Hard-Hitting Ad
But factual:
With Romney, it was only possible to infer tax hikes for the poor and middle class; he said what he would give the rich, and then said that he’d pay for it but not how. However, there’s only one real way to do that.
Imagine a guy standing next to a vault, with a box of dynamite nearby, and no one has the combination. “I promise I will open the vault,” he says.
“Do you have the combination?” you ask him.
“Nope,” he says.
“Do you have any special tools, a cutting torch or diamond drills?”
“Nope.”
“So, the only way to open it is to blast it with that dynamite right there. Will you use the dynamite?”
“I’m not saying.”
With Ryan, however, the picture is a bit more clear. Ryan has made positive statements about some of the stuff he plans. His math is fake and he still holds back on many details, but he is on the record about a lot of draconian crap he plans to pull.
Romney has tried to distance himself on this, but it’s what Ryan is known for. It’s why Ryan was even in the field in the first place. Choosing Ryan not for his budget and Medicare plans would be like the Yankees saying they got Ichiro not for his batting skills.
Romney is trying to do what he has been doing: veering hard right and then calling foul when people say he veers hard right.
Interestingly, the upper house finally passed Noda’s 10% consumption tax.
they expect to raise ¥11T/yr, or $140B.
deficit is ~$400B.
at least it’s a start I guess. Japan’s pivot from a “nation of savers” to a “nation of taxpayers” remains to be seen, LOL.
as I’ve said here a lot, at the most macro level I think I like Japan’s demographics more than the US’s, through 2050 at least.
Japan is going where no country has gone before — shrinking! — but I hope it can transition from new capital investment to just maintaining what it needs going forward — as depopulates at a rate of ~1M per year this century.
But as for Romney and the Republicans, it’s hard to know if they’re so stupid as to believe their BS. Reagan was a big BSer too, but in the end he just tripled the national debt on his watch, doubling it in real terms.
I expect 8 years of Romney and a Republican-run House to turn in a similar record — raising taxes on the middle class, cutting services, while allowing debt leverage to blow up again. It’s their MO.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCMDODNS
shows the general course of total debt in the US.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=9tY
gives away their game clearly enough.
I get chills running down my spine when I see Ryan talking. To me he’s the devil incarnate. He unflinchingly, with calm, wants to inflict the most heinous violence (and poverty is the worst kind of violence) on tens of millions of the most vulnerable Americans – for the sake of giving trillions of more dollars to the very rich. This is evilness on several compounded levels. Concentrated wealth no only causes unnecessary suffering on an enormous scale, it causes the economy to contract, and eventually causes the break down of societies, nations, empires and civilizations and existential wars. This is a sure as day follows night. It’s not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of mechanics.
He never backs down from this. He never flinches. He shows no guilt of conscience. Nothing. But persistence.
I’ve never seen anything so startling an evidence of evil in a walking talking person. I can easily imagine his widowers peak extending, if only a trifle, and fangs extending more so, and cape on his shoulders. A chill runs down my spine every time I see him and here him talk. Count Paul Von Ryan, he wants to such your blood, the blood of the middle class, and drain them lifeless for the sake of the upper class. He is the living embodiement of Vampire economics.
Thank God he doesn’t have real political charisma.
Tim, at least We The People have a choice this November.
I was afraid Romney would etch-a-sketch his way to 269 EVs — or, even worse, a better bullshitter like Huckabee would win the nomination and just lie his way to the win, like Bush did in 2000.
If the Obama team can’t win against Romney & Ryan then they simply don’t deserve to be running the country anyway.
It’s not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of mechanics.
Indeed. When the top 5% of the population is taking 33% of the national income, without redistribution back to the masses the economy has to seize up (since much of that 33% is coming from the masses).
And HOW the 5% is earning their trillions is the critical bit. If they were indeed uber-capitalists, creating and selling new wealth to the masses for a small profit, then that would be one thing.
But the 5%, and 1%, and 0.1% are not making money from actual wealth-creation, they are making it from monetizing access to the planet — from the mere ownership of pre-existing resources — in land, energy, etc.
That and enjoying monopoly rents in health care etc, which are also immense cost-of-living taps on the people who actually work in this country (Americans pay $4000 more per-capita than Canada, which is not a particularly low-cost system)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthcare-spending-world-country
Obama has not been a particularly competent advocate of the left, alas, unlike how FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ were. He was kinda coopted by The System, being matriculated in the Columbia/Harvard/U of Chicago neoliberal worldview.