height of a financial panic?" Governor Rick Snyder and Congressman Fred Upton, his highest profile Michigan primary endorsers, acknowledged that "there was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government." In February, The Economist took Romney to task for his revisionist history:

Free-marketeers that we are, The Economist agreed with Mr Romney at the time. But we later apologised for that position. "Had the government not stepped in, GM might have restructured under normal bankruptcy procedures, without putting public money at risk", we said. But "given the panic that gripped private purse-strings...it is more likely that GM would have been liquidated, sending a cascade of destruction through the supply chain on which its rivals, too, depended." Even Ford, which avoided bankruptcy, feared the industry would collapse if GM went down. At the time that seemed like a real possibility. The credit markets were bone-dry, making the privately financed bankruptcy that Mr Romney favoured improbable. He conveniently ignores this bit of history in claiming to have been right all along.

Six months after crying that "If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout" their "demise will be virtually guaranteed," Mitt Romney warned in April 2009 that President Obama's proposed auto rescue would "would make GM the living dead." Instead, GM once again became the world's number one auto company. By December 2011, the Center for Automotive Research estimated that the bailouts saved more than 1.1 million jobs in 2009 and another 314,000 in 2010, while avoiding personal income losses of more than $96 billion. By February 2012, Romney could only cough standard right-wing talking points about the successful rescue he opposed. As McClatchy reported:

He's slamming the federal bailout of Chrysler and General Motors, calling it a corrupt bargain between Democrats and the United Auto Workers that gave the union more control in exchange for campaign donations.

"I call it crony capitalism," Romney said this week. "I've taken on union bosses before. I'm happy to take them on again because I happen to believe that you can protect the interests of the American taxpayers and you can protect a great industry like automobiles without having to give in to the UAW, and I sure won't."

Mitt Romney may love American cars, just not the people who make them. And, as it turns out, he likes the truth even less.

MA, MA Where's Your Pa?

Discussing the Affordable Care Act with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt in March, Mitt Romney declared, "If I'm the godfather of this thing, then it gives me the right to kill it." But the former Massachusetts governor isn't merely promising to "kill it dead" at the national level. As it turns out, Romney's plan for draconian cuts to Medicaid would strangle the popular and successful program he put in place in Massachusetts, the one he once touted as "a model for getting everybody insured."

By most measures, Governor Romney's signature 2006 health care law has been a tremendous success. Enjoying the consistent support of Bay State residents by a 2 to 1 margin, the bill Governor Mitt Romney signed into law lowered the uninsured rate from 12.5 percent to a national low of two percent. In March, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) showed that universal coverage in Massachusetts is indeed making people there healthier. Meanwhile, the rate of growth for business and individual insurance premiums has slowed dramatically, a trend state regulators this week announced will result in only a 1.2% increase.

But as the Boston Globe reported last week, what Governor Romney giveth, President Romney would taketh away.

Like his new GOP twin in Congress Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has proposed steep cuts to Medicaid spending and pledged to hand-over the shrunken pool of funds as block grants to the states. And it is precisely that formula that would smother his once-beloved Romneycare in its cradle. As the Globe documented, President Romney "would probably cripple the Massachusetts health care law":

"It would have been impossible for Massachusetts to do what it did without increased federal Medicaid support,'' said John McDonough, a major architect of the state's health care overhaul law and now director of Harvard University's Center for Public Health Leadership. "What he's proposing is in direct opposition to what he did as governor,'' said Amy Whitcomb Slemmer, executive director of Health Care for All in Massachusetts, citing the Bay State's 98 percent coverage rate, the highest in the nation. "That kind of expansion would not have been possible under a block grant program,'' as Romney has proposed. Block grants give states more flexibility in spending federal money, but restrict funding increases.

As ThinkProgress explained, Romney in the past had been very up front about the crucial role federal funding - and flexibility - played in making his signature achievement possible:

"[F]rom the beginning the plan was a 50/50 deal between the federal government and the state government. The Feds fund half of it, they have from the very beginning." The Boston Globe notes that "approximately 56 percent of the gain in coverage was related to increased federal Medicaid support" in Massachusetts, and of the newly insured, "18 percent gained coverage through Medicaid, and another 38 percent gained coverage through Commonwealth Care, a program that federal Medicaid dollars pay half of."

But like the new insurance coverage for 30 million Americans nationwide under the Affordable Care Act, the gains in Massachusetts would be a thing of the past under a Romney administration in Washington. Projections from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that 48 million more people would be uninsured under Paul Ryan's House GOP budget, a scheme similar to Romney's. That figure would include hundreds of thousands in the state Romney once governed.

And where on the issue of health care reform at least, MIT professor and Obamacare/Romneycare designer Jonathan Gruber insisted in 2007, Romney governed well:

"He was incredibly impressive, with his intellect, his ability. If there is anything that qualifies him to be President of the United States, it is his leadership on this issue."

Four years later, Jonathan Gruber reached a much different conclusion about Mitt Romney, or at least this version of him. As the NBER pointed out in a recent study, "the general strategies for obtaining nearly universal coverage in both the Massachusetts and federal laws involved the same three-pronged approach of non-group insurance market reforms, subsidies, and mandates, suggesting that the health effects should be broadly similar." The difference between Romney's own Boston bill and what he calls Obamacare?

"Zero difference," he said. "This is, to my mind, the most blatantly obvious case of politics trumping policy I've ever seen in my life. Because this is an idea, that four or five years ago, Republicans were touting. A guy from the Heritage Foundation spoke at the bill signing in Massachusetts about how good this bill was."

He credited Mitt Romney for not totally disavowing the Massachusetts bill during his presidential campaign, but said Romney's attempt to distinguish between Obama's bill and his own is disingenuous.

"The problem is there is no way to say that," Gruber said. "Because they're the same f--king bill. He just can't have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it's the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he's just lying. The only big difference is he didn't have to pay for his. Because the federal government paid for it. Where at the federal level, we have to pay for it, so we have to raise taxes."

Now in 2012, Romney has abandoned his Massachusetts "model" for America and threatens its slow death by his own hand. If snuffing out his orphaned health care achievement doesn't make him a godfather of another kind, it does make Mitt Romney a deadbeat dad.

—Perrspective 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Conservatives this week were quick to mock the Obama campaign's "The Life of Julia," an online slideshow highlighting how government investments in education, health care, small business and retirement security help enable the children of working families to climb the ladder of social mobility. Republican critics dismissed that common path to the middle class as the "condescension" of "cradle-to-grave, government-supported existence" supposedly championed by Democrats.

It is only fitting, then, that the Romney campaign offers its alternative vision. So here is "The Life of Mitt," a tale of a winner-take-all America in which government exists to ensure a privileged few stay that way.

Click here for larger version of image.

