Karl Smith asks:
I am specifically going to ask Yglesias, Drum, Cowen, Ozimek and Barro (Josh) to chime in on this. Anyone else feel free as well, but I would like to hear from these guys.
I don’t care if Mitt Romney pays negative taxes, cheated on his mistress with her daughter, fired his Grandmother while at Bain, and lied to kids to get the GOP nomination, etc.
What are the significant differences that you think we could actually see come to pass from a Romney Presidency versus an Obama Presidency?
I am generally a better-the-devil-you-know kind of guy, but I am pretty open here. So, let me here it.
Kevin Drum offers a specific answer. I have not invested much energy in following Romney or the other Republican candidates, so this is a rough, impressionistic response. Here are a few points:
1. I expect Romney to claim he has repealed ACA, but in fact he will change five aspects of the law and cement the rest of it in place, albeit in a less progressive manner and with lower Medicaid expenditures. (Outright repeal actually would not be easy, not to mention filibuster issues.) He knows he doesn’t have any other “right-wing health care plan” in his back pocket, won’t be willing to restore the status quo ex ante, and he will be willing to take the “Tea Party knock on the chin” very early on in his term, hoping to repair the fence later. Ultimately letting the issue fester doesn’t help him, and he is smart enough to realize that.
2. The Republican Party will split very quickly. For instance, will AEI support or oppose Romney in an early action like this? I don’t know, but I see massive carnage. Democrats may end up happier than they expect.
3. Romney will use conservative judge nominations, corporate tax cuts, Dodd-Frank repeal (does anyone understand it anyway?), and estate tax repeal to try to keep the base in line. Democrats may end up less happy than they expect.
4. Medicare won’t be touched, not fundamentally. There is some chance that a “twenty years from now” plan is passed (remember Waxman-Markey?), yet without any secure mechanism for commitment to make the actual cuts.
5. I worry if Obama wins on a platform of envy and anti-rich sentiment; such ideas rarely translate well into policy. If Obama loses, future Democrats will continue the cash goodies they deliver to constituents but fold on a lot of regulatory issues (don’t want to appear “anti-business”), and they will pay greater lip service to Deficit Commission recommendations and the like, while insisting that the governing Republicans take the heat for an actual budget deal. It is a much better outcome if Obama is re-elected from a promise to govern as a moderate and a fiscal conservative. So far I don’t see that as the Democratic strategy, so I am more worried about an Obama re-election than I used to be.
As noted, those are very rough predictions and I don’t have much faith in them, but they are my best guesses.
What else can Karl Smith get me to do?
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More poor women will die from low quality or illegal abortions
If next POTUS gets a SOTUS, kiss miranda goodbye
More hungry children going to school (shorter unemployement periods = less food for homeless kids. It is a great country where M Romney can park millions in tax free offshore havens, and kids go hungry)
Clean air, water acts gutted/repealed, cuyahoga river catches fire again
A lot of this is state level stuff currently blocked by feds
Its ok to lock your employees in the building [Walmart used to do this to the overnight cleaning crews]
Discrimination against women in the workplace is ok
In Texas, it is ok to execute a black guy, who happens to be an engineer for Texas Instruments, because one elderly white woman says she saw him do the crime,as opposed to 19 coworkers who said he was elsewhere (old 60 minutes story)
Its ok to turn illegal immigrants away from the emergency room, even if they are kids
Its ok to pass blatantly racist laws restricting access to the voting booth ['the lack of empathy here on the GOP side is stunning; apparently they can't concieve that in a small town, you can grow up without ID, and that 35 bucks is a lot of money]
Having a Romney POTUS means Tulia TX didn’t have to be apologized for [google tulia texas drug bust]
heck, with any luck , they can repeal Griswold vs CT; why on earth should what you and your wife do in the bedroom not be subject to hourly inspection by the Feds ?
nuff said ?
awful
His phony church will be empowered to continue their plan of world domination.
Isn’t that precisely the problem with a guy who “…pays negative taxes, cheated on his mistress with her daughter, fired his Grandmother while at Bain, and lied to kids to get the GOP nomination, etc.”? Since no one he is close to can trust him he is completely untrustworthy and we can’t really have a very good idea of what he will do in office except perhaps that it will be largely self-serving.
lff
Tyler
given your intro, I wish to receive a grade on my post
I am ok with public grade announcement
Yours
How about black Americans’ disappointment about the first Black President being voted down for a second term? Is that an important feature in this election. I am almost willing to give Obama a vote on that alone and vote Republican for congress.
Although when push comes to shove I will really probably vote all libertarian.
I know I’m beating this into the ground, but since I rather suspect from other comments that this honestly isn’t clear to some people, let me spell out the argument explicitly:
(1) There is currently, not just on the left, a notion that the rich should either pay more in taxes for reasons of fairness, or not be given certain special benefits (e.g., the bail out to rich bankers). Along with this, on the left at least, is a perception that the Republicans bend over backwards to favor the rich, and that the Dems should counter this in the name of “fairness.” Of course another argument (again on the left) is that we need to increase revenues and the rich are most able to bear a tax increase. There is nothing inherently envious about these POVs. They may be wrong (see below), but they don’t represent “envy.”
