Empty threats from RNC, Rove

Following the Todd Akin "legitimate rape" fiasco, national Republican organizations are pulling their funding from Akin's Missouri campaign for Senate.  Akin won the recent Republican primary by  carrying much of the Tea Party vote, so he owns the Republican line on the ballot.  SuperPACs and national committees are trying to force Akin out of the race so someone else's name can get the coveted 'R' in a red state.

But Akin has no reason to go anywhere.  Withdrawing under these circumstances ends his career, but if he holds on and wins, which is at least possible enough to merit discussion, he's likely got a powerful job for life.  So what's his motivation to get out of the race?  And it could very well be the case that his race will decide who controls the Senate.  If it's the middle of October and Akin is looking like the 51st GOP Senator, Karl Rove & Co will be back.

Who are the radicals? Don't let the "Hussein" throw you

The left-wing media have been falling over themselves to show the video of Paul Ryan from 2002 arguing in favor of a stimulus bill proposed by Bush.  They point out his former explicit support for Keynesian economics and contrast it with his current positions and call him a hypocrite.  And they may or may not be true.  I'm prepared to give the man some leeway to change his positions.  They're missing the actual important point of Ryan's past comments, which is that Ryan admits that the bipartisan consensus of the "no doubt, this is what you do every time" thing to do is to provide stimulus measures much like President Obama has been proposing.

Ryan is of course free to change his mind and to argue fervently for his new position.  But Republicans have to admit that it is their proposals, not the suspiciously-named man in the White House, who has the radical policy proposals which depart from those which have guided our country for decades.  It doesn't mean that Obama's proposals are necessarily correct, but Republicans need to drop their rhetoric on Obama being the one who is somehow un-American/other/radical.

Pathetic defense of Ryan's foreign policy experience

One clear weakness of the Republican ticket is that neither Romney nor Ryan has any sort of foreign policy experience.  Romney ran the Olympics and hides a bunch of money overseas.  Paul Ryan said today that his foreign policy experience is better than Obama's because he's been in Congress voting on stuff like invading Iraq.  I'm sure being a reliable vote for party leadership on a topic that's clearly not his forte or area of interest is totally the same thing as being Commander-in-Chief.

So much for specifics

A Politico article quotes an unnamed Romney adviser who says

“What you’re going to see is a campaign that has clear direction, but not a Simpson-Bowles or Ryan-budget level of detail.  It’s not only politically unwise to do that, but it’s not how the voters engage in a presidential campaign.”

He also said

“The nature of running a presidential campaign is that you’re communicating direction to the American people.  Campaigns that are about specifics, particularly in today’s environment, get tripped up.”

Well, shit.

It's completely legit if they want to run a campaign on "direction".  But they are making specific promises, like 12 million jobs created by the end of his first term, that the rich will pay the same share of taxes and the middle class will get a cut (despite analysis (.pdf) to the contrary), or balancing the budget by the end of a second term while not touching Medicare or Social Security and expanding military spending.  Specific promises have to be backed up by specific proposals, or else they can't be taken seriously.  Obama has to put out specific plans, by virtue of having to govern, so why shouldn't Romney?

If Romney's plan is to slide into office without actually proposing anything, why would he choose Ryan, a man who causes a very specific plan to pop into voters' minds, as his running mate?  In the absence of specific Romney proposals, voters are left with specific (and unpopular) Ryan ideas.

Romney makes meaningless tax claim

Mitt Romney once again tried to put the issue of his tax history to bed today by announcing that he has paid at least a 13% tax rate every year for the past decade.  This claim is meaningless, because he doesn't make clear what it is that he's paid 13% of.  If he's referring to his adjusted gross income, or his income that's not in a foreign account, then the 13% number is not what really matters.  If, for example, he made $10 million but only $1 million was reported as taxable income, he could claim that he paid a 13% rate but it was actually only 1.3%.  He might have accomplished such a deception by keeping money overseas, or stashing it in his huge IRA, or other accounting tricks like carried losses.

Without more specifics, Romney's statement today is meaningless, and hopefully he isn't allowed to wriggle off the hook so easily.

Ryan gives away the game

The Tax Policy Center study from a couple weeks ago greatly increased the pressure on Romney to firm up his tax policy plans by showing those plans seem to be mathematically impossible.  Despite voters' legitimate concerns about what a Romney presidency would mean to their taxes, his running mate told Fox News that they won't decide on their tax policy until after the election.  But that somehow doesn't stop them from making specific promises, like the share that wealthy people pay won't go down, and it will be revenue-neutral.  Hopefully as more voters start engaging in the race it will become untenable to not release a detailed plan.

Romney's promises on the spending side are also starting to get more scrutiny.  An excellent article by Ezra Klein breaks down the implications of Romney's claims to cap federal spending at 20% while restoring $700 billion to Medicare, not cutting anything from Medicare or Social Security and actually expanding our military spending.  Klein's calculations show that the rest of the budget, which includes student loans, the EPA, veterans' benefits, the VA and, well, everything else, would have to be cut by 40% by 2016 and by 57% by 2022.

Promises to balance the budget within 8-10 years don't look so good when you have to tell people about the costs.

In the Fox News interview, Ryan admits that they have no idea when the budget would be balanced  if they were elected, as they "haven't run the numbers".  One would think that having an economic plan would necessarily involve running the numbers, at least to the degree where you'd have a pretty good idea when your "revenue" and "expenditure" lines might cross.  If you haven't run the numbers, why should anyone pay any attention to what you say you can deliver?