Age Minus 9 Months: The son of American Motors magnate and Michigan Governor George Romney, Mitt fondly recalls being with his father for Detroit's Golden Jubilee. That celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the American automobile occurred on June 1, 1946, "fully nine months before Romney was born." Years later, Mitt would similarly "remember" seeing his dad march with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Age 8: Young Mitt Romney is living his American Dream; that is, being born to a father who achieved his own. "Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of the state in which he once sold paint from the trunk of his car." In Michigan, Mitt learned to love cars and trees which were the right height. He also begins to soak up valuable life lessons from his dad, like "Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage." As for the millions of Americans unable to pay theirs, Mitt later concluded:

"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

Despite his filial devotion, Mitt forgets his father's warning that "rugged individualism" is "nothing but a political banner to cover up greed."

Age 12: After attending a public elementary school, young Mitt is sent to the prestigious Cranbrook School in elegant Bloomfield Hills. This experience leads him to declare he's just "a guy from Detroit," one who happens to support school vouchers and tax breaks for home schooling, while slashing funds for public schools.

While Mitt Romney would certainly never had to worry about "getting a pink slip," he stills gets a chuckle thinking about those who did when his father moved AMC jobs from Michigan to Wisconsin. It's no wonder he chides his former home town in 2008, declaring, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."

Age 16: In 1963, Mitt confronts personal tragedy, as "dear, close family relative" Ann Keenan dies as a result of an illegal abortion. As he later explained during a 1994 Senate debate with Ted Kennedy, it was that searing experience which made him a pro-choice Mormon:

"It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that."

Age 19: In 1966, Stanford student Mitt Romney takes part in his only college protest, one in favor of the Vietnam War. But thanks to the generous 4-D exemption from military service, Mitt like many Mormon young men of his age was able to secure multiple deferments in order to perform his church mission. During that two and half year period when other American men were fighting in the rice fields of Vietnam, Romney faced hardships in the vineyards of France. These apparently included pooping in a bucket during his of roughing it in a palatial church mansion in Paris. As he revealed in a 1994 interview with the Boston Herald, Romney was not exactly racked by guilt as the war raged in Southeast Asia:

"Romney, however, acknowledged he did not have any desire to serve in the military during his college and missionary days, especially after he married and became a father," the newspaper wrote. "'I was not planning on signing up for the military,' he said. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft. If drafted, I would have been happy to serve, and if I didn't get drafted I was happy to be with my wife and new child.'"

Thirteen years later, candidate Mitt Romney explained he passed on that tradition to his five boys:

"My sons are all adults and they've made decisions about their careers and they've chosen not to serve in the military and active duty and I respect their decision in that regard. One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president."

Age 24: In 1971, Ann and Mitt Romney head to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, Mitt starts a "terrific" four year program to get his JD and MBA at Harvard Business School, completing both degrees 37 years before accusing Barack Obama of spending too much time in the Harvard faculty lounge. Even with small children and Mitt in school, Ann avoided the "dignity of work" because "Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. The stock came from Mitt's father."

That history might explain why Romney offered this advice in March to college students struggling to pay for his education:

"If you can't afford it, scholarships are available, shop around for loans, make sure you go to a place that's reasonably priced, and if you can, think about serving the country 'cause that's a way to get all that education for free."

Pell grants, schmell grants.

In 2012, Mitt tells college students to borrow money from their parents to start a business, advice his son Tagg took to the tune of $10 million.

Age 29: Mitt starts his career at Boston Consulting Group. There, he befriends a colleague named Benjamin Netanyahu. Over the years, the fast friends will come to agree on just about everything, including cracking down on public sector unions and launching pre-emptive strikes on Iran.

Age 30: In 1977, Romney is hired away by Bain and Company. But in 1984, he found Bain Capital, the private equity firm where Romney discovered that "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." Thanks to his beloved process of "creative destruction," Mitt got very rich as investments in companies like Staples and Sports Authority paid off handsomely. Just not necessarily for the employees at the firms Bain often creatively destroyed. As the Los Angeles Times documented, workers' pain was Mitt's gain:

Bain's top 10 dollar investments under Romney -- averaging $53 million -- spanned a number of sectors, including healthcare, entertainment and manufacturing. The firm's largest investment was its 1999 buyout of Domino's Pizza, into which Bain put $188.8 million, eventually reaping a fivefold return.

Four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs. The prospectus shows that Bain investors profited in eight of the 10 deals, including three of the four that ended in bankruptcy.

Under Romney's successful leadership, the Times concluded, "Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers." As Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years put it, "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation. The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors."

Age 47: Mitt Romney follows his father's path from business to politics by taking on Ted Kennedy in the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race. Mitt loses, despite his pro-choice and pro-gay rights views, as well as his declaration that:

"I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush; I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

Age 52: Now a multi-millionaire, Mitt leaves Bain Capital in 1999. But thanks to a sweetheart deal from his old employer, he continues to earn millions annually from the firm's investment portfolio. And thanks to even an even sweeter deal from Uncle Sam, the notorious carried interest exemption lets the man who is "also unemployed" pay only 15 (and not 35) percent on the $42 million he pocketed over two years. Just as important, a Mitt-friendly IRS lets Romney set up a $100 million trust fund for his five sons - tax free.

Under President Romney, the federal government will come to aid of the struggling rich, like Mitt Romney. His own tax proposals would save the $250 million man an estimated $4 million a year. His friends who own NASCAR and NFL teams would reap a massive windfall, courtesy of the U.S. Treasury. (As for the people in polyester and plastic rain ponchos, not so much.) And by eliminating the estate tax, Romney's heir could pocket over $80 million courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Age 55: Running for Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt avoids a residency crisis by paying $54,000 in property taxes on the Utah resort home he had claimed as his primary residence. He also avoids the ire of liberal Bay State voters by proclaiming:

"I think people recognize that I'm not a partisan Republican; that I'm someone who is moderate; and that my views are progressive."

His wife Ann, who Mitt explains ten years later "reports to me" what women care about, got in on the act, too. As she put it in a 2002 interview:

"I think women also recognize that they want someone who is going to manage the state well. I think they may be more nervous about him on social issues. They shouldn't be, because he's going to be just fine. But the perception is that he won't be. That's an incorrect perception."

To prove it, Mitt tells Planned Parenthood he supports Roe V. Wade, the morning after pill and funding for abortion services for low income women. A decade later, he announces he wants to end the federal Title X law providing health care services to low-income women and backs personhood amendments. It's no wonder his adviser Michael Murphy reveals in 2005 that Romney's "been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly."

