Science Is the Key to Growth

By NEAL F. LANE

Houston

MITT ROMNEY said in all three presidential debates that we need to expand the economy. But he left out a critical ingredient: investments in science and technology.

Scientific knowledge and new technologies are the building blocks for long-term economic growth — “the key to a 21st-century economy,” as President Obama said in the final debate.

So it is astonishing that Mr. Romney talks about economic growth while planning deep cuts in investment in science, technology and education. They are among the discretionary items for which spending could be cut 22 percent or more under the Republican budget plan, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the plan, which Mr. Romney has endorsed, could cut overall nondefense science, engineering, biomedical and technology research by a quarter over the next decade, and energy research by two-thirds.

Mr. Romney seems to have lost sight of the critical role of research investments not only in developing new medicines and cleaner energy sources but also in creating higher-skilled jobs.

The private sector can’t do it alone. We rely on companies to translate scientific discoveries into products. But federal investment in research and development, especially basic research, is critical to their success. Just look at Google, which was started by two graduate students working on a project supported by the National Science Foundation and today employs 54,000 people.

Richard K. Templeton, chief executive of Texas Instruments, put it this way in 2009: “Research conducted at universities and national labs underpins the new innovations that drive economic growth.”

President Bill Clinton, for whom I served as science adviser from 1998 to 2001, understood that. In those years, we balanced the federal budget and achieved strong growth, creating about two million jobs a year. A main reason was the longstanding bipartisan consensus on investing in science. With support from Congress, Mr. Clinton put research funding on a growth path, including a doubling over five years (completed under President George W. Bush) of the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

In 2010, the federal government invested about $26.6 billion in N.I.H. research; those investments led to $69 billion in economic activity and supported 485,000 jobs across the country, according to United for Medical Research, a nonpartisan group.

Moreover, the $3.8 billion taxpayers invested in the Human Genome Project between 1988 and 2003 helped create and drive $796 billion in economic activity by industries that now depend on the advances achieved in genetics, according to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit group that supports research for the industry.

So science investments not only created jobs in new industries of the time, like the Internet and nanotechnology, but also the rising tax revenues that made budget surpluses possible.

American science has not been faring so well in recent budgets. President Obama has repeatedly requested steady increases for scientific research, aimed at putting the budgets of three key science agencies — the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — on a path to double, by 2016, the combined $10 billion they received in 2006. But a polarized Congress has not delivered at that rate, and the goal could be nullified if next year sees the beginning of draconian cuts.

Meanwhile, the frontiers of science continue to expand. President Obama is proposing that the United States boost its overall national research and development investments — including private enterprise and academia as well as government — to 3 percent of gross domestic product — a number that would still lag behind Israel, Sweden, Japan and South Korea, in that order.

In an increasingly complex world, that should be only a start. If our country is to remain strong and prosperous and a land of rewarding jobs, we need to understand this basic investment principle in America’s future: no science, no growth.

Neal F. Lane, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, was director of the National Science Foundation and the chief science and technology adviser to President Bill Clinton.

The One Percent will have their way!

by Hal Crowther

I've successfully immunized myself to the horse-race fever of presidential elections: the relentless polls and fundraising totals, the endorsements and lame speeches and could-be-fatal gaffes, worst of all the dim psychoanalysis and fanzine micro-dissection of candidates who always looked much alike to me. I was inoculated against most of this when I was fairly young, thanks in part to reading the convention reporting of H.L. Mencken, who took American democracy like a recreational drug and relished every hysterical high.

The political animal at his most ridiculous never amused me as much as he amused Mencken. His excesses can still reduce me to tears, even though I'm old enough to remember presidential candidates with actual convictions and commitments, instead of pollsters, bundlers and message-masseurs. It always catches me by surprise when the media resume their election coverage as if they'd learned nothing whatsoever from all the elections that came before. Are the media themselves now under such a state of siege, is the public's attention span now so brief that four years is enough to erase every scrap of residual wisdom? It looked that way to me when I read a news-service "think piece" in my local daily, an essay explaining "the stark philosophical differences" that separate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

I groaned so audibly that my wife asked me if I was having chest pains. This writer, I thought, is he 12 years old? First of all, no one mentions philosophy in the presence of Romney, who embraces any philosophy his ambition finds convenient and will, before his race is run, embrace as many more as his handlers recommend. And Obama, vilified on right-wing radio as a cross between Jomo Kenyatta and Malcolm X, between Rap Brown and Toussaint L'Ouverture? This is a white woman's son with a rich white man's education, a cautious, pragmatic man of the middle, like most Republicans used to be—like Mitt Romney before the White House bug bit him, like his father, George Romney, before him. Obama is a mild-mannered white attorney with a slight genetic handicap. He loves golf. In every way except that inappropriate pigmentation, he's a country-club Republican (vintage, not current) like Mitt.

In another climate, another decade, another turn of the wheel of fortune, they could have been comfortable running mates—if the fastidious Obama could have put up with an awkward fumbler like Romney. Philosophy? Romney has no philosophy, Obama only as much as he needs from week to week. The American political system seems designed to feed celebrity-addled media, which focus on the forgettable faces and generic utterances of the latest candidates, never on the forces that produce them or the deeper issues that tear this country in two.

Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, was featured in another front-page story presenting his intellectual pedigree. His infatuation with Ayn Rand was enough to convince me that he's an arrested adolescent, but there in bold letters on Ryan's list of mentors was my old schoolmate Bill Bennett. Sometimes we literally don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I chose to laugh. We will see these faces 10,000 times before Nov. 6. (I'd never stoop to the face game myself, but is Ryan actually Eddie Munster grown up and Nautilus-hardened?) Yet the only faces that matter in this election are the faces of the founders and dead presidents printed on America's folding currency. The U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision is the Rough Beast whose hour has come round at last, unleashing evil billionaires and subterranean oceans of corporate cash, tidal waves of it, under which the American democracy may vanish like lost Atlantis.

We are in deep water, in deep trouble here. It matters not at all that Romney is a Mormon or that he was mean to his dog, not at all that Obama is a Protestant with a jump shot and a wholesome marriage. It does matter, though only symbolically, that Romney was what Rick Perry calls "a vulture capitalist" and that Obama is not white—not white according to the old slave-state standard, which established that there's no such thing as half-white (or three-quarters or seven-eighths).

Who they are, or what they say or believe is beside the point; everything in this critical election rests on what they represent. Just because I choose to ignore the conventions, the debates, the PAC-paid TV commercials and the hurricane of expensive spin doesn't mean I think this election is meaningless. Quite the opposite. It is, in contention only with 1968, the most significant presidential election of my not inconsiderable lifetime. And I remember Ike's first victory over Stevenson very well.

