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Republicans – Using The Middle Class As Bargaining Chip To Get More Tax Cuts For The Rich

Two years ago, Republicans held the middle class American people hostage and demanded that the rich get a continuation of the Bush tax cuts. Those tax cuts were set to expire the last day of December 2010, but Republicans told the President that if the rich couldn’t get more tax cuts, then the middle class would suffer. To avoid more suffering by the middle class, the President went along with the Republicans’ demands.

And here we are again, except this time, the American people voted for President Obama knowing that he was going to end those tax cuts for the rich. That was what he campaigned on for almost two years and the American people approved. But Republicans are still turning a deaf ear to what the people want and again, two years later, Republicans are trying to use middle class America as a bargaining chip to get more tax cuts for the rich.

Their playbook worked in 2010, but something seems different this time around as cracks are developing within the Republican ranks. Republicans like Rep. Chris Gibson (R-N.Y.) signed the Grover Norquist pledge not to raise taxes, but he recently released a statement saying that he “doesn’t plan to [re-sign] it for the 19th Congressional District.” And another New York Republican Representative Peter King, has decided to leave Grover’s pledge, calling it a two-year deal.

Republican Lindsey Graham has also voiced his opinion against the pledge. “When you talk about eliminating deductions and tax credits for the few, at the expense of the many, I think over time the Republican party’s position is going to shift,” Graham said. “It needs to, quite frankly, because we are $16 trillion in debt.”

But even with these and other Republicans changing their minds on the no-tax hike pledge, the Republican House Leader John Boehner is still trying to hold the gun to the head of the middle class. Boehner recently held a press conference criticizing the President’s plan because he thinks the plan raises more revenue from taxing the rich, than from services he want wants to cut from the poor.

President Obama is hoping that there are enough Republicans willing to go against their desire to sink the middle class to protect rich people. In his recent weekly address, the President said;

So let’s begin by doing what we all agree on. Both parties say we should keep middle-class taxes low. The Senate has already passed a bill to keep income taxes from going up on middle-class families.  Democrats in the House are ready to do the same thing. And if we can just get a few House Republicans on board, I’ll sign this bill as soon as Congress sends it my way. 

The president’s plan would allow the tax cuts to continue for the middle class and those earning up to $250,000 a year. Those earning over $250,000 would see their rates on income above that amount go back to what those rates were under the Clinton administration. The Democratic controlled Senate has already passed this bill, but Boehner and the Republicans refuse to bring the bill to the House floor for a vote.

If Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on this issue over the next few weeks, all the Bush tax cuts would expire and automatic cuts will go into effect in January. The preferred method of course, would be working out a deal between the two parties, but that must be done with  the rich and the middle class carrying the burdens of that deal, not just the middle class. And including the rich in such a deal is something Republicans are against.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking towards December 31st.

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democrats Politics

What We Know: The Calm After the Election

Oh, that 20/20 hindsight. Now that the election’s over, didn’t we just know it was going to end the way it did? Wasn’t it painfully obvious that President Obama was going to be reelected and win every swing state by recount-resistant margins? Elizabeth Warren? Claire McCaskill? Heidi Heitkamp? Marriage equality?

Of course not. That’s the fun of a campaign. But the polls were right and the right was very wrong. And the sweetness of the Democrats’ victories will stay with progressives until the reality of the fiscal cliff descends on the country.

What did we learn from this election? So many lessons.

Obama’s Osawatomie speech in December, 2011 set the tone for his campaign. He staked himself out as a true Progressive and claimed the middle class for his own. Romney, meanwhile, was becoming “seriously conservative” while trying to outflank those political dynamos in the GOP nomination field.

Defining your opponent before they define themselves is an essential component of a victory. Obama was able to define Romney as a job-busting, China-outsourcing plutocrat while Mitt was still aglow from his primary victories. The lead that Obama built in the summer polls became a crucial buffer for him come the fall.

The Citizen’s United decision was a bad one, but it didn’t alter the race in ways that Democrats feared. As a matter of fact, the two parties raised about the same amount of money, but the Obama campaign was more frugal and strategic about how they spent it. Campaign finance laws still need to be amended and adjusted because the effect of all the money was just as corrupting and polluting as ever, but the spending gap never materialized.