Age 59: With Senator Ted Kennedy by his side, Governor Romney signs the popular Massachusetts health care reform law in 2006. That bill, which Mitt repeatedly calls a "model" for the country, reduces the uninsured rate to a national low of two percent, improves residents' health and slows the growth of insurance premiums. As Jonathan Gruber, who helped design both Romneycare and Obamacare, put it, "it's the same f**king bill."

Just a few years later, Romney says of the Affordable Care Act that as President he would "kill it dead." As it turns out, by slashing the federal Medicaid funding that made his signature achievement possible, Mitt would snuff out Romneycare as well.

Age 61: In his first presidential run, Mitt reverses course on abortion rights, immigration, and just about everything else. (He also announces his opposition to Barack Obama's call for strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, a move five years later he claimed "other presidents and candidates like myself" would have ordered.)

Thanks to lax campaign laws that tilt the playing field in favor of the rich, Mitt is able to spend $45 million of his own money in his losing effort. Hoping to become John McCain's running mate, he parts with the loss of a fifth of his net worth and over two decades of tax returns. As Brian Williams pointed out during a January 2012 debate, "You said during the McCain vetting process you turned over 23 years which you had at the ready because, to quote you, you`re something of a packrat." Now, the American people only get two because, as Mitt helpfully explained earlier this year:

"I don't put out which tooth paste I use either. It's not that I have something to hide."

Age 63: Mitt's not-so-blind trust sheds its holdings in Swiss accounts just in time for his next presidential campaign. Not so for his cash stored in the Cayman Islands, still safely beyond the reach of the IRS.

Age 65: For his 65th birthday, Mitt announces he won't be taking Social Security or Medicare payments. He's just setting an example for all Americans, since he wants to raise the retirement age to 67. He also wants to convert Medicare into an under-funded voucher scheme that would dramatically shift health care costs onto seniors. For safety sake, Romney avoids mentioning his past support of President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, which he used to call "a good idea."

—Perrspective 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Days after his Wall Street op-ed claiming that Obama's Bin Laden "bragging" compared unfavorably to Lincoln, Eisenhower and, wait for it, George W. Bush, Michael Mukasey took to Fox News to charge that "the Obama Administration drafted a memo to protect the president from blame if the mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden would have failed.". As right-wing blogs excitedly quoted:

"That was a highly lawyered memo (designed to protect the president politically)... I think there's going to be more that's going to be tumbling out about that escapade but so far that memo is enough."

Of course, standard operating procedure for Team Bush was to claim that their man, like the Pope, was infallible. As with the proverbial fish, that rot started at the head.

Mistakes? What Mistakes?

"I'm sure something will pop into my head here...maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

But by January 2007, just days after he announced the surge in Iraq, Bush admitted to Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes that he had made mistakes, if only semantic ones:

PELLEY: You mention mistakes having been made in your speech. What mistakes are you talking about?

BUSH: You know, we've been through this before. Abu Ghraib was a mistake. Using bad language like, you know, "bring them on" was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it.

Amazingly, Bush's most profound statement of regret about his tough talk came (despite Dana Perino's claim to the contrary) in June 2008. In London as part of his final swing through Europe before leaving the White House, President Bush told The Times of London that his cowboy rhetoric was perhaps his greatest regret:

President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a "guy really anxious for war" in Iraq.

[...] In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric."

Phrases such as "bring them on" or "dead or alive", he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

To be sure, George W. Bush had a lot to apologize for when it came to his use of phrases like "bring 'em on." As a grieving Mary Kewatt told Minnesota Public Radio in June 2003:

"We have some issues with the fact that President Bush declared combat over on May 1. Combat is not over. We don't even know who's firing at us right now, and all of our soldiers are at great risk of being picked off as Jim was. And that's a shame. And then President Bush made a comment a week ago, and he said, 'bring it on.' They brought it on and now my nephew is dead."

Throughout his tenure in the White House, Bush evaded accountability for errors large and small. On no issue was this more on display than on the war in Iraq. After, President Bush's response to collapse of his primary rational for the war against Saddam was to joke about the absence of weapons of mass destruction. David Corn recalled Bush's performance at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner, in which the Comic-in-Chief regaled the audience with his White House hijinx:

Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

And to the very end, President Bush (along with his Republican allies) continued to perpetuate the myth of Saddam's link to Al Qaeda and 9/11. During his jaw-dropping December 15, 2008 interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz. The President wasn't merely content to ignore the bipartisan 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Al Qaeda and Iraq had no "operational relationship." Boasting that "there have been no attacks since I have been president, since 9/11," the President simply dismissed any criticism that it was only his 2003 invasion which brought Al Qaeda forces to Iraq:

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take -

RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

"I Don't Think Anybody Could Have Predicted That"

But when the mistakes were too big to ignore, Team Bush came up with a new excuse. Like an ill-timed fart, Bush's aides insisted, "nobody could have predicted" the disasters that befell America under George W. Bush.

Even in its last throes, the Bush White House insisted the disasters which unfolded on its watch were unforeseeable. Just days before leaving office, Vice President Dick Cheney tried to deflect blame for the calamity on Wall Street and the deepening recession by declaring, "nobody anywhere was smart enough to figure that out" and "I don't know that anybody did." Then, Cheney magically converted failure into a virtue and ignorance into a shield in explaining away the Bush presidency:

"No, obviously, I wouldn't have predicted that. On the other hand I wouldn't have predicted 9/11, the global war on terror, the need to simultaneous run military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq or the near collapse of the financial system on a global basis, not just the U.S."

At every turn, of course, voices both inside and outside the government warned a Bush administration asleep at the switch.

Starting with the prospect of terror attacks on the U.S. homeland. As George W. Bush was taking office in early 2001, the Hart-Rudman Commission on U.S. National Security issued its report declaring "The combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack" and cautioning "many thousands of American lives" are at risk. At a transition briefing in the White House situation room during the first week of January, Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger warned his successor Condoleezza Rice, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject." And on January 25, 2001, counterrorism czar Richard Clarke (who helped lead the 1996 effort to protect the Atlanta Olympics from, among other things, threats from hijacked aircraft) handed the Bush national security team the famous Delenda plan for attacking Al Qaeda.

But in the aftermath of the horrific 9/11 attacks, Condi Rice played the role of a reverse Nostradmus, detailing the myriad foreign policy and security disasters she failed to predict. Confronted by 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben Veniste about the August 6, 2001 PDB (Presidential Daily Brief) which warned of "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks," national security adviser Rice responded:

"I believe the title was 'Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.'"

For his part, the vacationing President George W. Bush responded to the CIA presenter of the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) which warned of Al Qaeda's intent to attack the U.S. homeland by declaring:

"All right. You've covered your ass, now."

On March 22, 2004, Rice took to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to argue, "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration." And in an argument she would later make repeatedly, Rice first introduced the now ubiquitous "nobody could have predicted" defense on May 16, 2002:

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking."

