Class warfare and the 47 percent

I was going to write about Mitt Romney’s “China cheaters” ad that’s been all over my TV all week, but then this happened.

Yesterday, Mother Jones posted online a snippet of a video shot secretly at a Romney fundraiser back in May. They’ve since posted the entire thing, but it was the initial excerpt that got people all riled up, myself included. Here’s what Romney said:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the 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. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.”

There’s so much to refute here that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with my annoyance that once again Romney is conflating two things that have little to do with one another either because he doesn’t understand them or he does, and just hopes that you and I don’t. It’s true that nearly half of Americans don’t write a check to the IRS each year, and it’s probably true that half of Americans get some form of assistance from the government. But these aren’t the same people, and they sure as hell aren’t all Obama voters.

First, the tax thing. It’s a well-worn right-wing talking point that 47 percent of Americans “don’t pay taxes,” usually presented in such a way to make whoever’s hearing it feel outraged because he or she is a hard-working American and those 47 percent are probably sitting at home playing X-box and lighting their cigars with your tax dollars. The problem is that the hardworking American who’s hearing about the 47 percent – and the person who’s telling them – are both likely part of it.

Let’s throw it to the AP:

“Forty-six percent of the country's households -- some 76 million -- paid no federal income taxes last year, according to a study by the Tax Policy Center.

While it's true most of those families are poor, the numbers include many others who got tax breaks because they are old, have children in college or didn't owe taxes on interest from state and local bonds. And of those who didn't write checks to the IRS, six in 10 still paid Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, and more than that paid federal excise taxes on items such as gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes, said Roberton Williams, who analyzes taxes at the center.”

Now, Romney quoting the easily refuted tax thing is ignorant and/or deliberately misinformative . Romney pulling out the “people who get government money are lazy and entitled” thing is just offensive.

You know who gets government money? My dad, a Vietnam vet who’s on 100 disability from the VA from that time 40 years ago when Uncle Sam sent him to jungle to get shot four times. My grandfather, who gets the Social Security benefits he paid into his entire working career. Me, who got through college thanks to the low-interest, government-backed student loans that I’m now paying back. Anyone who got a small-business loan to help “build that.”

Oh, I know, I know. Romney wasn’t talking about us. He meant the bad ones, the ones who abuse the system. The mythical welfare queens driving Cadillacs and managing to use their food stamps on liquor, even though that’s illegal.

Except that he didn’t do that. He said this: everyone who doesn’t pay income taxes only survives because they live off the government, and everyone who gets a dime from the government is also a free-loader who doesn’t pay into the system. And they’re all automatic Obama voters because we’re terrified that a President Romney will make us actually get off the couch and wash ourselves.

The fact that none of this is true doesn’t seem to bother Romney, which I guess is just par for the course at this point. He’s shown himself to be concerned less with fact and more with how lies make his supporters feel: superior to those of us that think a progressive tax rate has worked pretty well, actually.

Here’s a thought… what about the other 47 percent? So to speak – I’ve no idea what the actual percentage is of people who would vote for Mickey Mouse if he were running against Barack Obama, but they’re out there. They’d do so despite demonstrated evidence that our economy grew faster when the tax rate on the highest earners was higher than it is now; or that our country is a better place now that we require kids to go to school instead of to factories; or that 21^st century Democrats really do have no interest in taking their guns. Why isn’t Romney tsk-tsking about the rationality of those voters? Why isn’t he publicly worried about fraud in federal welfare programs like subsidies for oil companies, or tax loopholes that allow a retired investment banker earning millions a year to pay a lower income tax rate than I do?

It’s okay. We already know why Romney’s not talking about those things. It’s because you talk about what’s important to you, and I guess if you’re Mitt Romney, you just make up the rest.

Something like war, something unlike presidential

Pop U.S. history quiz: on what date did the U.S. officially enter World War II?

Though Japan’s sneak attack at Pearl Harbor happened on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, President Roosevelt did not ask Congress to declare war on Japan until the next day, Dec. 8. We didn’t officially declare war on Germany and Italy until Dec. 11, and that was only after they declared war on us.

Now, hold that thought.

Like most Americans, I woke up this morning to the news that our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had been attacked and four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, had been killed. All kinds of thoughts ran through my head… Are we going to be dragged into another war? was the overarching one. Because, when someone attacks American soil (which an embassy is, legally), something like war usually happens. Maybe not World War II, exactly, but still – ships get moved, bombs get dropped. People die.

It’s not something anyone in leadership takes (or should take) lightly. Even after Pearl Harbor, it took another day for our country to say, yes, we’re going to war. Facts have to come in and be processed.

And, after Libya, the facts are still coming in. I read news reports first thing in the morning, at lunch and again before leaving work at the end of the day. From that time, the story moved from: attack in Libya – by whom? Its new post-Qadaffi government? No, by rebels, and the Libyan government is condemning them. Was the date (Sept. 11) deliberate? Wait, there was a less violent, but still frightening protest at the embassy in Cairo, which appears to have been motivated by some movie that no one has seen that insults the prophet Muhammed. By late afternoon, reports were that the Libya attack may’ve been planned after all.