Conventions still matter. The Democrats had a terrific convention that highlighted the right message and leveraged the speaking talent that resides in the party. It also helps to have a former President at your disposal who is far more popular now that he was when he left office. The Republicans, by contrast, had a terrible convention that didn’t highlight the candidate and was remembered more for an empty chair and Paul Ryan’s untruths than full-throated rhetoric.

Debates still matter. There was considerable chatter before the debates about how they don’t move the polls much. President Obama’s Denver performance proved that wrong as Mitt Romney got a nice bump out of the first debate, simply for showing up and being coherent. The great fallacy about the bump, though, was that it morphed into momentum. It did not. Romney’s bounce lasted approximately 3 days, then settled down with him still behind the president in both national and swing state level polls. The lead that Obama built with his summer advertising held even though Romney showed that he wasn’t quite the monster the Obama campaign asserted he was.

Debates still matter. Obama’s performance in the second and third debates not only stopped any movement to Romney, but actually provided the president with a bounce of his own. Obama won both debates, and he exposed Romney for having few ideas, few details and a woefully inadequate grasp of foreign policy. Romney also lost his cool, which had to turn off some voters who were giving him a second look.

Unscripted comments can derail a campaign. Romney’s 47% comment and the unconscionably disgraceful Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock are all you need to know.

The polls were right. I’ll repeat that. The polls were right. In fact, if you looked at the polls in July, you would see that it would take a mammoth effort by the Romney campaign just to make up the margin to achieve a tied race. Even Mitt’s debate bounce only brought him within one percent of the president in the poll aggregator’s computations. The right wing math deniers even came up with anti-math to show that Romney was going to win 315+ electoral votes. Meanwhile, real math people at fivethirtyeight, Pollster, Votamatic, Princeton Election Consortium, PPP, IBD and yours truly were analyzing and conducting polls that reflected exactly where the race was going, who would win, and by how much. Rasmussen and Gallup took the biggest lumps and will have two years to repair their reputations.

The campaign of ideas, promised by the right when Romney selected Paul Ryan to be his running mate, didn’t materialize. There was some initial talk about Medicare and the Ryan budget, but when both proposals turned out to be unpopular they disappeared from the discussion on a national level. In the same way, Barack Obama did not run a high-minded campaign of ideas as much as undertaking a slog that dragged Romney through the mud and segmented the country into gender, ethnic and racial groups. Obama won those groups. By a lot. That was the difference.

There was/is a gender gap. And a Latino gap. And an African-American gap. And all three went in Obama’s favor. Romney was left with a declining demographic of older white men and younger people without college degrees. If you wanted to chart the fall of a political party, like the Federalists or the Whigs, you couldn’t start with a more disastrous demographic time bomb. The Republican Party had better reorient itself quickly, though I doubt they can do it in time for 2016. In fact, some of the talk today is that Romney was not conservative enough to win. Evidently the GOP only wants to win 140 electoral votes next time around.

There are more lessons, but they are subjects for another day. It’s time to celebrate the victories and look forward to the next four years.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest

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democrats Politics

So Far, Democrats Outnumber Republicans In Swing States Early Voting

President Barack Obama heads toward Election Day with an apparent lead over Republican Mitt Romney among early voters in key states that could decide the election.

Obama’s advantage, however, isn’t as big as the one he had over John McCain four years ago, giving Romney’s campaign hope that the former Massachusetts governor can erase the gap when people vote on Tuesday.

More than 27 million people already have voted in 34 states and the District of Columbia. No votes will be counted until Election Day but several battleground states are releasing the party affiliation of people who have voted early.

So far, Democratic voters outnumber Republicans in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio – five states that could decide the election, if they voted the same way. Republicans have the edge in Colorado, which Obama won in 2008.

Obama dominated early voting in 2008, building up such big leads in Colorado, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina that he won each state despite losing the Election Day vote, according to voting data compiled by The Associated Press.

h/t: Huffington Post

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democrats Egypt Mitt Romney Politics

Both Democrats And Republicans Criticize Romney’s Latest Dumb Move

Pundits, politicos and Republican Party stalwarts alike have panned a mid-morning press conference by Republican presidential candidate former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA). Romney’s campaign drew fire overnight for falsely attributing a quote by Egyptian embassy personnel under siege to the Obama administration, then attacking the presidency for “apologizing for our values,” thereby seizing upon the violence in Egypt and Libya to score political points against President Barack Obama.