Even before its 2009 regurgitation by Dick Cheney, White House spokesman Tony Fratto showed that Rice's talking point had legs. Spoon-fed by Fox News anchor Jon Scott's suggestion that "nobody was thinking that there'd be terrorists flying 767s into buildings at that point," Fratto reliably coughed up the laughably discredited sound bite:

"That's true. I mean, no one could have anticipated that kind of attack - or very few people."

Then there's the war in Iraq. The chaos that followed the U.S. invasion - the looting and the breakdown of security, the impact of disbanding the Iraqi army, the explosion of sectarian conflict, the prospects for a Sunni insurgency - was presciently predicted by the CIA and State Department long before the war began.

But for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others in the administration, these disastrous setbacks for the American people were the unfortunate - and unknowable - results of a smashing victory for the United States. As the looting and ransacking of Baghdad spun out of control in April 2003, Rumfeld portrayed the administration's utter lack of foresight as a positive development:

"Think what's happened in our cities when we've had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens!...Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things, and that's what's going to happen here."

A year later as the insurgency was taking a terrible toll of U.S. forces in Iraq, President Bush on August 30, 2004 offered the purest articulation of the uniquely Republican theory that nothing succeeds like failure (especially unanticipated failure):

"Had we had to do it [the invasion of Iraq] over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success - being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day."

As it turned out, the President's "catastrophic success" extended to his Bush Doctrine of expanding freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East. Sadly, when voters in the Palestinian territories went to the polls in January 2006, they much to surprise of Team Bush overwhelmingly chose Hamas.

That result (one coincidentally not reflected in the State Department's official timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) came as a complete shock to Secretary of State Rice, if few others. As the New York Times reported:

"I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."

(Making matters worse, Vanity Fair and others detailed how subsequent covert U.S. backing of armed Fatah units helped spark the bloody civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza.)

FEMA and other federal agencies had long fretted about the danger of a major tropical storm inundating New Orleans, as a 2001 study made clear. As Hurricane Katrina approach the city, Dr. Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center briefed President Bush, DHS Secretary Chertoff and FEMA's Brown on Sunday, August 28th, noting later, "It's not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped." That afternoon, the National Weather Service warned, "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer," adding, "Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards."

And yet, George W. Bush insisted in the days after the catastrophe, no one could have foreseen the death of New Orleans. As the Washington Post put it:

President Bush, in a televised interview three days after Katrina hit, suggested that the scale of the flooding in New Orleans was unexpected. "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm," Bush said in a Sept. 1 interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Which brings us to Vice President Cheney's pathetic claim two years ago about the economic crisis that there wasn't "anybody saw it coming." There was, of course, a legion of analysts, journalists and even members of the Bush administration warning about mortgage-backed securities and the collapse of the housing market. But as ThinkProgress documented, White House officials throughout 2008 denied the recession already underway since the previous December. Again, it was the hapless Tony Fratto who offered up the signature Bush sound bite on January 8, 2008:

"I don't know of anyone predicting a recession."

After his administration bequeathed the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression to Barack Obama, Dick Cheney in March 2009 disowned the Bush administration's responsibility for it. Skyrocketing unemployment, an explosion in the ranks of the uninsured and a doubling of the national debt resulted, Cheney explained, because "stuff happens":

"All of these things [wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina] required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend or weren't originally part of the budget. Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did."

Of course, by the time George W. Bush left the White House with his nation in tatters, that's a response everyone could have predicted.

—Perrspective 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) |

By most measures, Governor Romney's signature 2006 health care law has been a tremendous success. Enjoying the consistent support of Bay State residents by a 2 to 1 margin, the bill Governor Mitt Romney signed into law lowered the uninsured rate from 12.5 percent to a national low of two percent. In March, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) showed that universal coverage in Massachusetts is indeed making people there healthier. Meanwhile, the rate of growth for business and individual insurance premiums has slowed dramatically, a trend state regulators this week announced will result in only a 1.2% increase.

But as the Boston Globe reported today, what Governor Romney giveth, President Romney would taketh away.

Like his new GOP twin in Congress Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has proposed steep cuts to Medicaid spending and pledged to hand-over the shrunken pool of funds as block grants to the states. And it is precisely that formula that would smother his once-beloved Romneycare in its cradle. As the Globe documented, President Romney "would probably cripple the Massachusetts health care law":

"It would have been impossible for Massachusetts to do what it did without increased federal Medicaid support,'' said John McDonough, a major architect of the state's health care overhaul law and now director of Harvard University's Center for Public Health Leadership. "What he's proposing is in direct opposition to what he did as governor,'' said Amy Whitcomb Slemmer, executive director of Health Care for All in Massachusetts, citing the Bay State's 98 percent coverage rate, the highest in the nation. "That kind of expansion would not have been possible under a block grant program,'' as Romney has proposed. Block grants give states more flexibility in spending federal money, but restrict funding increases.

As ThinkProgress explained, Romney in the past had been very up front about the crucial role federal funding - and flexibility - played in making his signature achievement possible:

"[F]rom the beginning the plan was a 50/50 deal between the federal government and the state government. The Feds fund half of it, they have from the very beginning." The Boston Globe notes that "approximately 56 percent of the gain in coverage was related to increased federal Medicaid support" in Massachusetts, and of the newly insured, "18 percent gained coverage through Medicaid, and another 38 percent gained coverage through Commonwealth Care, a program that federal Medicaid dollars pay half of."

But like the new insurance coverage for 30 million Americans nationwide under the Affordable Care Act, the gains in Massachusetts would be a thing of the past under a Romney administration in Washington. Projections from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that 48 million more people would be uninsured under Paul Ryan's House GOP budget, a scheme similar to Romney's. That figure would include hundreds of thousands in the state Romney once governed.

And where on the issue of health care reform at least, MIT professor and Obamacare/Romneycare designer Jonathan Gruber insisted in 2007, Romney governed well:

"He was incredibly impressive, with his intellect, his ability. If there is anything that qualifies him to be President of the United States, it is his leadership on this issue."

Four years later, Jonathan Gruber reached a much different conclusion about Mitt Romney, or at least this version of him. The difference between his own Boston bill and what Romney calls Obamacare?

"Zero difference," he said. "This is, to my mind, the most blatantly obvious case of politics trumping policy I've ever seen in my life. Because this is an idea, that four or five years ago, Republicans were touting. A guy from the Heritage Foundation spoke at the bill signing in Massachusetts about how good this bill was."

He credited Mitt Romney for not totally disavowing the Massachusetts bill during his presidential campaign, but said Romney's attempt to distinguish between Obama's bill and his own is disingenuous.