This is one we can't afford to lose. If you're not sure who "we" might be, I hope to make it clear. Amid all the inanities and distractions of an election that parliamentary countries dismiss as a wasteful "beauty contest"—though few beauties compete—it's still possible to recognize certain omens, subtle signs that lead us toward the reality of America at a turning point. All summer the signposts kept appearing. One was the first anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, less visible now and no longer a media staple, but historic for its forceful assertion that economic inequality is the fatal malignancy that politics as usual will not cure.

The One Percent, remember? Between the bursts of assault-rifle fire that punctuated the summer season's motiveless massacres, beneath the mindless thunder of huge PACs colliding, behind the mind-numbing slapstick of Republican congressmen reinventing gynecology and skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee, a populist anthem seemed to be playing softly, for anyone who would pause to listen.

July 14, Bastille Day, marked the 100th birthday of the Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie, who wrote "This Land Is Your Land" to warn the One Percent of his day that other people lived in this country, people who might not stand idly by while the plutocracy bought up our birthright and fenced it off. Woody's heroically subversive verse, "I saw a sign, it said 'No Trespassin', but on the other side, it didn't say nothin', that side was made for you and me," is a political and spiritual touchstone that divides Americans, and probably the human race, into two irreconcilable camps.

Who did I mean by the "we" who can't afford to lose this election? I meant all of us grinning, instead of scowling, when we hear that verse of Guthrie's. But the One Percent of 2012 owns a far greater percentage of America's wealth—four times more—than it owned when Woody rode the rails during the Great Depression. Gated communities, rare in his day, wall off whole counties in ours. And Lawrence Downes writes in The New York Times that Woody's son Arlo, the wistful hippy of Alice's Restaurant, is now a Republican. Say it ain't so, Arlo.

In August, Liveright published the collected diaries of Guthrie's British contemporary George Orwell, an equally eloquent champion of the eternal underdog. It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that they knew each other's work. In an entry dated June 3, 1940, reacting to some twit's lament that the war would deprive the rich of their cooks, Orwell wrote a line that would make a fine epitaph for Romney's candidacy: "Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist."

But the coincidence that grabbed me most forcefully was the death in August of the science-fiction writer Harry Harrison, whose 1966 novel Make Room, Make Room became the 1973 film Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. If you could call Soylent Green a cult film, surely the cult is very small. But I'm one old-timer who remembers it well. It's set in the New York City of a distant future—2022—when the world is so hopelessly polluted and overpopulated that the rich have retreated to fortified barbed-wire compounds with armed guards, where they continue to lead the good life, somewhat circumscribed. The poor—the rest—mill about the streets in homeless herds, squat in abandoned buildings and subsist on government-issued crackers known as "soylent green."

A grisly twist the filmmakers added to Harrison's plot was that the crackers were actually the processed corpses of the poor, who could escape their misery in Ethical Suicide Parlors where they died peacefully amid video images of all the beauty and pleasure their lives had not included. Heston plays a police detective who lives in a wretched tenement with his decrepit partner (Robinson). Crimes among the rich occasionally enable him to enter their fortified apartments, where in one scene he steals a spoonful of strawberry jam, for him an unimaginable luxury. He also steals a single leaf of fresh lettuce and takes it home with him, where he and Robinson marvel over such a windfall before they divide and reverently devour it.

Most of you reading this are not arugula-deprived—perhaps you have more salad greens wilting in the crisper at this moment than the average third-world omnivore has ever seen. One of the year's most depressing statistics is that obese America now wastes 40 percent of its food—$165 billion worth annually—while hundreds of millions of human beings suffer from chronic hunger.

Necrophagia is still rare, even in depressed and primitive red states, though the tea party (like the Donner Party) endorses it in cases of "legitimate" starvation. But poverty is spreading rapidly in America. It's increased by nearly 3 percent since the beginning of the 2008 recession and now engulfs one in six (47 million) citizens, its highest level since 1965. Among children the rate is much higher, 22 percent in 2010. And there's still a 10-year countdown to 2022, when Harry Harrison calculated that overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and global warming due to the greenhouse effect would have created the terminal dystopia of Soylent Green. Once dismissed as science fiction, in 2012 it's beginning to look more and more like prophecy.

Those of you with a weakness for New Age eschatology may be anticipating the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012, a calculation based on the 5,125-year cycle of the Mayan Calendar. But it's Nov. 6 that frightens me. The first giant step toward Harrison's dystopia was total corporate control—absorption—of all forms of government. Soylent Green, manufacturer of the ghastly crackers, is also a huge international conglomerate. In Harrison's scenario, corporate feudalism has long since succeeded in disenfranchising and degrading everyone without financial leverage. If the Republicans win the White House and both houses of Congress and press forward with a Rand-Ryan-Koch brothers blueprint for America, we'll be right on schedule for something much like Soylent Green by 2022. The Hard Right, without apology, opposes unions, federal arbitration and regulation of the workplace. Are there people who actually hold jobs, or seek them, who haven't realized that this is a program to reduce them from employees to serfs to slaves?

You have to give the Republican high command some credit for the purity, the transparency of its purpose. When it chose Ryan, Randist ideologue and far-right budget wonk, to run with Romney, quarter-billionaire and gilded veteran of the vulture markets, the corporate plutocracy asserted its control of the Republican Party and the urgency of its desire. No more ego-clowns like Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, medieval theo-geeks like Rick Santorum or dizzy morons like Michele Bachmann, whose agendas only get in the way of the hunger of the One Percent.

What does it want, the big One? Everything. Everything. This micro-minority of the very rich now holds nearly 40 percent of all the private wealth in this country, a share that's tripled since 1980. The one-tenth of one percent, the obscenely rich, have tripled their annual income in that 30-year period, to an average of $5 million, while the inflation-adjusted income of the "bottom" 90 percent—the American people—has actually declined by 5 percent.

Numbers are numbing, but there are volumes of them, many more shocking than these, to attest to the metastasizing inequality that shames and cripples us. And the response of the very rich who now control the Republican Party? Well, they resent taxation, environmental policy and government itself if it threatens to interfere with the flow of profits and the steady stream of America's wealth into the deep, deep pockets of the greediest people who ever lived. We own nearly everything, the One Percent declares when it presents the populist-crushing ticket of Romney and Ryan, but we won't be satisfied until we get the rest.