(2) There are, of course, counter arguments to the above – arguments (for example) that taxes on the rich are fair (or even too high).
(3) It’s the next move that is the problem. Honestly I don’t really understand it myself, but it seems to go something like this – “the ostensible reasons for anger at the rich are invalid, therefore the real issue must be envy. ” Stated baldly, that’s absurd, which is why it baffles me that Tyler joins in. Maybe there is some better argument in favor of the “envy” slur? If so, I’ve never seen it articulated.
(4) All THAT said, it seems to me that Tyler’s real point 5 is that anti-wealth sentiment, whatever its cause or merits, in fact results in bad policy. Which is arguable, at least. IMO sometimes true, sometimes not. But you don’t need to make the “envy” slur to make the point.
It’s funny that no one envies the poor.
#5 tells the whole story. If Obama runs on an anti-rich populist platform, he will almost certainly win against Romney, and probably by a landslide. OTOH, if he runs as a centrist, he has a chance of losing if the economy doesn’t show improvement (although if we keep gaining 200K jobs a month, Obama will win either way).
Except for Republicans, almost everyone else really hate Wall Street and their wealthy allies, and consider Romney one of them. A brutal class warfare campaign will wipe Romney out.
For me, I could care less what kind of campaign Obama runs, I have three issues that I care about, Supreme Court, social liberalism, and the environment. Obama is far far better than even a truly moderate Republican on those issues. I’m probably closer to Santorum than Obama on the Middle East and foreign policy, but it is a much lower priority for me.
Mostly, I think either president will mostly have their hand forced by events. But in the spirit of the thing, for the same approximate reason that only Nixon could go to China, Romney
would close the prison ops in Guantanamo p = 0.6
end to major operations in Afghanistan p = 0.6
close a major overseas base (Germany? Okinawa?). p = 0.7
completely cave on some major piece of environmental legislation p = 0.8
Obama can’t do any of these things because he would “look weak” or be seen as “kowtowing to his environmentalist supporters”.
On the other hand, a higher thought still less than p=0.5 of a balanced budget, loosely tied to some nutty idea about shoring up SS, possibly achieved through some new tax (raise in SS, or perhaps VAT). Obama will never get a tax passed in a Congress in which either side is controlled by Republicans, and nobody wants to blink on spending.
Also, Romney comes out swinging in the Drug War, resulting in a border skirmish with Mexico that leads to very badly damaged relations. p = 0.1
Does anyone remember what a floundering mess the first 8 months of Bush II looked like? Yep, it will be just like that. A symbolic but superficial change in Obamacare, p=0.95.
Does anyone remember what a floundering mess the first 8 months of Bush II looked like?
HA HA LOL
and the rest of the eight years too. Ending with the grand finale, the CRASH and TARP.
Actually, I believe we would have been better off if he had spent the rest of the 8 years floundering about helplessly instead of being driven to execute one long terrist[sic]-fueled spending spree.
It is, indeed, simple math. And the fact that clearly intelligent people like you, and the entirety of the tea party movement (and, to be fair, plenty of people on the “other side”) fail at this basic math makes me weep for the future of our nation.
Dave, did you even read my post? Have you even looked at budget projections past 2020?
Even if we zeroed out the discretionary portion of the budget, and otherwise made no changes in the law regarding SS, medicare, and medicaid, we would eventually need a tax increase and a big one. And no one, anarchists aside, really wants to zero out the rest of the budget (defense, law enforcement, border control etc.). The kind of stuff you and Gillespie are talking about – freezing discretionary spending, etc. – is small potatoes compared to the entitlement issue.
Now, again, you COULD change that by radically revising how those programs are delivered. Argue for that if you wish. But THAT’S the argument to make.
This is why I ultimately can’t remain civil in these kinds of discussions. There is an incredible amount that reasonable people can reasonably differ about. Then you have some people, not content with that,, who, through stupidity, ignorance, or venality, insist on going beyond the bounds of reasonable debate and arguing that 2+4 = 3.
There’s even room here for someone to say: “look, I won’t support a federal tax regime that takes more than 15% out of the economy, and I’ll do what it takes to balance the budget at that figure, even if it means increasing the retirement age to 70 and replacing the current fee for services medicare system with a voucher system that is pegged to the general inflation rate rather than the medical service inflation rate, along with allowing the discretionary part of the budget to shrink in real terms.” That’s a position I don’t agree with, but it is at least mathematically sound and ideologically coherent.
But ignoring long term budget implications of the current medicare program and pretending that we can balance the budget long term without either a tax increase or impacting senior citizens – honestly, that is, or should be, far more embarrassing to you than sh*tting yourself in public.
Why repeal the estate tax? Economically, this tax does less damage than any other tax. Politically, if this is a priority for Republicans, it’s like putting a sign on your chest, proclaiming “We’re for the rich!”
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