"The problem is there is no way to say that," Gruber said. "Because they're the same f--king bill. He just can't have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it's the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he's just lying. The only big difference is he didn't have to pay for his. Because the federal government paid for it. Where at the federal level, we have to pay for it, so we have to raise taxes."

Now in 2012, Romney has abandoned his Massachusetts "model" for America and threatens its slow death by his own hand. If snuffing out his bastard love child doesn't make him a godfather of another kind, it does make Mitt Romney a deadbeat dad.

—Perrspective 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

But Mitt Romney didn't just sleep through that proverbial 3 AM phone call. When it was time to protect his embattled gay - and now former - foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell, Team Romney silenced him during a major conference call with reporters last week. Apparently, Mitt Romney was no more willing to stand up to the fundamentalists in his Republican Party than the Al Qaeda ones encamped in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

As TPM, ThinkProgress and other media outlets reported, the Romney campaign's Thursday call did not go swimmingly. But as the New York Times detailed today, the embarrassments for Romney and his team of Bush administration retreads were hardly limited to John Lehman and Pierre Prosper warning about the "Soviet" threat and the need to protect "Czechoslovakia." Just as important as who was leading that Romney conference call was who wasn't:

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

"Ric," said Alex Wong, a policy aide, "the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call." Mr. Wong added, "It's best to lay low for now."

For Mr. Grenell, the message was clear: he had become radioactive.

Radioactive, that is, because Grenell happened to be openly gay.

When Richard Grenell told the Romney camp he was gay during his April interview in Boston, Eric Fehrnstrom of "Etch-a-Sketch" fame reassured him, "It's not an issue for us." But in the face of criticism from Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins and many of the usual suspects on the religious right, the Romney campaign laid low, believing the conservative crisis over Grenell's appointment had "blown over."

As it turned out, not so much.

But the final straw, for Mr. Grenell, was the conference call on April 26. After being told not to speak, he felt deeply undermined, worrying it would erode his credibility with journalists who had expected to hear from him, friends said. One, R. Clarke Cooper, the executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, called it a missed opportunity.

"If one wanted to look at how it could have been done differently, they could have gotten Ric off the bench and onto the field," he said. "There's been a lot going on this week on foreign policy, with Syria, Hillary Clinton in China, Obama in Afghanistan. There's a lot happening where Ric could have been present."

The day after the call, complaints from the religious right picked up steam. In the National Review on April 27, Matthew J. Franck wrote: "Whatever fine record he compiled in the Bush administration, Grenell is more passionate about same-sex marriage than anything else."

Left to twist in the wind, Grenell resigned. The next day, Mitt Romney had a private meeting with many of the same of right-wing media groups to extend "an olive branch" and send the message that "the primary's over and we want you on our side and working with the campaign." Meanwhile, GOProud founder Christopher Barron could only lament:

"It doesn't bode well for the Romney campaign going forward if they couldn't stand up to the most outrageous attacks about him being gay."

And if Mitt Romney can't stand up to attacks from his allies, what about America's enemies?

Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in her 2008 "3 AM" ad reprising Walter Mondale's famous spot 24 years earlier, when a crisis hits the White House at 3 AM:

'Who do you want answering the phone?"

Now as in 2008, Mitt Romney reminded us this week, the answer is Barack Obama.

—Perrspective 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Just days after telling college students to borrow money from their parents to start a business (advice his son Tagg took to the tune of $10 million), Mitt Romney offered voters another important lesson. As Romney explained in new video footage of a fundraiser held last month at the estate of pizza mogul John Schnatter:

"What a home this is, what grounds these are, the pool, the golf course, you know if a Democrat were here he'd look around and say no one should live like this," said Romney, as the crowd began to laugh. "Republicans come here and say everyone should live like this, all right."

Unfortunately for Mitt and his fawning supporters, the historical record shows that from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance and just about every other indicator of the health of the U.S. capitalism, the modern U.S. economy has almost always done better under Democratic presidents. Despite GOP mythology to the contrary, America generally gained more jobs and grew faster when taxes were higher (even much higher) and income inequality lower. And while the U.S. recovery from the Bush recession remains painfully slow, most economists - including the nonpartisan CBO and some of John McCain's own 2008 advisers - believe President Obama saved the American free-enterprise system from the abyss. As Harry Truman famously put it:

"If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

• Job Creation and Economic Growth
• The Stock Market
• Income Inequality
• National Debt
• The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Job Creation and Economic Growth

When President Obama declared in December that decades of Republican trickle-down economics "never worked," conservatives were predictably apoplectic. Instead, they should have been ashamed.

To be sure, George W. Bush provided the perfect bookend to era of modern Republican economic management ushered by Herbert Hoover. The verdict on President Bush's reign of ruin was pronounced even before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times on January 24, 2009 featured an analysis ("Economic Setbacks That Define the Bush Years") comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

That dismal performance prompted David Leonhardt of the New York Times to ask last fall, "Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?" His answer was unambiguous:

Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7...

Is there good evidence the tax cuts persuaded more people to join the work force (because they would be able to keep more of their income)? Not really. The labor-force participation rate fell in the years after 2001 and has never again approached its record in the year 2000.

Is there evidence that the tax cuts led to a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation? Again, no. The rate at which start-up businesses created jobs fell during the past decade.

The data are clear: lower taxes for America's so called job-creators don't mean either faster economic growth or more jobs for Americans.

It's no wonder Leonhardt followed his first question with another. "I mean this as a serious question, not a rhetorical one," he asked, "Given this history, why should we believe that the Bush tax cuts were pro-growth?" Or as Mark Shields asked and answered last April:

"Do tax cuts help 'job creators' or 'robber barons'?"

But as the Washington Post and the New York Times suggested, Bush's dismal performance was hardly the exception to the rule. In general, the American economy simply does better when a Democrat sits in the White House. Apparently, America's job creators can create a lot more jobs when their taxes are higher - even much higher - than they are today.

As it turns out, control of Congress matters as well. As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, a recent JP Morgan study found that the American economy grew fastest when Democrats in charge of both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill:

The Stock Market

For the investor class so fond of perpetuating the myth of Republicans' superior economic stewardship, the collapse of the stock marketing during the Bush recession must be particularly galling. The Standard & Poor's 500 spiraled down at annual rate of 5.6% during Bush's time in the Oval Office, a disaster even worse than Richard Nixon's abysmal 4.0% yearly decline. (Only Herbert Hoover's cataclysmic 31% plunge makes Bush look good in comparison.)

As it turns out, as the New York Times also showed in October 2008, the Democratic Party "has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole." To make its case, the New York Times asked readers to imagine having put their money where its mouth is. Contrary to Republican mythology, Americans fare better - much, much better - under Democratic administrations:

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover's presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

(For the eye-popping chart of the S&P's performance under each of the presidents from Hoover through Bush 43, visit here.)