It really is remarkable to watch Ryan dance around the emptiness of his position.  Watch the next minute or so starting at 4:48 in the interview.  I really can't imagine Republicans can feel good about that exchange.  This is their budgetary wunderkind demonstrating he has no earthly idea what sort of budget Mitt Romney might propose.

Would Romney veto the Ryan plan over Medicare cuts?

In an effort to take the offensive on Medicare, an issue which was returned to prominence by the Ryan nomination, the Romney campaign has been relentlessly attacking Obama over the "cuts" to Medicare discussed yesterday.  Romney's attack on Obama over the "cuts" in Medicare ring hollow because he has never mentioned the $700 billion as a critique of the Ryan budget.  He frequently states his intention to repeal these cuts.  But he also often speaks highly of Paul Ryan's budget, which fails to restore the pre-Obamacare funding.  This is, by his own accounting, a $700 billion difference between the Ryan budget and where he thinks we should be, judging based on his attacks on Obama.  This difference isn't worth a veto, apparently, or even mentioning.

As recently as Sunday, a top Romney surrogate said Romney would have signed the Ryan budget if it were on his desk as President.  Someone needs to ask him if he would have insisted on restoring the money before signing the plan, and if not, why should we take his attacks seriously?

ADDENDUM: After posting, came upon this report of Romney's statements today on differences between himself and Paul Ryan.  Let's look at a couple quotes:

-“We haven’t gone through piece by piece and said, ‘Oh, here’s a place where there’s a difference', but my plan for Medicare is very similar to his plan."

So Romney is claiming that he just hasn't had time to look closely enough at the differences between himself and his own running mate to form an opinion on the $700 billion disagreement.  He's either lying or utterly incompetent, and there's no in-between.

Romney continues:

-...but my plan for Medicare is very similar to his plan, which is ‘Do not change the program for current retirees or near-retirees but do not do what the president has done and that is to cut $700 billion out of the current program.'

That is clearly not true.  The budget that Romney, Ryan and 200+ House Republicans approved of did not have to include reversing those cuts to get their support.  So I guess that shows how much Romney really cares about the issue.

Who cuts Medicare better?

Let's say you're a President looking to reform health care.  You come up with a scheme that will insure tens of millions of people, but now you have to pay for it.  It seems reasonable to start by asking those who would profit from more people having insurance to chip in.  Expanding insurance means lots of extra money for hospitals, as there would be fewer uninsured people potentially sticking the hospital with the bill for their care.  Doctors similarly will not feel as obligated to care for as many people cost-free, a common practice currently.  Pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers, as previously discussed, would profit tremendously if more people are able to pay for their products.

Given that hospitals will save hundreds of billions in formerly-free care, Medicare can drop their reimbursement rates by some amount in order to pay for the system which allows those hospitals to save all that money to begin with.

This concept for hospitals/providers, along with eliminating subsidies to insurance companies to cover Medicare beneficiaries, is the origin of the $700 billion that Romney et al say Obama "stole" from Medicare.  Yes, Medicare payments to hospitals will drop, but taken in toto, the hospitals turn out ok.  Large hospital groups and the AMA supported passage of Obamacare despite the drops in Medicare reimbursements because they realized the money they were "losing" was the house's money, which they wouldn't even have if not for Obamacare.

Contrast this approach with Paul Ryan's budget, which eliminates the expanded coverage provisions of Obamacare while keeping the $700 billion in Medicare cuts.  Without the benefits to providers resulting from more people having insurance, those cuts will actually mean worse quality or increased costs for seniors, unless private insurance miraculously becomes more efficient at controlling costs than Medicare, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

Ryan nom means actual debate

In April, I predicted that Paul Ryan wouldn't be the VP nominee because

Romney has dedicated his campaign to being a blank, generic candidate who won't take a firm stand on anything. Paul Ryan is the personification of a controversial, explicit policy. Therefore, Romney will not choose him as his running mate, because it he did, he couldn't "etch a sketch" his way out of supporting/defending it.

So imagine my surprise when Ryan was named the nominee.  Romney could have chosen anyone he wanted, and he chose the author of a controversial budget (discussed here and here) that has essentially become official Republican dogma.  Despite Romney's protestations to the contrary, by nominating Ryan he has endorsed Ryan's budget.

Instead of having an election about whether or not people think Obama's doing a bad job, the race will now become a contest of two clear visions of the role of government.  Ryan's budget is nothing less than a destruction of the New Deal and Great Society.  It's likely what Romney & Co. were going to do anyway, but with Ryan on the ticket they have to be more explicit about it.  That's good for everyone, as voters will have more info on which to base their decision.

I can't imagine they're going to like what they see.  Romney got in hot water when his tax plan (cutting rates by 20% and fiddling with deductions to make everyone's share similar) was shown to be impossible.  Ryan's plan, which drops the tax rate even further (from 35% to 25%, instead of 28% in Romney's plan), would necessarily result in an even larger shift of the burden away from the rich.

But if any Republican is capable of defending Ryan's view of the role of government, it's Ryan, so I'm looking forward to the rest of the race.

Thrilled about Ryan

Say what you will about the man, but he put an idea/plan out there.  Will make for an interesting campaign.  More tomorrow