If you find this level of selfishness and cupidity astonishing, you probably haven't read the novels of Ayn Rand that inspired Rep. Ryan to seek public office, as he has testified. A fair example of Randian philosophy in action: New Orleans is devastated by a hurricane, as it was in 2005 and might have been again during the recent Republican Convention, and there's only one emergency helicopter available. If you're a faithful Randian, you land it on the roof of the Exxon-Mobil headquarters, to make sure no top executives are endangered, even though hundreds of plebeians may be drowning or screaming from their rooftops.

No exaggeration. A less dramatic but equally effective exercise in social Darwinism is Paul Ryan's magic budget. It guts Medicaid, food stamp and low-cost housing programs by an estimated $3.3 trillion over 10 years, while tossing the very rich yet another tax cut. Rand's is a merciless philosophy, an intellectualization of the Law of the Jungle that says, essentially, screw the weak and the meek and make way for the bold and the greedy. If you have nothing, it declares, you deserve nothing—not even a chance to protest that you never had a chance.

The gospel of Ayn Rand is the perfect contradiction of everything ever preached by Jesus Christ. It's much to their credit that several Roman Catholic groups, nuns and Jesuits, have chastised the Catholic Ryan for his attachment to the atheist Rand. Her appeal is limited to young people, usually male, who are arrested in the infantile stage Freud describes as pure id—the "Gimme!" stage—and who tend to overrate themselves as potential supermen.

Not all of them outgrow it. Ryan's Randian economics, which celebrate avarice and sneer at conscience, are a made-to-order framework for the Last Grasp, a daring bid for absolute power by the Republican One Percent. (Every millionaire with a murmur of conscience now votes Democratic.) How, you might ask if you don't understand America, could such a tiny minority control an election, with a program that seems to benefit so few and harm so many? The best answer is that the extremely greedy are not the only extremists in this country, and the Republican Party has built a formidable new power base by cynical appeals to every extreme.

A Big Tent the GOP may not be—it's nearly 90 percent white and weighted heavily toward older males—but a wild and colorful tent-full it is, more like a carnival sideshow than a circus big top. The gluttons share their stage with racists, nativists, misogynists, homophobes, gun freaks, religious fundamentalists and fanatics of all denominations, and gonzo libertarians who hope to restore the gold standard. Along, of course, with a healthy harvest of dimwits—the extremely stupid—and a fair sprinkling of apparent mental patients. In the last group I'm obliged to include birthers, deniers of climate change, EPA-eliminators and everyone who thinks a private citizen should be able to acquire 6,000 rounds of ammunition for an automatic weapon.

If you'll eagerly cut your own throat—and your childrens' and your neighbors'—to express Caucasian solidarity or preserve your right to an AK-47, you're just what they're looking for. In a nation where most people think clearly and behave generously, a party like the current Republicans would be impossible. The entire unruly menagerie, still bloody from its raw-meat primaries, hopes to coast to victory behind a squeaky-clean Mormon mega-millionaire, a reformed moderate who tries to hide his tax returns and his intimate history with Goldman Sachs.

When you describe this GOP contraption, it sounds like a vehicle that would never start, far less lap the field. But there are at least two compelling reasons why it could win. One is the horrible effect of the Citizens United decision, that triumph of corporate personhood that has unleashed the great PACs and multiplied the scandalous influence of money in American elections.

The gross, florid face of the new reality—pandemic top-dollar "democracy"—is the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the human embodiment of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Adelson is worth roughly $25 billion, which means that if he were a dollar, the embarrassingly rich Romney would be a Lincoln penny. He has vowed to spend at least $100 million to defeat President Obama, and since that announcement Republican candidates have followed him around like hungry puppies. Romney virtually carried Adelson's suitcase on his recent tour of Israel; the moment Ryan was chosen as Romney's running mate, he hastened to Vegas to kiss Adelson's ... ring.

Dirtier money than Adelson's would be hard to find. Is it a sane legal system that lets marijuana dealers rot in prison while casino owners, who exploit the far more destructive human weakness, can live like sultans? Among the many unsavory things about Adelson are his casinos in Macau and Singapore, where reporters have been exploring rumors of bribed Chinese officials and prostitution, and his ultra-right newspaper in Israel, which supports the immediate bombing of Iran and whichever wars that might precipitate.

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Adelson's Macau operation for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Daily Mail of London accused him of "despicable business practices" and charged that he had "habitually and corruptly bought political favour." The paper was consequently sued into silence. Unlimited legal intimidation is one of the great prerogatives of billionaires.

Adelson's lone virtue is a certain feral honesty. A former Democrat, he admits he became a Republican when he tried to crush his employees' unions and realized the Democrats wouldn't help him. He never tries to hide the fact that he uses his money to shape legislation to his own advantage, as well as Israel's. His billions in overseas income are currently taxed at the shamefully low rate of 9.8 percent, and no doubt Mitt Romney has promised him another tax break.

Can you swallow that? Monstrously wealthy international pirates like Adelson, with agendas that contain no benefits for America or Americans, are the tragic dead end of our political system unless we can overturn Citizens United and put Big Money back in its box. Along with the largesse of the heinous Koch brothers, who bankrolled the tea party and launched the outrageous crusade against climate science solely to protect their energy investments, Adelson's millions are now evident in the flood of televised ads disparaging Obama's health care reforms. According to Paul Krugman of the Times, hardly neutral but a Nobel laureate in economics, every one of these ads is a gross distortion and many are impudent lies. But in the field of political advertising, unlimited resources often overpower limited intelligence by repetition alone.

Yet Adelson and the Kochs aren't even the best cards in Romney's hand. The recidivist South, where the electoral map is now colored solid red by the most optimistic Democrats, is no longer worth pursuing by a president who isn't colored solid white. I don't know exactly what the tea party represents in Wisconsin, where it's in love with Ryan, but I'm pretty sure what it represents in the South. For years now we've watched surly old white men of modest means raging about "Obamacare," using silly words like "socialist" and "fascist," when it seemed clear that the president's well-intentioned but inadequate overhaul of the health care system could only work to their advantage.

Health care issues have nothing to do with their hatred of Obama. But it's still considered bad form (though less so of late) to say flatly "I want that black man out of the White House." I'll bet my ranch that 80 percent of the Southern tea party's active members voted for Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, and no doubt George Wallace before them. Most of them are old enough to have their roots buried deep in Jim Crow. And so here we go again, with progressive Southerners hanging our heads in shame.

Down here they don't fool us, the geezers in the leather vests and Johnny Tremain hats. Obama reanimated a generation of dormant racists, and they're determined to take back Air Force One. Of course the One Percent, who for the most part are not racist—or anti-abortion, or gun-loving, or homophobic, or religious, either—are delighted to play the race card and hope the Southern Sickness can defeat Obama. Once in office, the Wall Street Republicans are likely to ignore this unsavory constituency that elected them. Most ominously, only the NRA and Adelson's Israel lobby have the money and muscle to make a Republican president keep his promises.