As the broader record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. As Slate in 2002 and the New York Times in 2003 found, "It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats." And as Bloomberg News documented in February, Barack Obama has been no exception:

Income Inequality

While the GOP's "job creators" didn't create any jobs after the top rate was trimmed to 35 percent and capital gains and dividends taxes were slashed under President Bush, they did enjoy an unprecedented windfall courtesy of the United States Treasury.

For Republicans, this predictable result of the Bush tax cuts was a feature, not a bug.

As the Center for American Progress noted in 2004, "for the majority of Americans, the tax cuts meant very little," adding, "By next year, for instance, 88% of all Americans will receive $100 or less from the Administration's latest tax cuts."

But that's just the beginning of the story. As the CAP also reported, the Bush tax cuts delivered a third of their total benefits to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. And to be sure, their payday was staggering. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that millionaires on average pocketed almost $129,000 from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. As a result, millionaires saw their after-tax incomes rise by 6.2%, while the gain for those earning between $40,000 and $50,000 was paltry 2.2%.

And as the New York Times uncovered in 2006, the 2003 Bush dividend and capital gains tax cuts offered almost nothing to taxpayers earning below $100,000 a year. Instead, those windfalls reduced taxes "on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000." As the Times explained in a shocking chart: "The top 2 percent of taxpayers, those making more than $200,000, received more than 70% of the increased tax savings from those cuts in investment income."

And as the Washington Post recently explained, for the very richest Americans the successive capital gains tax cuts from Presidents Clinton (to 20 percent) and Bush (to 15 percent) have been "better than any Christmas gift":

While it's true that many middle-class Americans own stocks or bonds, they tend to stash them in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, where the capital gains rate does not apply. By contrast, the richest Americans reap huge benefits. Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.

This convenient chart tells the tale:

It's no wonder that between 2001 and 2007- a period during which poverty was rising and average household income had fallen - the 400 richest taxpayers saw their incomes double to an average of $345 million even as their effective tax rate was virtually halved. As the Washington Post noted, "The 400 richest taxpayers in 2008 counted 60 percent of their income in the form of capital gains and 8 percent from salary and wages. The rest of the country reported 5 percent in capital gains and 72 percent in salary."

(It's worth noting that the changing landscape of loopholes, deductions and credits, especially after the 1986 tax reform signed by President Reagan, makes apples-to-apples comparisons of marginal tax rates over time very difficult. For more background, see the CBO data on effective tax rates by income quintile.)

If you had any lingering doubts about Warren Buffett's admission that "it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning," this pair of charts from the New York Times should put them to rest. As the upper-income tax burden fell, income inequality in the U.S. exploded.

As the Washington Post demonstrated in its jaw-dropping series "Breaking Away," plummeting tax rates overall and on capital gains in particular have been widening the chasm between the rich and everyone else in America:

National Debt

The Republican tax cut windfall for the wealthy didn't merely produce the lowest total federal burden in 60 years and the highest income inequality in 80. GOP trickle down policies also drained the United States Treasury.

In case Americans had forgotten that Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it, the New York Times presented this helpful reminder:

Leave aside for the moment that small government icon Ronald Reagan signed 17 debt ceiling increases into law. (That might explain why the Gipper repeatedly demanded Congress boost his borrowing authority and called the oceans of red ink he bequeathed to America his greatest regret.) As it turns out, Republican majorities voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under President Bush and the current GOP leadership team voted a combined 19 times to bump the debt limit $4 trillion during his tenure. (That vote tally included a "clean" debt ceiling increase in 2004, backed by 98 current House Republicans and 31 sitting GOP Senators.)

Of course, they had to. After all, the two unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 (the first war-time tax cut in modern U.S. history) and the Medicare prescription drug program drained the U.S. Treasury. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Eric Cantor voted for all of it.

Again, in words and pictures, the New York Times tells the tale:

As the Washington Post summed up the CBO's conclusions regarding the causes of the nation's mounting debt earlier this year, "The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts." The analysis by the Times echoed that finding:

With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here -- from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.

But as Ezra Klein explained in the Washington Post, the revealing Times chart doesn't tell the full story of the impact of Bush-era policies on future debt facing Barack Obama:

What's also important, but not evident, on this chart is that Obama's major expenses were temporary -- the stimulus is over now -- while Bush's were, effectively, recurring. The Bush tax cuts didn't just lower revenue for 10 years. It's clear now that they lowered it indefinitely, which means this chart is understating their true cost. Similarly, the Medicare drug benefit is costing money on perpetuity, not just for two or three years. And Boehner, Ryan and others voted for these laws and, in some cases, helped to craft and pass them.

These two graphs from the Washington Post and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities make that point crystal clear. Analyses by CBPP showed that the Bush tax cuts accounted for half of the deficits during his tenure, and if made permanent, over the next decade would cost the U.S. Treasury more than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, TARP and the stimulus - combined.

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch was telling the truth when he described Republican fiscal mismanagement during the Bush years by acknowledging, "It was standard practice not to pay for things."

As Paul Krugman documented, the jump in federal spending as a percentage of GDP under President Obama is almost completely explained by the contraction of the economy and the stimulus programs now ending. (Republicans always take great to care to avoid mentioning that the total federal tax burden as a percentage of the U.S. economy is at its lowest level in 60 years even as income inequality is at its highest in 80.) As Krugman summed it up:

Now, pointing out the Obama spending binge is a myth generally produces rage: people know that it happened, because Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal say so. But that doesn't make it true.

Put another way, when it comes to the American balance sheet, Republicans broke it. Now, they claim, Democrats own it.

The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Despite Republican mythmaking that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) "created zero jobs," the CBO reported in November that the stimulus added up to 2.4 million jobs and boosted GDP by as much as 1.9 points in the past quarter. As it turns out, that conclusion confirms the consensus of most economists - including John McCain's 2008 brain trust- that President Obama's recovery program is continuing to deliver benefits for the American people.

From the beginning, the CBO has testified to the success of the largely concluded 2009 stimulus package in driving employment and economic growth. Now, as The Hill reported, the CBO has found that "President Obama's 2009 stimulus package continues to benefit the struggling economy":

The agency said the measure raised gross domestic product by between 0.3 and 1.9 percent in the third quarter of 2011, which ended Sept. 30. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that GDP in that quarter was only 2 percent total.

CBO said that the stimulus also lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 and 1.3 percentage points and increased the number of people employed by between 0.4 million and 2.4 million...

By CBO's numbers, the $800 billion stimulus added up to 0.9 million jobs in 2009, 3.3 million jobs in 2010 and 2.6 million jobs in 2011.