All I could think this morning was: please, God, don’t let the election dictate our country’s response in any way. American lives – and the lives of the Libyans who’d be caught in the cross-fire – are too important to turn this grave incident into a political opportunity. What should happen is the State Department telling our supposed Libyan allies, “Either you find the people responsible for this, or we will,” and that actually happening because the Libyan government doesn’t want a giant piece of glass on the north side of Africa where Libya used to be. THAT is Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick, despite what our resident idiots-with-Facebook think – the threat of what our military is capable of should we not get what we want using diplomacy.

How naïve of me, to have worried about the president. Because it turns out that the guy who thinks he can be president was the one who’d screw this up.

At 10:09 last night, Mitt Romney started. Oh, he embargoed his statement bashing President Obama until midnight, so he wouldn’t technically be violating the unsaid prohibition against politicking on the anniversary of the worst attack on our country in history (which kind of pisses me off even more, actually. Own it, you weasel.) Anyway, Romney’s statement said:

"I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

Note: this (the tweets) came BEFORE the fatal attack in Libya, so I guess at that point Romney was responding to a riot at the Cairo embassy, which at one point breached the embassy wall. It sounds awful, and had to have been terrifying for the Americans inside, especially considering what day it was. It was the embassy staff that tweeted the messages Romney apparently objected to, not the White House or the State Department (again, BEFORE the Libya attack.) The relevant tweets are listed on this timeline link. None of them were ok’d by the Obama Administration. And Romney's statement does nothing to point out that the tweets he's responding to were about an impending riot, NOT a murder of a U.S. diplomat.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement at 10:38 p.m., and the president’s full official statement came about 7 this morning, confirming Ambassador Chris Stevens’ death. Romney continued to criticize the administration this morning, not admitting that the entire premise of his original statement was wrong, or even saying that the situation was more serious now that U.S. diplomats had been murdered. Instead, Romney continued to conflate tweets from a random embassy staffer with official U.S. foreign policy.

Right now – a full 24 hours after Cairo, after Benghazi – there are Americans in embassies and consulates all over North Africa and the Middle East. There are college students and mission workers volunteering their time. There are employees of multi-national corporations just doing their jobs. And right now, if there really is a coordinated terrorist movement to take out Westerners, every single one of them is a target. It’s the State Department’s, and President Obama’s, job to get them all out of harm’s way before any more sh*t hits the fan.

And a guy who has a 50-50 shot of being our next “decider” going on national TV to basically say “Screw waiting – let’s start lobbing some cruise missiles!” or whatever the hell Romney was going on about – that DOES NOT HELP. A president gets this. (They have TVs in Libya, Mitt! And they watch them!)

A president is also aware of the fact that, 18 months after the Arab Spring, places like Egypt and Libya are going through what countries always go through when they get free of dictators – a long, painful, sometimes violent negotiation between radical and moderate factions. The U.S. may be a symbol, but ultimately it’s not about us. There are times when the best thing we can do is say “My name’s Paul, and this is between y’all,” and get the hell out of Dodge – we’ll be here with aid and investors when y’all get it figured out.

Even other conservatives are saying that Romney should’ve just kept his mouth shut. It isn’t about discretion on 9/11, or about presenting a unified front when our country’s interests are attacked – although Fox News would be having a stroke now if this were 2008 and Obama’d said half of what Romney did today. Romney all but disqualified himself as a potential commander in chief by rushing to judgment, albeit with just as few specifics about what he thinks we should do as he has on the subject of his domestic policy. “No apologies” is not a foreign policy. Does Mitt Romney know that?

It took Franklin Roosevelt days to enter World War II. It took George W. Bush weeks to send troops to Afghanistan after 9/11. It took George Bush months after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait to launch the Gulf War. It took Mitt Romney mere minutes to declare that President Obama wasn’t doing enough, while not bothering to say what he’d do differently. And who would be affected.

Maybe he just didn’t think that part was important.

One-time money

There’s an ad running for President Obama’s reelection campaign that features President Bill Clinton. In the ad, Clinton says that electing Mitt Romney would mean a return to fiscal policies similar to those of the Bush Administration, which he says caused the current recession. Clinton expanded on that point in his remarks to the Democratic National Convention last night.

When Democrats talk about Bush-era policies, they’re usually talking about the Bush tax cuts, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found was the largest single contributor to projected U.S. debt. (Along with Bush’s two wars, the cuts count for half of all U.S. debt… And Paul Ryan voted for all of it, by the way.) Cutting taxes for top income brackets is, according to “trickle-down theory,” is supposed to spur the economy because it gives the wealthiest more money to spend. There’s a lot to argue about there, but that isn’t what I want to go into today.

I’m not an economist. I read economic analysis to try and better understand why something like the 2008 crisis happened, and my eyes glaze over. I guess I just don’t understand why it has to be so complicated.

But one thing I do understand is this: if you have one-time money, then you use it for a one-time purpose. And I may not be an expert on macroeconomics, but I can remember events that I lived through 12 years ago.

