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Joe Biden, during last night’s debate: “Folks, follow your instincts. With regard to Social Security, we will not privatize it. If you listened to Mitt Romney and the Congressmen, during the Bush years, imagine where all of those seniors would be now if the money had been in the market. Their ideas are old, and their ideas are bad, and eliminate the guarantee of Medicare.”
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Mitt Romney behind closed doors:
“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what …”
“… who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it …”
“… And they will vote for this president no matter what …”
“… And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Jonathan Chait comments on why President Obama’s new ad may seal Mitt Romney’s fate.
“What’s devastating about the ad, aside from the juxtaposition of Romney’s words against photos of regular Americans, is something I only noticed the second time I watched it. It’s the sound of silverware clinking on china in the background as Romney speaks. That detail contrasts the atmosphere Romney inhabits with the one in which most Americans live. You can tell, even though you’re not seeing this, that the remarks are being made to people enjoying a formal dinner.”
“The damage of the remarks is twofold. Obviously, it deeply reinforces the worst stereotypes voters have of Romney. Indeed, the fact that he is currently running ads trying to make the case that he does care about all of America testifies to the grim position in which Romney finds himself… Worse still, the comments destroy Romney’s fundamental credibility. Here America sees what he says behind closed doors.”
via: barackobama
Bill weighs in. via: barackobama
“As long as I’m President of the United States, I will never allow Medicare to be turned into a voucher that would end the program as we know it. We will not go back to the days when our citizens spent their golden years at the mercy of private insurance companies. We will reform Medicare — not by shifting the cost of care to seniors, but by reducing the spending that isn’t making people healthier. That’s what’s at stake in this election…
On issue after issue, we can’t afford to spend the next four years going backward. America doesn’t need to refight the battles we just had over Wall Street reform and health care reform. On health care reform, here is what I know: Allowing 2.5 million young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance plan — that was the right thing to do. Cutting prescription drug costs for seniors — that was the right thing to do. I will not go back to the days when insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, or deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men. We’re not going back there. We’re going forward.
We don’t need another political fight about ending a woman’s right to choose, or getting rid of Planned Parenthood — or taking away access to affordable birth control. I want women to control their own health choices, just like I want my daughters to have the same opportunities as your sons. We are not turning back the clock. We are moving forward.”
barackobama: Don’t boo—vote!
It was called Son of Boss:
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Reporter: “Was there ever any year where you paid lower than the 13.9%?”
Mitt Romney: “I haven’t calculated that. I’m happy to go back and look.”
Voiceover: “Did Romney pay 10% in taxes? 5%? Zero? We don’t know. But we do know that Romney personally approved over $70 million in fictional losses to the IRS as part of the notorious Son of Boss tax scandal. One of the largest tax avoidance schemes in history. Isn’t it time for Romney to come clean?”
And this guy wants to be president!
Image above / story below: liberalsarecool
A key troubling public manifestation of Romney’s apparent insensitivity to tax obligations is his role in Marriott International’s abusive tax shelter activity, as previously reported by Jesse Drucker in Bloomberg.
Romney has had a close, long-standing, personal and business connection with Marriott International and its founders. He served as a member of the Marriott board of directors for many years. From 1993 to 1998, Romney was the head of the audit committee of the Marriott board.
During that period, Marriott engaged in a series of complex and high-profile maneuvers, including “Son of Boss,” a notoriously abusive prepackaged tax shelter that investment banks and accounting firms marketed to corporations such as Marriott. In this respect, Marriott was in the vanguard of a then-emerging corporate tax shelter bubble that substantially undermined the entire corporate tax system.
Son of Boss and its related shelters represented perhaps the largest tax avoidance scheme in history, costing the U.S. many billions in lost corporate tax revenues. - CNN
“In naming Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has chosen a leader of the House Republicans who shares his commitment to the flawed theory that new budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on the middle class and seniors, will somehow deliver a stronger economy. The architect of the radical Republican House budget, Ryan, like Romney, proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid. His plan also would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors. As a member of Congress, Ryan rubber-stamped the reckless Bush economic policies that exploded our deficit and crashed our economy. Now the Romney-Ryan ticket would take us back by repeating the same, catastrophic mistakes.”
— Obama for America Campaign Manager Jim Messina, in response to Mitt Romney picking Congressman Paul Ryan to be his presumptive nominee for vice president
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OFA: “You work hard, stretch every penny, but chances are you pay a higher tax rate than him: Mitt Romney made $20 million dollars in 2010, but paid only 14% in taxes—probably less than you. Now he has a plan that will give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2000 dollars a year. Mitt Romney’s middle class tax increase: he pays less, you pay more.”