Adelson-Romney-Ryan is quite a triumvirate. A colossus spewing rancid money, The Face—handsome, impossibly rich and remote, no fixed identity—and The Brain, dispensing phony theories to justify them all. It's cynical and improbable, but it's working well enough. This election is not at all about voting for a candidate you admire, or a party platform that echoes your ideals. It's about trying to defeat what you have every reason to loathe and fear.

Obama has not been the president I hoped he would be, and the Democratic Party, to which I've never belonged, may be a poor vehicle for anyone's passions. But the truth is that the bad people, the worst Americans, were once divided fairly evenly between the two parties. Not all Republicans were grasping and reactionary, not all Democrats (read the Dixiecrat, segregationist South) were broad-minded and compassionate. Since the GOP Southern strategy converted the Old Confederacy, however, most of the bad people are Republicans—bad as in prejudice, predatory self-interest and social irresponsibility.

Incredibly, the GOP has convinced most of its blue-collar foot soldiers that government is their enemy and that corporations—job creators?—are their friends. This is possibly the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the ignorant. To a predatory capitalist, government is merely another factor, an impediment or a useful tool in his pursuit of carte blanche, the wide-open hogs-at-the-trough marketplace of his dreams. To the rest of us, elected government—the result of our votes—is our only leverage, the only weapon we have left in a "democracy" where clamorous dollars drown out human voices.

And those jobs? Campaign candy, free-market myth. If you're unemployed and broke and seeking salvation by voting Republican, let me assure you that the Soylent suicide parlor is an equally promising choice. The London-based Tax Justice Network recently reported that the world's super-rich—a third of them Americans—have cached between $21 million and $32 trillion in offshore tax havens. Just pick a middle number, notes Al Lewis in The Wall Street Journal, and it's a sum that exceeds the annual gross domestic product of the U.S., China and Japan combined. That's right: Pirates have looted this country of wealth beyond our comprehension, and buried most of the treasure they're alleged to be reinvesting.

Though they dominate our world and covet all that's in it, Mitt and his mega-rich live in a world all their own. Very often they sound like it. As he dropped a nickel, a mere million, in Romney's cup and endorsed him, the North Carolina billionaire Julian Robertson explained that America needs a successful businessman to rebuild its economy. Excuse my condescension to my eminent fellow Tar Heel, but someone should tell Robertson that the U.S.A. is not a business, not a profit-seeking entity. A nation is a cooperative—a commonwealth—whose elected officials are charged with managing common resources for the common good. Do even Princeton graduates and hedge-fund wizards recycle Fox News clichés?

This coalition of wealthy vultures, Kool-Aid drinkers and political neanderthals is not the Republican Party of even 20 years ago, as Bob Dole and Dan Quayle, of all people, have protested in their recent warnings against extremists. The most intelligent Republicans are no longer well-intentioned, and the most well-intentioned are not intelligent. The party we saw in Tampa has strayed so far from an honest account of itself that almost nothing it says makes sense or rings true. It's true that the U.S. economy is still disappointing, but Republicans promise to heal it with the same Republican policies that made it sick: tax cuts, military misadventures, and lax regulation of markets and banks.

Their favorite word is freedom, yet they frown on every form of freedom I can think of—civil rights, reproductive rights, workplace rights, gay rights, even the right to clean air and water. The only rights they defend are the right to make or steal as much money as possible and squirrel it away, and of course the sacred right to arm ourselves like third-world terrorists.

If they prevail decisively in these elections, and I'm not betting against them, it probably spells the end of the U.S.A. as a viable political experiment. Our cannibal capitalism will have killed us; the One Percent, having devoured the 99 percent, will be suffering indigestion. Give us just eight years of increasingly obscene inequality, environmental devastation, unchecked global warming, belligerent foreign policy, a shredding social safety net and a powerless proletariat, and the prophet Harrison's Soylent Green will be right here, friends, and right on time.

Cracker, anyone?

This article appeared in print with the headline "Soylent Mitt."

Fully, 68% of the very, very wealthy agree with President Obama.

By Robert Frank

Warren Buffett isn’t the only rich guy who wants to higher taxes on the rich.

A new survey from Spectrem Group found that 68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more) support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income. Fully 61% of those with net worths of $5 million or more support the tax on million-plus earners.

Buffett, as you might recall, has proposed raising taxes on million-plus earners, saying the ultra-rich pay lower rates than everyday workers.

Rich people’s opinions of Buffett remain fairly positive in the wake of his tax-me-more crusade. More than a third of millionaires and ultra-high-net-worths said they have a more positive opinion of Buffett after his tax proposal. Only 19% of millionaires and 22% of the $5 million -plus group said they had a more negative opinion of him after the proposal.

More than 40% of both groups said their opinion hadn’t changed.

In other words, Buffett’s proposal had more supporters than detractors among the rich — though that support declines slightly as you move up the wealth ladder.

Explains George Walper of Spectrem: “What this tells us is that there are a number of wealthy folks who said: ‘Gee, we need to increase taxes to stimulate the economy. No one likes to be taxed more, but the reality is maybe it has to be done.’ ”

Walper added that he was also surprised at the positive reactions to Buffett’s political agenda. “I thought that among this group there would be a feeling of ‘why doesn’t he keep his nose out of it?’”

As part of its survey, Spectrem Group also collected comments from the respondents. Here are a few highlights, from both the pro-Buffett and anti-Buffett camps:

PRO-BUFFETTS

“When you have someone who made four and a half billion pay fifteen percent, and because it’s a hedge fund, I have a problem with that.”

“Quite frankly if Warren Buffett gets taxed an extra fifty thousand dollars or your typical investor of two hundred and fifty [thousand] or larger has to pay an extra thousand dollars in tax; It’s not gonna change his lifestyle. Whatever he or she was gonna buy, he or she is gonna buy.”

““I think theoretically it would be good for this country and put some more money in the coffers, personally it wouldn’t be good for my family so I’m kind of at conflict between self interest and what might be good for the country.”

ANTI-BUFFETTS

““I think some of that spirit of America is lost when you start penalizing so to speak, the folks who have more.”

“I think there should be a voluntary check box on the tax form that says, if you would like to send in more please do.”

““For myself, if there were an increase in taxes, I’m probably gonna button up some spending.”

The survey and comments prove that the rich are not the monolithic, entirely self-serving group that is often portrayed in the media. They are just as divided as the rest of the country. And many are willing to pay more taxes.