Rather than use today’s press conference as an opportunity to clear the air and mourn the deaths of U.S. citizens who gave their lives in service to their country, however, the former governor doubled down on his attacks against the president, a maneuver that was criticized even on the right.

Former foreign policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), Victoria Coates told BuzzFeed, “It’s deeply unfortunate when the circumstance of the statement becomes the story.”

Members of the press were struck by the move, as well. Time magazine’s Mark Halperin said on Twitter that Romney’s attacks were the most “craven + ill-advised move” of the 2012 campaign.

Wall Street Journal columnist and doyenne of DC politics Peggy Noonan opined to Fox News that the nominee isn’t “doing himself any favors” with his handling of the situation.

“When you step forward in the midst of a political environment and start giving statements on something dramatic and violent that has happened, you’re always leaving yourself open to accusations that you are trying to exploit things politically,” she said.

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democrats Politics

Bill Clinton Was Right – Democrats Create More Jobs Than Republicans

Clinton pointed out that under Democratic presidents since 1961, the economy has added 42 million private-sector jobs, while under Republicans it has added just 24 million. He used the same concept to argue that President Obama has outscored both congressional Republicans and his GOP presidential opponent, Mitt Romney, in terms of creating jobs.

Clinton has some intriguing facts on his side. Aside from a rounding error, his historical numbers are accurate (figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the tally under Democrats since 1961 rounds to 41 million, not 42 million). I crunched the numbers a few different ways to see if Clinton was cherry-picking the best numbers. His figures measure job gains from the month a president took office until the month he left. Since it takes a year or so for any president’s policies to go into effect, I also measured job gains from one year after each president took office till one year after he left. Here’s the score by that measure: Democrats: 38 million new jobs, Republicans, 27 million.

Clinton only mentioned private-sector jobs, so I pulled the data for all jobs, including government. Again, the Dems have a big edge, accounting for 48 million new jobs, compared with 31 million for Republicans. If you push the boundaries out one year for each president, the gap narrows to 44 million new jobs under Democrats, and 34 million under Republicans.

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democrats Politics unemployment rate

More Good News For The Economy – Unemployment Rate Falls to 8.3%

News from The Hill: The economy added 243,000 jobs in January, many more than had been expected. The unemployment rate also dropped from 8.5 percent to 8.3 percent.

The job gains are a boost for President Obama, who is hoping a growing economy will make voters happier with his stewardship of the economy and carry him to a second term. Unemployment might be the most important statistic to watch ahead of the presidential race, and it has now dropped from 9 percent since September 2011.

Most observers had been expecting about 150,000 jobs to be created in January, or even fewer. The January report was nearly 100,000 jobs higher, and suggests a strengthening job market.

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democrats Domestic Policies Unemployment

Unemployment Rate Falls To 8.5%

More news for the United States economy, as the national unemployment rate falls to 8.5%. Although the pace of job growth may not be as fast as many would like, any improvement is always a welcome sign that things are headed in a positive direction.

The New York Times: The United States added a robust 200,000 new jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday, in a sign that the long-awaited economic recovery has finally built up a head of steam.

The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent in December, from a revised 8.7 percent in November, the government said. The Labor Department revised the number of new jobs added in November to 100,000, from 120,000.

The employment report built on a flurry of heartening economic news in December, when consumer confidence rose, manufacturing came in strong and small businesses showed signs of life. It was the sixth consecutive month that the economy added at least 100,000 jobs – not enough to restore employment to pre-recession levels, but enough, perhaps, to cheer President Obama as he enters an election year.

The upward trend restored some of the ground lost this spring and summer, when global events like the earthquake in Japan and domestic ones like the debt ceiling debate slowed the American recovery to a crawl and raised fears of a second recession. Then, even signs of modest growth were dismissed as too anemic. Now, they are drawing tentative praise.