President Clinton left office not just with a balanced federal budget, but with a small surplus. What to do with that surplus was a major issue of the 2000 presidential campaign. Al Gore wanted to use the extra money the U.S. collected that year to pay down the national debt (“Al Gore believes we should use the projected surplus to build our economic prosperity, invest in our families, secure Social Security and Medicare for future generations, and pay off the national debt in 15 years.. -- www.algore2000.com”). George W. Bush wanted to return the surplus to taxpayers in the form of a tax cut (“’But the best way to reduce the fat in Washington is to send money back to the people who pay the taxes. And that's exactly what I intend to do.’ -- Iowa GOP Debate 1/15/2000”).

What Bush said makes sense on its face… I mean, if you give the cashier at McDonald’s a 20, they still give you back your change. But the problem is that the Clinton surplus was a bit of a fluke; thanks to a booming economy, the government collected more than usual in income and capital gains taxes. In other words, it would’ve been irresponsible to assume that the government would see that surplus every year. It was one-time money.

When you get one-time money – a larger-than-expected tax return, a salary bonus – you probably do one of two things: you either pay down your personal debt, or you make a one-time purchase of a new washing machine or a vacation. What you don’t do is go out and make a down payment on a Ferrari. Because you have the common sense to know that this is one-time money, and that you’re not going to get this windfall every day. You know not to take one-time money and add a permanent expenditure to your household budget.

That’s exactly what Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress did, and – this is worth repeating – it’s the single-largest item on that $16 trillion balance sheet the GOP complained about all last week. It was more about ideology – the size of the federal government is more important than its effectiveness – than what made sense as a sustainable fiscal policy. If Bush had pushed for a one-time rebate to taxpayers, that would’ve accomplished the same thing while not adding as much to the debt.

And Mitt Romney wants to do the same thing, even as our debt balloons because the government isn’t collecting the revenues it did in, say, the Clinton or Reagan years. This would be happening anyway because people are earning less right now. But the regressive Bush tax laws certainly don’t help.

Why would Republicans do this? Either they don’t understand how budgeting works, or they don’t care. Why should they? When a Wall Street bank ties up its entire asset sheet in mythical financial products and finds itself days away from bankruptcy, the government holds its nose and bails it out. When Mitt Romney’s investment bank is on the ropes because it over-spent, its executives loot its cash reserves and tell the FDIC – and the taxpayers who fund it – to go jump in a lake. They know that they and their backers will be taken care of, no matter what. It’s “my daddy’s going to call his lawyer” on a national scale.

I don’t trust that Mitt Romney understands this… but I don’t know what on earth Paul Ryan’s deal is. It cannot be repeated often enough that the “budget hawk” voted for every single unfunded Bush Administration expense, and only discovered his inner Ayn Rand when it meant stalling the priorities of a Democratic president. Please spend more time looking at this man’s record before you consider putting him in the vice presidency in November.

Trash can poop!

Hey, y’all, an unmarried woman with no kids is about to blog about child care. Gather ‘round.

I’m actually just going to put this out there because I think it’s fascinating. I’m a firm believer that parents should be able to raise their own kids in whatever way works for their family and it’s really no one else’s business as long as they’re not beating their kids or churning out three-foot-tall sociopaths. While something like “elimination communication” sounds like something I would never, EVER want to do, if holding your infant over a trash can to poop is important to you – hey, it’s a free country. (I won't judge you. I will think about Maggie Gyllenhaal's character in "Away We Go," but I won't judge you.)

But on one of these parenting philosophies, I am going to have to call BS. Consensual living “is a philosophy in which parents regard children as equals who have a say in the family's consensus-based decision-making. The intent is to resolve conflicts (insolence, poor grades, messy bedroom, etc.) not through coercion or punishments, but through mutually agreed upon solutions, where the needs of each person are considered and addressed.”

I could see that working with older children, and even being a great way of teaching life skills to kids that are in their teens and will soon be on their own. My own parents were great about treating my sisters and I like autonomous human beings and respecting our privacy by, say, not going in our bedrooms if we weren’t there. The clear message was that we would be trusted as long as we were trustworthy. But there were still boundaries. I never had – and still don’t have – a TV in my bedroom, for example. And I knew how to do laundry when I went to college.

But are there actually parents out there who involve their children as equals in the family – at any age? I’m not talking about stuff like letting your four-year-old pick from two outfits that you’ve pre-chosen so she can feel like she’s helping. Is someone out there actually letting their toddler or adolescent “decide” whether to do clean her room or do her homework? I’m not trying to judge, but, in the words of a person who left a comment on the post I linked to: “My kid isn’t allowed to make household decisions because he doesn’t have a sound enough mind to make rational decisions. Last night he cried so hard he nearly threw up because his hands were too pruny from the bathtub and he couldn’t wipe it off.” I’m supposed to let THAT kid decide what we have for dinner?

On the other hand, it’s awesome that people are thinking through how they parent and what impact their parenting will have on their kids. There’s no one type of kid, and so there shouldn’t be any one-size-fits-all style of parenting. Ultimately, kids need people around them who give them a secure, consistent and loving environment, whatever that environment looks like – and their parents need a society that gives them the room they need to do their thing.