Has your opinion of Buffett gotten better or worse after his tax idea?

 

When Low Taxes Hurt The Rich!

By ROBERT H. FRANK

Published: October 27, 2012   

AT first glance, money’s growing influence in politics appears impossible to challenge because of a powerful positive-feedback loop. Yet hope remains.

Enlarge This Image

Jesse Lefkowitz

Although big-money donors are a diverse group, many of them want lower tax rates for themselves and less stringent regulations for their businesses — and they’ve been brilliantly effective in getting them. Their success has increased their incomes still further, allowing them to make even larger contributions and to demand even bigger favors. This vicious circle was strengthened considerably by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. And so, each year, the possibility of any new laws to curb money’s influence appears to recede.

But as the economist Herbert Stein once joked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Eventually, the social and economic consequences of further growth in income inequality may become so severe that even the most generously financed candidates won’t prevail against reform-minded opponents.

Alternatively, extreme inequality might one day spawn a violent revolution, as has happened in many other countries. Such routes to change still seem distant, however, and are hardly something to hope for.

There is a more encouraging possibility: in time, wealthy political donors may become convinced that their contributions poorly serve even their own narrow interests.

Lower tax rates have affected these donors in two opposing ways. On the positive side, they have supported higher consumption in the private sector. But on the downside, the resulting budget deficits have reduced the quantity and quality of public services. Compelling evidence suggests that the negatives have been much larger, and the positives considerably smaller, than many donors have expected.

Through private schools, gated communities, personal aircraft and other adaptations, the wealthy have been insulated from many costs of a decaying public sphere. But ill effects remain. Declining quality of public schools, for example, makes it harder for businesses to recruit productive workers, and a shrinking middle class makes it harder to sell their products in volume.

Many other effects of budget deficits also cut across the income divide. First, consider two extreme examples: When a poorly maintained bridge collapses, rich drivers are no less likely to die than poor ones. And if cutbacks in the Energy Department’s program for locking down loosely guarded nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union one day enable terrorists to detonate a dirty bomb in Manhattan, hedge fund managers and their families will suffer along with everyone else.

But important, if less dramatic, losses occur often in real life, because the process of social framing often exaggerates the gains from private spending. When all families stage more elaborate celebrations for special occasions — weddings, for example — the main effect is simply to raise the bar that qualifies an event as special.

A RELATED distortion is easily seen in a thought experiment:

Let’s say that two societies differ only in their mixes of public and private spending. In one society, lower taxes on the wealthy allow them to drive very fine cars — say, $180,000 Bentleys. The streets and highways in this society, however, are riddled with foot-deep potholes.

In the other society, the wealthy pay higher taxes that support well-maintained roads, but drive $120,000 BMWs. Some car buffs will grumble, but for argument’s sake, let’s assume that all view the Bentley as the better car.

In which society would the wealthy be happier? Because product-quality improvements cost much more to achieve beyond some point, the absolute quality of a $180,000 car may be only slightly higher than one costing $120,000. And because not even the most sophisticated automotive suspensions can neutralize deep potholes, it’s little wonder that most people think the BMW drivers would be happier, not to mention safer.

That conclusion is reinforced by evidence that consumption standards are highly local. The BMW drivers in the second society don’t often mingle with the Bentley drivers in the first, and are thus unlikely to feel deprived for having less-expensive cars.

If the wealthy often overestimate the attractions of higher private spending, they’re also likely to overestimate the regulatory burden on their businesses. Compliance with regulations, of course, can be costly. And if only one company has to comply, its profits may indeed decline sharply. But regulation applies to all companies in an industry, which typically allows them to cover their costs by raising prices. So if regulation promotes a safer, cleaner environment whose benefits exceed those broadly shared costs, everyone — even a business owner — is ahead in the long run.

Because the market forces causing greater inequality are still playing out, the wealthy will continue to have more power to influence politics. So if donors stick to their strategy of supporting candidates who favor lower taxes and fewer regulations, they’re likely to prevail indefinitely.

REFORMERS castigate wealthy donors for supporting self-serving policies. But, instead, the reformers could call attention to evidence that the donors themselves would fare better, in purely practical terms, without the tax cuts and deregulation they’ve been promoting.

You needn’t be a cynical

economist to believe that this second strategy has brighter prospects.

      

Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

U.S. Growth Rate Picks Up to 2%

Matt Sullivan/Reuters

Employees of General Dynamics in Lima, Ohio, work on an Abrams tank. Military spending rose 13 percent in the third quarter.

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Published: October 26, 2012   

More optimistic consumers are propelling the economy forward.

The New York Times

The pickup in spending by consumers, along with a burst of defense orders and a stronger housing market, helped the economy expand at an annual rate of 2 percent in the third quarter, a slightly better pace than had been anticipated, according to government data released Friday. In the previous quarter, economic growth had dipped to a rate of just 1.3 percent.

While growing more confident that the housing market has stabilized, households have been buoyed by lower energy prices, until recently a rising stock market and a slight improvement in employment. After years of shedding debt, there are also signs that consumers are starting to borrow again.

“Consumers are feeling wealthier so they are still out there spending,” said Joshua Dennerlein, an economist with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Still, the pace of economic activity is short of what’s needed to substantially reduce the unemployment rate, now at 7.8 percent and also well below the level of growth typical in this stage of a recovery after a sharp downturn.

What’s more, fears are growing that the economy could slow again in the fourth quarter. Companies are preparing for the possibility of steep tax increases and sharp spending cuts if Congress cannot agree on a deal to reduce the deficit after the election, a combination of factors frequently referred to as the fiscal cliff.

 Businesses have already begun to retrench.

With the presidential campaign entering the final, desperate dash to Election Day, there was plenty of fodder in Friday’s report for both candidates to cite as they spar over the direction of the economy.

For President Obama, the best news was that consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 2 percent last quarter, up from 1.5 percent in the second quarter, while residential investment increased at an annual rate of 14.4 percent, compared with 8.5 percent in the second quarter.

             

 A separate survey released Friday showed consumer sentiment at its highest level in more than five years, with the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan index rising to 82.6 in October from 78.3 in September, though it was lower than a preliminary October reading of 83.1 that had been previously reported.

Just What Are President Obama's Economic Plans and Mitt Romney's Economic Plans?

Here is the best analysis, in my opinion, of Mitt Romney's and President Obama's economic plans:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/opinion/krugman-pointing-toward-prosperity.html?_r=1

Here are the details of President Obama's plan:

http://www.barackobama.com/plans

Here are the details of Mitt Romney's plan:
http://www.romneytaxplan.com/

He is not alone in ripping off the American taxpayer!