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Barack Obama Democratic democrats Domestic Policies Nancy Pelosi Republican Unemployment

Democrats On The Attack – Asks Republicans Where Are The Jobs?

News on The Hill – In their first public address of 2012, House Democratic leaders ripped into Republicans Thursday for ignoring President Obama’s jobs package amid a lingering unemployment crisis.

Behind Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the lawmakers accused GOP leaders of neglecting their duties and remaining on vacation as the jobless rate tickles down to 9 percent.

“The American people need jobs, and we’re not on the job,” said Pelosi, flanked by more than two dozen other Democrats in the Capitol. “Where are they [Republicans]? I don’t know. Where should they be? Right here in this Capitol getting to work.”

The Democrats used the one-year anniversary of the Republicans’ takeover of the House to question why GOP leaders have resisted new education, infrastructure and public works funding – all part of Obama’s plan to create jobs.

“One year in office and no significant jobs bill,” Pelosi charged.

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Barack Obama democrats Mitt Romney Politics Republican Texas

President Obama Beat Republican Candidates For Hispanic Vote

Hispanics are slowly becoming the largest voting block in the American political system. Hispanics are also a group of people highly despised by the Republican party – a party that has embraced an anti-immigration, anti Dream Act, “build the darn electrified fence now!” mentality. So it is no surprise that this group have been an ardent supporter of President Obama.

The Poll…

The survey, conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, revealed a general-election weakness for Republicans among an increasingly influential voting bloc — with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry each winning less than one-fourth of the Hispanic vote in hypothetical matchups against Obama.

Obama leads Romney by 68 percent to 23 percent and Perry by 69 percent to 23 percent among Hispanic voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 5.2 percentage points for the sample.

But have no fear. The Republican party are also well verse in the art on pandering.

With just a few more days before the Iowa primary begins on January 3rd, don’t expect any promises to the Hispanic community as the Republican candidates are still focused on pleasing their Teaparty base. But after this primary season is over, we expect nothing less than some baseless promises from the GOP nominee. Don’t be surprised the nominee offer open borders and amnesty, and free health care for all the undocumented people in this country.

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democrats Ohio Politics

Dumb Quote Of The Day: Today’s Contributor – John Boehner

After a bipartisan effort in the Senate where both Democrats and Republicans voted to approve a payroll tax cut for hard-working Americans, House Republicans led by John Boehner voted to raise those taxes. A move that would result in a $1,000 tax bill for every working poor and middle class American.

After raising your taxes, Boehner had this to say;

“We’ve done our work for the American people,”… “Now it’s up to the president and Democrats in the Senate to do their work as well.”

I guess we should all thank Mr. Boehner for doing what we all wanted, to have our taxes raised.

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Barack Obama democrats Politics

President And Democrats Give Up The Call For Millionaire Tax Hike

Here we go again. In another effort to negotiate in good faith with Republicans and get some agreement on extending the payroll tax break, CNN is reporting that President Obama and the Democrats will drop the millionaire surtax the President has called for over the last few months.

In what would be a major concession, President Obama and Senate Democrats will drop their insistence that a surtax on millionaires pay for extending the payroll tax cut, a Democratic source tells CNN. This would be part of a new Democratic offer.

The move comes after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other top Senate Democrats met with President Obama at the White House earlier today.

Based on this President’s past, one would assume that Republicans should chalk this one up as another win. But I will caution my fellow Americans. Until we get a full understanding of what they agreed upon, let’s not pass judgement on this administration just yet.

I remember other situations where we thought the president had given up too much. And although there may have been times when we wished he had held out a little longer and stood his grounds against these Republicans, we must admit that when we looked at the overall picture, the president, most of the time,  seemed to come out on top. Thus, we hear all the time, “while everyone played checkers, the president was playing chess.”

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ann coulter democrats Politics

Our Blacks vs Their Blacks – A Conservative Point Of View

Republican Ann Coulter said it last week while tripping over herself to defend Herman Cain from the recent sexual harassment claims, “Our blacks are so much better than their blacks” she said, because “you have fought against probably your family, probably your neighbors. . . that’s why we have very impressive blacks.”

We know, these people makes no sense. But trying to understand how Republicans think about black people, we found the illustration below.

This must be what they’re talking about.

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