But to really gauge the success of the stimulus, it's worth taking a second look at just how dire the U.S. economic situation was when the Obama administration made its fateful prediction that unemployment would peak at 8 percent. As The Economist and the Washington Post's Ezra Klein detailed, in early 2009 the American economy was not only in much worse shape than anyone imagined; it was literally on the brink of collapse. As The Economist explained the run-up to the passage of the $787 billion recovery program:

The White House looked at the economic situation, sized up Congress, and took its shot. Unfortunately, the situation was far more dire than anyone in the administration or in Congress supposed.

Output in the third and fourth quarters fell by 3.7% and 8.9%, respectively, not at 0.5% and 3.8% as believed at the time. Employment was also falling much faster than estimated. Some 820,000 jobs were lost in January, rather than the 598,000 then reported. In the three months prior to the passage of stimulus, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers, not 1.8m. In January, total employment was already 1m workers below the level shown in the official data.

Klein points out that "wasn't until this year that the actual number was revealed" for Q4 2008 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As The Economist lamented, the Obama administration was "flying blind."

Whether the White House should have known the unemployment picture was going to be much, much worse (as Joseph Stiglitz and Jared Bernstein argued) or that the stimulus package itself was too small and too laden with tax breaks (as Paul Krugman warned at the time), there is little question that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act worked largely as designed. And you don't have to take the CBO's word for it. You can just ask some of John McCain's advisers.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the CBO and chief economic adviser to John McCain during the 2008 election, acknowledged the impact of the stimulus. Certainly no fan of either Barack Obama or the design of the ARRA, Holtz-Eakin told Ezra Klein that:

"The argument that the stimulus had zero impact and we shouldn't have done it is intellectually dishonest or wrong. If you throw a trillion dollars at the economy it has an impact, and we needed to do something."

Mark Zandi, another adviser to McCain, was much more adamant. Federal intervention, he and Princeton economist Alan Blinder argued in August 2010, literally saved the United States from a second Great Depression. In "How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End," Blinder and Zandi's models confirmed the impact of the Obama recovery program and concluded that "laissez faire was not an option":

The effects of the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising 2010 real GDP by about 3.4%, holding the unemployment rate about 1½ percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls. These estimates of the fiscal impact are broadly consistent with those made by the CBO and the Obama administration.

But their modeling also suggests that the totality of federal efforts to rescue the banking system dating back to the fall of 2008 prevented a catastrophic collapse:

We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs, and inflation are huge, and probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0. For example, we estimate that, without the government's response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

While the U.S. economy is now experiencing slow but steady growth and job gains, the effects of the stimulus are winding down. Worse still, the draconian budget-cutting by state and local governments which have already cost 600,000 workers their jobs could rightly be deemed the "anti-stimulus." (Ironically, the public sector grew dramatically under Obama's Republican predecessor, with 900,000 government jobs added during Bush's tenure.) As Paul Krugman described the new report from the Congressional Budget Office:

What it tells us is that the US federal government has been practicing destructive fiscal austerity since the middle of 2010 (and that's not even talking about what's happening at the state and local level). Here's the average of CBO's high and low estimates of the impact of the ARRA on the level (not the rate of growth) of GDP by quarter:

And you wonder why the economy isn't recovering strongly?

Now, the would-be Second MBA President Mitt Romney would make the situation worse with an economic prescription even more poisonous than the one administered George W. Bush. Romney would deliver a massive tax cut windfall for the rich, paying for it by gutting the social safety net each pretends to protect. He would end Medicare as we know it with a premium support gambit that would dramatically shift health care costs to America's seniors. While increasing defense spending, the GOP White House hopeful would repeal the Affordable Care and leave at least 30 million people without insurance. And despite his pledge to end many tax loopholes and deductions to fund their gilded-class giveaway, Mitt Romney doesn't have the courage to say which ones. As a result, Mitt "Cut, Cap and Balance" Romney would actually add trillions more in red ink to the national debt.

In a major address offering his own economic vision in Osawatomie, Kansas last December, President Obama summed up the performance of the Republican trickle down economic theory in practice. As he explained and as the images above attest, the picture of GOP economic orthodoxy is not a pretty one:

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the '50s and '60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory.

As Obama suggested, you don't have to go all the way back to the time of Teddy Roosevelt for proof of the failure of the GOP's coddling of the gilded class: George W. Bush was proof enough. Or as Harry Truman explained in words that are as true to today as when he uttered them over 60 years ago, "if you want to live like a Republican vote Democratic."

—Perrspective 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

And that could be a big problem for Mitt Romney come November. Because as his record shows, when Romney says "my inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel," Mitt is really talking about Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud Party.

(Click a link below for the details on each.)

• Business Buddies in Boston
• Bibi's Iran Disinvestment Campaign Backfires on Mitt
• In Unison on War Crimes Charges for Ahmadinejad
• A Shared Hard Line on the Iranian Nuclear Program
• Blocking the Peace Process

Business Buddies in Boston

Famously reticent to talk to the press, last month Mitt Romney was only too happy to highlight for the New York Times his close friendship with the Israeli Prime Minister. "We can almost speak in shorthand," Romney told the Times, adding, "We share common experiences and have a perspective and underpinning which is similar." That shared experience began in 1976 in the offices of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where the two men were colleagues right out of graduate school:

That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue. Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is making the case for military action against Iran as Mr. Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, is attacking the Obama administration for not supporting Mr. Netanyahu more robustly.

The relationship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Romney -- nurtured over meals in Boston, New York and Jerusalem, strengthened by a network of mutual friends and heightened by their conservative ideologies -- has resulted in an unusually frank exchange of advice and insights on topics like politics, economics and the Middle East.

As the record shows, the exchange has largely been a one-sided affair.

As Mitt explained in an interview explained in an interview with the hardline, Bibi-friendly Israel Hayom in October, President Romney would follow Israel's lead:

The actions that I will take will be actions recommended and supported by Israeli leaders. I don't seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel's leaders thought that a move of that nature [the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem] would be helpful to their efforts, then that's something I'll be inclined to do. But again, that's a decision which I would look to the Israeli leadership to help guide. I don't think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process, instead we should stand by our ally. Again, my inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel, as to where our facilities and embassies would exist.

And during his exchange with Newt Gingrich during a December Republican debate, Romney left no doubt which Israeli leader he was talking about:

"I've also known Bibi Netanyahu for a long time. We worked together at Boston Consulting Group. And the last thing Bibi Netanyahu needs to have is not just a person who's an historian, but somebody who is also running for president of the United States, stand up and say things that create extraordinary tumult in his neighborhood...Before I made a statement of that nature, I'd get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say, 'Would it help if I said this? What would you like me to do?'"

Bibi's Iran Disinvestment Campaign Backfires on Mitt

As it turns out, that's exactly what Mitt Romney has been doing since before his first run for President of the United States.