 

Click below to see other similar ripoffs and click on the images that appear to see those other similar situations:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=10151211552437908&set=a.10151211551882908.482457.9124187907&type=1&theater

How much political power did these guy buy with our money (tax rebates) to continue to feather their own nests?

"How will your policies be different from those of President George W. Bush?"
It was the best question asked of either President Obama or of Mitt Romney over all of the presidential debates. It was asked by a member of the audience. It was followed by the least convincing answer from any of the presidential debates.

Check it out at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/19/mitt-romneys-george-w-bush-problem/

Mitt Romney’s George W. Bush problem

Posted by Ezra Klein

Mitt Romney has a George W. Bush problem.

In fact, that’s Romney’s biggest problem. It’s George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, who has made voters skeptical of many of Romney’s core policies. It’s George W. Bush, not Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe, who persuaded voters that our ongoing economic problems aren’t mainly Obama’s fault. And so it is, in a sense, the electorate’s lingering disappointment in George W. Bush, as much as its residual affection for Barack Obama, that Romney needs to beat if he’s to become president.

The Washington Post

At Tuesday’s debate, Romney was given a chance to do just that. A voter from Nassau County stood up and asked: “Governor Romney, I am an undecided voter, because I’m disappointed with the lack of progress I’ve seen in the last four years. However, I do attribute much of America’s economic and international problems to the failings and missteps of the Bush administration. Since both you and President Bush are Republicans, I fear a return to the policies of those years should you win this election. What is the biggest difference between you and George W. Bush, and how do you differentiate yourself from George W. Bush?”
That’s a slow pitch right over the middle of the plate. Romney should’ve been prepared to crush it. In fact, he should’ve been hoping against hope that someone would ask exactly that question. He needed that question.
But Romney didn’t crush it. Astonishingly, his first instinct was to ignore it.
“Thank you,” Romney said. “And I appreciate that question.” But his mind was still on the previous question. “I just want to make sure that, I think I was supposed to get that last answer,” he complained to moderator Candy Crowley.
This was one of Romney’s oddest tics, arguing endlessly and unhappily over the rules of debate. At times, it seemed he was running for parliamentarian rather than president. Crowley, with an exasperated look, assured him he could use the precious time he’d been allotted to distance himself from George W. Bush however he wanted. “Go ahead and use this two minutes any way you’d like to,” Crowley said, “the question is on the floor.”
Romney devoted the first bit of his answer to the previous question about contraception. Only later did he turn to address the central question about his candidacy: “Let me come back and answer your question,” he said. “President Bush and I are — are different people and these are different times and that’s why my five point plan is so different than what he would have done.”
Notice what he didn’t say there. He didn’t say that Bush had gotten anything wrong before leaving office as one of the most unpopular presidents in history. He didn’t say “you’re right to be skeptical of Republicans, because we didn’t live up to your expectations last time.” He said, rather, “Have you heard about my five-point plan?”

Romney’s right about one thing: These are different times than when Bush ran for president. But that’s why his five-point plan is so depressing. It’s not just that there’s nothing in it that Bush wouldn’t have endorsed in 2000. It’s that most of it actually would have made more sense in 2000.

Take Romney’s tax cuts. When Bush was proposing tax cuts without any offsets, the budget was in surplus, and tax receipts were at record highs. The policy made some sense. Romney’s tax cuts come at a time of enormous deficits and record low receipts. It’s a different time, but Romney’s policy, save for a vague promise to pay for it later, is the same.
“I’ll crack down on China,” Romney promised. But China’s currency manipulation has calmed. As Obama noted in the debate, China’s currency has appreciated significantly. Their current account balance, according to the Peterson Institute’s Joseph Gagnon, has fallen from about 10.7 percent of GDP in 2007 to about 2 percent of GDP this year.
Moreover, as Chinese wages rise, and they fight for more high-skilled jobs, the threat from China becomes less about currency manipulation and more about competitiveness. Perhaps we could’ve kept some jobs by cracking down on China in 2000. In 2012, it’s more like locking the barn after the horses have run off.

Romney promised that he would enter office with “a very robust policy to get all that energy in North America — become energy secure.” The idea that this is different from Bush is laughable; Romney sounds just like him, promising to intensify the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels. “Let me put this plainly,” Bush said in 2000. “Oil consumption is increasing. Our production is dropping. Our imports of foreign oil are skyrocketing. And this Administration has failed to act.” And tell me you can’t imagine this Bush line coming from Romney today: “My opponent says he is for natural gas – he just doesn’t like people to find it or move it.”

“I’m going to get us to a balanced budget,” Romney said. So did Bush. He endorsed amending the Constitution to require a balanced budget. But, like Romney, he was specific about his tax cuts and increases in military spending, but vague about his spending cuts. The result was much higher deficits.
Romney’s final point of differentiation from Bush was “championing small business.” Specifically, he promised to keep their taxes low and deregulate them. These are not exactly priorities Bush opposed. Romney then segued to his promise to repeal Obamacare, which, again, was no contrast with Bush.
So let’s go to the scoreboard: Romney offered precisely . . . nothing that Bush wouldn’t have proposed in 2000. And Romney left out some of his more salient agreements with Bush. For instance, both the Enron debacle and the financial crisis happened on Bush’s watch. As a result, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley and, later, Dodd-Frank laws to toughen financial regulation. But Romney has proposed rolling back both.
It fell to Obama to point out some disagreements between Bush and Romney. “You know, there are some things where Governor Romney is different from George Bush,” the president said. “George Bush didn’t propose turning Medicare into a voucher.”

Even that’s not true. On page 233 of “Renewing America’s Purpose,” Bush expresses his support for the recommendations of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, and in particular, their “reform plan modeled after the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program.” That was a premium support, or voucher, plan.

This year, 2012, is not 2000. We have deficits rather than a balanced budget. We have historically high unemployment rather than historically low unemployment. We’ve seen what the financial system can do when left unchecked. We’ve watched tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 fail to spark economic growth and seen a rising stock market fail to lift middle-class wages. We do need new thinking. But Romney isn’t offering any. His problem isn’t that the public is unfairly judging him by Bush’s policies. It’s that they’re fairly judging him by Bush’s policies.


 I maintain a separate political Facebook Community Page at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Whats-Going-On/241304559284144

Tax Policy Center in Spotlight for Its Romney Study

By ANNIE LOWREY

WASHINGTON — A small nonpartisan research center operated by professed “geeks” has found itself at the center of a rancorous $5 trillion debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney.

 

Donald Marron, the Tax Policy Center’s director, contends that the nonprofit group provides reliable, nonpartisan information.