Ezra Klein: “The reason Romney’s plan doesn’t work is very simple. The size of the tax cut he’s proposing for the rich is larger than all of the tax expenditures that go to the rich put together. As such, it is mathematically impossible for him to keep his promise to make sure the top one percent keeps paying the same or more.”
The Brookings Institution backs this up:
“For some time, Mitt Romney has been promising to reduce income tax rates and then pay for these cuts by closing loopholes. But he’s never specified which loopholes he’d close and now we know why. A new analysis from the Brookings Institution (and first reported by Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post) suggests that, in order to lower tax rates without increasing the deficit, Romney would have to close loopholes that benefit middle-class Americans as well as the wealthy. The end result, if I’m reading the report correctly, would be lower taxes for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans but higher taxes on everybody else. (See the graph below, which Steve Benen of Maddowblog constructed based on the report’s findings.)
“[...] For the record, reducing or eliminating tax breaks like the home interest mortgage deduction is a perfectly worthy idea, even if it means the middle class pay higher taxes. In the long run, most if not all of us need to pay more taxes. But Romney isn’t proposing to raise taxes on everybody. He’s proposing to raise them on the poor and middle class, while reducing them for the rich.
“Keep in mind that, even as Romney is proposing to taxes on most Americans, he is proposing to cut programs on which most Americans rely. His proposal to cap federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product, with a fifth of that set aside for defense spending, would inevitably require dramatic cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other vital public services.
“Figuring out the impact of campaign promises can be difficult. But if you’re like 95 percent of Americans, understanding what Romney’s plan means for you is simple: You’ll pay higher taxes and get fewer public services, so that Romney and his friends can keep more of their money. “
And the rubes in the GOP voting base allow themselves to be distracted by gays and abortion. It would be funny if they were the only ones to suffer the consequences.
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Downloaded, donated (some more) — definitely do not want to wake up Nov. 7th with President Romney. Do you?
“Because of the Citizens United decision, Karl Rove and the Republicans are looking forward to a breakfast the day after the election. They are going to assemble 17 angry old white men for breakfast, some of them will slobber in their food, some will have scrambled eggs, some will have oatmeal, their teeth are gone. But these 17 angry old white men will say, ‘Hey, we just bought America. Wasn’t so bad. We still have a whole lot of money left.’” — Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today in an interview with The Huffington Post.
Andrew Sullivan discusses how grass roots donors, like us, can counter the Sheldon Adelson fat cats: :
The Dish has spotlighted the extraordinary sway that a small number of individuals hold over campaign finance post-Citizens United. Shane Ferro crunches the numbers to see how to match them:
Well, let’s say roughly 200 Americans shelled out $10 million each (as casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson did last month to a pro-Romney super PAC)—that’s $2 billion pumped into the campaign system. And let’s say the average person making the median income (around $40,000 per year) can comfortably afford about a $100 contribution (that’s maybe a weekend’s worth of bar tabs?). How many $100 contributions would you need to equal the $2 billion of the .000063 percent? Twenty million. Okay, that sounds like a lot, but in reality is less than ten percent of the population. If even one in ten people donated a healthy but affordable sum, they would match the multi-million-dollar contributions of the wealthiest donors.
Yes we can make a difference. The new Obama for America app or http://www.barackobama.com/
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via: SecondCity
“Oh, I think people in my party just say, ‘Look, this is a non-issue, just release the returns and it will all go away.’ My experience is that the Democratic Party these days has approached taxes in a very different way than in the past,” Romney told WPXI, an NBC Affiliate in Pittsburgh. “Their opposition people look for anything they can find to distort, to twist, and to try and make negative, and I want to make this a campaign about the economy and creating jobs. And they want to make this campaign about attacking people and diverting attention from our job picture in this country.” — Mitt Romney Dismisses Tax Return Disclosure Calls From Republicans
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Tax Havens. Offshore accounts. Carried Interest. Mitt Romney has used every trick in the book. Romney admits that over the last two years he’s paid less than 15% in taxes on $43 million in income. Makes you wonder if some years he paid any taxes at all.
We don’t know because Romney has released just one full year of his tax returns. And won’t release anything before 2010.
Mitt Romney: You know what, I’ve put out as much as we’re gonna put out.
What is Mitt Romney hiding?
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“The Problem”
Mitt Romney, 10/11/2012: ”The Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank … taking our jobs and taking a lot of our future. And I am not willing to let that happen.”
He made a fortune letting it happen.
Newly published documents show Mitt Romney’s firms were ‘pioneers’ at ‘helping companies outsource their manufacturing’ to countries including China.
Bragging they were ‘A one-stop shop for their outsource requirements.’
Mitt Romney’s not the solution.
He’s the problem.