Consider Romney's 24 hour disinvestment campaign in early 2007, an effort cut short by revelations his own former employer had recent business dealings with Tehran. Romney followed the lead of his one-time BCG colleague and then-former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was touring the U.S. calling for pension funds to unload any holdings in companies doing business with Iran. Romney began his own grandstanding on Iranian disinvestment the next month by targeting the Democratic-controlled states of New York and Massachusetts. On February 22, Romney sent letters to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton as well as state comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli urging a policy of "strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime." Romney's theatrics continued:

"With your new responsibilities overseeing one of America's largest pension funds, you have a unique opportunity to lead an effort to isolate Iran as it pursues nuclear armament. I request that you immediately launch a policy of strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime. Screening pension investments and divesting from companies providing financial support to the Iranian regime or linked to Iran's weapons programs and terrorist activities could have a powerful impact. New investments should be scrutinized as long as Iran's regime continues its current, dangerous course."

As it turns out, scrutiny begins at home. As the AP and others detailed, Romney's former employer and the company he founded had links to very recent Iranian business deals. Caught flat-footed by his hypocrisy that took the AP less than a day to uncover, Romney feebly responded:

"This is something for now-forward. I wouldn't begin to say that people who, in the past, have been doing business with Iran, are subject to the same scrutiny as that which is going on from a prospective basis."

In Unison on War Crimes Charges for Ahmadinejad

Romney's role as Netanyahu's water carrier also explains Mitt's passing comment during the November 22nd CNN national security debate. When Romney said he wanted to "indict Ahmadinejad for violating the Geneva -- or the Genocide Convention," he was just awkwardly repeating an agenda Bibi has been pushing for years.

In January 2007, Romney joined Netanyahu among the speakers at the Herzliya Conference. There, he first announced his support for Netanyahu's approach. Then in the fall of 2007, Romney took his case to the United Nations. He not only demanded the General Secretary Ban-Ki-Moon "to revoke any invitation to President Ahmadinejad to address the General Assembly," but insisted that the UN prosecute the Iranian President for his 2006 boast that he would "wipe Israel off the map."

"If President Ahmadinejad sets foot in the United States, he should be handed an indictment under the Genocide Convention."

As Mother Jones detailed last year, there are a host of legal barriers to Romney's gambit. For starters, "U.S. policy has been to not honor the International Criminal Court; we are not a signatory to the Rome Treaty." And as MoJo reported:

It's widely interpreted that a statement supposedly egging on genocide is not legally considered a tool of genocide, unless it can be taken into evidence as proving direct intent and premeditation. Furthermore, it would be unprecedented to indict a foreign leader for a genocide that hasn't even taken place yet.

That may explain why Romney's nearly five-old year quest to prosecute the Iranian president has fizzled out. Of course, on the issue that matters most - the Iranian nuclear program - Benjamin Netanyahu and Mitt Romney have always seen eye to eye.

A Shared Hard Line on the Iranian Nuclear Program

In February's Arizona GOP debate, Mitt Romney repeated a pledge certain to please Benjamin Netanyahu:

"We must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. If they do the world changes, America will be at risk and someday nuclear weaponry will be used. If I'm president that will not happen. If we reelect Barack Obama it will happen."

As it turns out, many of Romney's advisers not only helped bring you the war in Iraq, but have for months been advocating an American attack on Iran "before it's too late." In 2007 Romney declared he favored all options "from blockade to bombardment" and announced that "if for some reasons [the Iranians] continue down their course of folly toward nuclear ambition, then I would take military action if that's available to us." And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in November titled, "I Won't Let Iran Get Nukes," Romney talked tough in two languages:

Si vis pacem, para bellum. That is a Latin phrase, but the ayatollahs will have no trouble understanding its meaning from a Romney administration: If you want peace, prepare for war...Only when the ayatollahs no longer have doubts about America's resolve will they abandon their nuclear ambitions.

Blocking the Peace Process

As for the ambitions of the Palestinian people for a state of their own - a U.S. foreign policy objective shared by the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations - Mitt Romney insists that is Bibi's call alone. As Romney put it in a January 26 Republican debate:

There are some people who say, should we have a two-state solution? And the Israelis would be happy to have a two-state solution. It's the Palestinians who don't want a two-state solution. They want to eliminate the state of Israel.

And I believe America must say -- and the best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.

Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu's premiership makes peace in the Middle East virtually impossible. Netanyahu, after all, opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords, which he said were "against my principles and my conscience" and were based upon "an enormous lie." Bibi also fought against the Ehud Barak's proposals to Yassir Arafat during the Clinton administration and refused to support the 2008 offer his predecessor Ehud Olmert made to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

As former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained in her recent memoir, Olmert was prepared to offer concessions to the Palestinians Romney doubtless would have described as "throwing Israel under the bus":

"I know what [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] needs. He needs something on refugees and on Jerusalem. I'll give him enough land, maybe something like 94 percent with swaps. I have an idea about Jerusalem. There will be two capitals, one for us in west Jerusalem and one for the Palestinians in east Jerusalem."

Even Netanyahu's much-hyped 2009 Bar-Ilan speech represented little movement forward towards a two-state solution he has long opposed:

Mr. Netanyahu made no mention of existing frameworks for negotiations, like the American-backed 2003 peace plan known as the road map.

He did not address the geographical area a Palestinian state might cover, and he said that the Palestinian refugee problem must be resolved outside Israel's borders, negating the Palestinian demand for a right of return for refugees of the 1948 war and for their millions of descendants.

He insisted that Jerusalem remain united as the Israeli capital. The Palestinians demand the eastern part of the city as a future capital.

It's no wonder that Israeli President Shimon Peres, a man who called Abbas "a worthy partner (who) can deliver the goods," recently blamed Netanyahu for the collapse of the peace process. Pointing to Bibi's intransigence and strong support for expanding West Bank settlements opposed by President Clinton, Bush and Obama, some observers have begun proclaiming the "death of the two-state solution."

According to Bibi's late father Benzion Netanyahu, that's no problem for his son. "He doesn't support [a Palestinian state]. He supports the sorts of conditions they [the Palestinians] will never accept."

Of course, Mitt Romney is just fine with them.

As the New York Times explained, "The ties between Mr. Romney and Mr. Netanyahu stand out because there is little precedent for two politicians of their stature to have such a history together that predates their entry into government." But as Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration pointed out, whether intentionally or not, Mitt Romney's statements about his BFF Bibi seem to imply that he would "subcontract Middle East policy to Israel." And, Indyk added, "That, of course, would be inappropriate."

Inappropriate for a U.S. president, American voters are just starting to find out, and often counterproductive for U.S. national interests.

—Perrspective 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) |