No white paper or policy manifesto put out during the presidential campaign has proved more controversial than an August study by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center, a respected nonprofit that issues studiously detailed tax analyses.

That study found, in short, that Mr. Romney could not keep all of the promises he had made on individual tax reform: including cutting marginal tax rates by 20 percent, keeping protections for investment income, not widening the deficit and not increasing the tax burden on the poor or middle class. It concluded that Mr. Romney’s plan, on its face, would cut taxes for rich families and raise them for everyone else.

The detailed paper proved kindling for a political firestorm. Mr. Romney criticized the center as performing a “garbage-in, garbage-out” analysis and his campaign accused it of partisan bias. The Obama campaign used the center’s numbers to argue that Mr. Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut. Economists jumped on the bandwagon too, flinging analyses back and forth and picking apart the projections and assumptions in the report.

At the Tax Policy Center itself, responses ranged from irritation at the partisan nature of some attacks to incredulity over the political hysteria. “There was this résumé-hunting, White-House-visitor-log” searching feel to the response, said the center’s director, Donald Marron, a former Bush administration economist. “That was unanticipated,” he added dryly.

In many ways the report did just what the center was created to do: inject some solid numbers into a shifty, accusatory, raucous political debate. The decade-old center — a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two nonpartisan grandes dames of the Washington world — was founded precisely to “fill that niche,” Mr. Marron said.

“A lot of tax policy discussions are — how to describe them? — people yelling at each other,” he said. “We believe that good information leads to better policy discussions and ultimately better policy outcomes.”

The center’s claim to provide reliable, nonpartisan information comes in part from its staff makeup. It has about four dozen affiliated staff members and scholars — most are economists, several are considered top experts in their fields, and a number have experience in either Republican or Democratic administrations.

It also is derived by virtue of its ownership of a highly sophisticated tax modeling system, one that took about two years to build and has a small coterie of specialists to tend it. The model resembles those used by government offices to forecast the effect of changes to the tax code, and it relies on about 150,000 anonymous tax returns and a wealth of data on pensions, education, consumer expenditures and economic growth.

“They’re one of the few groups that have this very big, very accurate model,” said Martin A. Sullivan, the chief economist and a contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a specialty publisher. “What they’re doing is just making the best computations available” for others to interpret, he said.

That includes so-called distributional analyses that show how changes to the tax code would change the relative burden on high-income and low-income families — a dry tax topic yet one of the most politically potent ones of the campaign, given the broader debate about tax fairness and inequality.

The analysis of the Romney proposal has proved highly controversial not just among politicians, but also among some economists.

Researchers including Martin Feldstein of Harvard and Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton have argued that Mr. Romney’s tax math might work if he raised taxes on families making more than $100,000 a year — not $200,000 to $250,000 a year, as he currently promises — or if his plan gave a strong jolt to economic growth.

“Reasonable economists disagree on” the growth effects of plans like Mr. Romney’s, said Alan J. Auerbach, a tax expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who added that he did not see the math working out as currently described. “It matters a lot what kind of reductions you’re making or how you’re paying for tax cuts.”

Others have argued that the Tax Policy Center filled in too many of the holes in Mr. Romney’s light-on-detail proposal — making a full analysis impossible and skewing the center’s paper’s results.

“It is not an analysis of Governor Romney’s plan,” said Scott A. Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation. a nonprofit research group also based in Washington.

“It has been, I think, mislabeled as such and misinterpreted as such. We don’t think there are enough details to analyze,” he said, adding that he believed that it was possible to devise a distributionally neutral, revenue neutral tax reform that cut rates in the way Mr. Romney described.

The Tax Policy Center said that it had sought as many details as possible from the Romney campaign. (Its economists said it has a cordial back-and-forth with the economic policy teams in both campaigns, as it did in 2008.) Given the numbers available, it had tried to perform the analysis in the most generous way possible, and still did not see how Mr. Romney’s rate cuts could square with his other goals.

“We wrote a technical, accurate paper given the available information,” said William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution, one of the paper’s main authors, in a recent interview. “The criticism that you can’t analyze the Romney tax plan because there isn’t one? That hasn’t stopped other economists from analyzing its growth effects. I like to have substantive discussions about tax policy. The uproar about the paper has not been substantive.”

Many economists across the political spectrum have said they found the report’s conclusions convincing, like Alan D. Viard, a tax expert at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute.

Mr. Sullivan of Tax Analysts said: “I like tax reform. I want to broaden the base. It’s something I’ve devoted my life to. And I welcome Governor Romney and the Republicans’ strong push, but the plan doesn’t work out. It’s not mathematically possible.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 25, 2012, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Tax Policy Center in Spotlight for Its Romney Study.

We must "Move To Amend" our U.S. Constitution!

Corporations are not people!
Money is not the same as "Free Speech"!
You can do something about it.  Check out:
https://movetoamend.org/
The U.S. Constitution starts with:
"We the people"  NOT  "We the Corporation"

Check out the video below by clicking on:
http://upwr.me/TGP4km

Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court decision in a case called Citizens United vs. FEC.
The Saving American Democracy Amendment states that:

• Corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people.
• Corporations are subject to regulation by the people.
• Corporations may not make campaign contributions or any election expenditures.
• Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances.

Check out Senator Bernie Sanders efforts here:
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/savingdemocracy/

Why do 18,857 of our largest U.S. companies use this one building as there home address?

With Monday's third presidential debate focusing on foreign policy, it's worth taking a look at a new Citizens for Tax Justice analysis that found 285 of the Fortune 500 companies piled up more than $1.5 trillion in overseas profits by the end of 2011. There is evidence, according to the report, that these profits were artificially shifted out of the United States and other countries where the companies actually do business and into foreign tax havens.

Read the report here: http://ctj.org/pdf/offshoreincome.pdf

http://ctj.org/pdf/offshoreincome.pdf

THE U.S. ECONOMY FINALLY SEEMS TO BE RECOVERING!

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The U.S. economy finally seems to be recovering in earnest, with housing on the rebound and job creation outpacing growth in the working-age population. But the news is good, not great — it will still take years to restore full employment — and it has been a very long time coming. Why has the slump been so protracted?
The answer — backed by overwhelming evidence — is that this is what normally happens after a severe financial crisis. But Mitt Romney’s economic team rejects that evidence. And this denialism bodes ill for policy if Mr. Romney wins next month.
About the evidence: The most famous study is by Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, who looked at past financial crises and found that such crises are typically followed by years of high unemployment and weak growth. Later work by economists at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere confirmed this analysis: crises that followed a sharp run-up in private-sector debt, from the U.S. Panic of 1893 to the Swedish banking crisis of the early 1990s, cast long shadows over the economy’s future. There was no reason to believe that this time would be different.
This isn’t an after-the-fact rationalization. The Reinhart-Rogoff “aftermath” paper was released almost four years ago. And a number of other economists, including, well, me, issued similar warnings. In early 2008 I was already pointing out the distinction between recessions like 1973-5 or 1981-2, brought on by high interest rates, and “postmodern” recessions brought on by private-sector overreach. And I suggested that the recession we were then entering would be followed by a prolonged “jobless recovery” that would feel like a continuing recession.
Why is recovery from a financial crisis slow? Financial crises are preceded by credit bubbles; when those bubbles burst, many families and/or companies are left with high levels of debt, which force them to slash their spending. This slashed spending, in turn, depresses the economy as a whole.
And the usual response to recession, cutting interest rates to encourage spending, isn’t adequate. Many families simply can’t spend more, and interest rates can be cut only so far — namely, to zero but not below.
Does this mean that nothing can be done to avoid a protracted slump after a financial crisis? No, it just means that you have to do more than just cut interest rates. In particular, what the economy really needs after a financial crisis is a temporary increase in government spending, to sustain employment while the private sector repairs its balance sheet. And the Obama administration did some of that, blunting the severity of the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the stimulus was both too small and too short-lived, partly because of administration errors but mainly because of scorched-earth Republican obstruction.
Which brings us to the politics.
Over the past few months advisers to the Romney campaign have mounted a furious assault on the notion that financial-crisis recessions are different. For example, in July former Senator Phil Gramm and Columbia’s R. Glenn Hubbard published an op-ed article claiming that we should be having a recovery comparable to the bounceback from the 1981-2 recession, while a white paper from Romney advisers argues that the only thing preventing a rip-roaring boom is the uncertainty created by President Obama.
Obviously, Republicans like claiming that it’s all Mr. Obama’s fault, and that electing Mr. Romney would magically make everything better. But nobody should believe them.
For one thing, these people have a track record: back in 2008, when serious students of history were already predicting a prolonged slump, Mr. Gramm was dismissing America as a “nation of whiners” experiencing a mere “mental recession.” For another, if Mr. Obama is the problem, why is the United States actually doing better than most other advanced countries?

The main point, however, is that the Romney team is willfully, nakedly, distorting the record, leading Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff — who aren’t affiliated with either campaign — to protest against “gross misinterpretations of the facts.” And this should worry you.

Look, economics isn’t as much of a science as we’d like. But when there’s overwhelming evidence for an economic proposition — as there is for the proposition that financial-crisis recessions are different — we have the right to expect politicians and their advisers to respect that evidence. Otherwise, they’ll end up making policy based on fantasies rather than grappling with reality.

And once politicians start refusing to acknowledge inconvenient facts, where does it stop? Why, the next thing you know Republicans will start rejecting the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change. Oh, wait.

What's Going On? -  In cartoons.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/the-strip.html#1

---

October 18, 2012

Snow Job on Jobs

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Mitt Romney talks a lot about jobs. But does he have a plan to create any?

You can defend President Obama’s jobs record — recovery from a severe financial crisis is always difficult, and especially so when the opposition party does its best to block every policy initiative you propose. And things have definitely improved over the past year. Still, unemployment remains high after all these years, and a candidate with a real plan to make things better could make a strong case for his election.

But Mr. Romney, it turns out, doesn’t have a plan; he’s just faking it. In saying that, I don’t mean that I disagree with his economic philosophy; I do, but that’s a separate point. I mean, instead, that Mr. Romney’s campaign is telling lies: claiming that its numbers add up when they don’t, claiming that independent studies support its position when those studies do no such thing.

Before I get there, however, let me take a minute to talk about Mr. Romney’s claim that he knows how to fix the economy because he’s been a successful businessman. That would be a dubious claim even if he were honestly representing his business career, because the skills needed to run a business and those needed to manage economic policy are very different. In any case, however, his portrait of his own experience is so misleading that it takes your breath away.

For Mr. Romney, who started as a business consultant and then moved into the heady world of private equity, insists on portraying himself as a plucky small businessman.

I am not making this up. In Tuesday’s debate, he declared, “I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business.” In his speech at the Republican convention, he declared, “When I was 37, I helped start a small company.”

Ahem. It’s true that when Bain Capital started, it had only a handful of employees. But it had $37 million in funds, raised from sources that included wealthy Europeans investing through Panamanian shell companies and Central American oligarchs living in Miami while death squads associated with their families ravaged their home nations. Hey, doesn’t every plucky little start-up have access to that kind of financing?

But back to the Romney jobs plan. As many people have noted, the plan has five points but contains no specifics. Loosely speaking, however, it calls for a return to Bushonomics: tax cuts for the wealthy plus weaker environmental protection. And Mr. Romney says that the plan would create 12 million jobs over the next four years.

Where does that number come from? When pressed, the campaign cited three studies that it claimed supported its assertions. In fact, however, those studies did no such thing.

Just for the record, one study concluded that America might gain two million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. patents and other intellectual property; this would be nice, but Mr. Romney hasn’t proposed anything that would bring about that outcome. Another study suggested that growth in the energy sector might add three million jobs in the next few years — but these were predicted gains under current policy, that is, they would happen no matter who wins the election, not as a consequence of the Romney plan.

Finally, a third study examined the effects of the Romney tax plan and argued (implausibly, but that’s another issue) that it would lead to a large increase in the number of Americans who want to work. But how does that help cure a situation in which there are already millions more Americans seeking work than there are jobs available? It’s irrelevant to Mr. Romney’s claims.

So when the campaign says that these three studies support its claims about jobs, it is, to use the technical term, lying — just as it is when it says that six independent studies support its claims about taxes (they don’t).

What do Mr. Romney’s economic advisers actually believe? As best as I can tell, they’re placing their faith in the confidence fairy, in the belief that their candidate’s victory would inspire an employment boom without the need for any real change in policy. In fact, in his infamous Boca Raton “47 percent” remarks, Mr. Romney himself asserted that he would give a big boost to the economy simply by being elected, “without actually doing anything.” And what about the overwhelming evidence that our weak economy isn’t about confidence, it’s about the hangover from a terrible financial crisis? Never mind.

To summarize, then, the true Romney plan is to create an economic boom through the sheer power of Mr. Romney’s personal awesomeness. But the campaign doesn’t dare say that, for fear that voters would (rightly) consider it ridiculous. So what we’re getting instead is an attempt to brazen it out with nakedly false claims. There’s no jobs plan; just a plan for a snow job on the American people.