"Too long to go through all that"?

In an interview with Fox News that aired this morning, Paul Ryan stated, when asked about how the numbers add up for Romney's tax plan (discussed previously), "it would take me too long to go through all that".  He then goes on to repeat the same lame promises about cutting everyone's taxes without the government's revenues going down at all.

"It would take me too long to go through all that."

Luckily for Mr. Ryan, we aren't limited to a world where the only way to get your plan out there is to go on a Sunday morning talk show and condense it down to a 25 minute interview, or sum it up in a 90 second debate answer.  We live in a world where this sort of thing is possible:

That goes on for 10 hours.

If technology can somehow figure out a way to beam 10 hours worth such brilliance into my home, surely it must be possible for Mr. Ryan to show us the math.

But he can't.  Because the math can't work.

Wishful thinking on poll bias

Conservatives, perhaps hoping to keep the base involved despite polls showing a growing Obama lead, are claiming that polls are systematically biased in how they choose their samples.  They say the pollsters are counting too many Democratic voters, so of course their numbers will show an Obama lead.  Party identification numbers which differ from similar numbers last time around are the source of the erzatz margin.  A site called unskewedpolls.com removes the supposed bias by assuming a return to '08 party identification proportions.

This is not at all standard practice for polling.  While they correct for things like age, gender and ethnicity, they make no effort to correct for party identification, allowing the interviewees themselves to determine the mix.  Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com takes a look at the performance of polls in past elections and finds that this practice has historically resulted in predictions without partisan bias.

Readings

Some interesting reads from today:

-Democrats can probably think of this as the best-case scenario.  "The Republican Party will massacre each other after Mitt Romney loses."
-It's probably not a good idea to tell the world that, if your husband is elected President, you would be concerned for his "mental well-being".
-A history of Romney's statements on his own health care reform.

Brutally effective ad

The Obama campaign released this ad today, juxtaposing Romney's words regarding the 47% with examples of the actual 47%, including low-wage workers, families and veterans.  It ends with the most damning portion of the speech, where he writes off nearly half the country "And so my job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."  This sentiment distinguishes Romney's statement from Obama's "cling to guns or religion" controversy in 2008.  Obama acknowledges in the speech that "our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives."  Despite the clumsy sociological claim Obama makes, he accepts the duty to convince those who might disagree with him, whereas Romney throws up his hands and gives up on tens of millions of us who have done nothing wrong besides being poor.

Who agrees with Romney on health care?

After years of bashing Obamacare and minimizing his involvement with health reform in Massachusetts, Romney presented his success at insuring 100% of children in Massachusetts as evidence of his empathy.  While emphasizing his past achievement might help blunt the attacks over his 47% comments, it also emphasizes the amazingly narrow path he has to walk on health care.  He has to pretty much admit that most of the elements of Obamacare are good, as most are similar to Romneycare, but follow that up with a federalism argument for why Obamacare itself is actually bad.  So he'll turn off most conservatives with his support for mandates at the state level, but lose most liberals with his opposition to Obamacare.

Romney's forced into this position given his record as governor.  He is the single worst Republican in the history of the party to attack Obama on health care.

Meaningless tax release

The Romney campaign released info on the effective tax rate he paid in each of the last 20 years.  Here's a letter written by his accountants, PricewaterhouseCoopers, which states that Romney always paid at least 13.66 percent of his Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) in personal income taxes.  They also state that he has paid an "average" effective rate of 20.2% for those years, though that average is found by just adding up the percent paid in each year and dividing by 20.  They don't, however, give any info regarding the actual AGI amounts or how much was actually paid in taxes.

We know that Romney has a huge IRA in which he's sheltered tens of millions of dollars.  IRA contributions are not included in the AGI.  So whatever games he played to hide lots/most of his money in his IRA would not show up in his AGI and hence not show up in his effective tax rate.  For example could have made $10 million in a year, hidden $9 million in his IRA, paid 20% of the remaining million in taxes, and claimed to have paid a 20% rate, even though it was actually 2%.

Without seeing the actual numbers/returns, we can't really know anything real about Romney's tax history.  His new "release" doesn't actually tell us much at all.

Romney's Medicare Trojan Horse

Romney's plan to overhaul Medicare involves offering premium supports to help seniors buy insurance on a government-run exchange.  The value of the premium support (or voucher, if you prefer) would be equal to the second-lowest premium of all the plans in the exchange, one of which is traditional Medicare.  This sort of formulation would inevitably result in the true end of Medicare.

Romney's website states that all the plans "must offer coverage at least comparable to what Medicare provides today."  That leaves plenty of wiggle room for companies to come up with plans that undercut Medicare unfairly, such as by offering gym memberships to attract younger, less-sick seniors, which happened with Medicare Advantage plans.  Of course, given that anything resembling true regulation is anathema to the Republican Party, it's also likely that "comparable" will result in truly "less".  Telling people exactly what has to be in the plan is definitely right out.  Insurance companies could even attempt to game the system by offering two plans with lower premiums sold at a loss.  By pulling the cost of the government subsidy further and further down over time, traditional Medicare will be destroyed.

Voters deserve more debate, details

One of the areas where the Romney campaign has been most specific is military spending, with Romney promising to spend at least 4% of GDP on defense.  A Romney victory would open the door to a $2 trillion increase in defense spending versus Obama's proposal.

Romney's plan to convert Medicaid to a block grant program would save (or, "save") something like $1.26 trillion.

Whatever the actual details of Romney's proposals wind up being, it's safe to say that the outcome of the election will determine how trillions of dollars are spent.  As previously discussed, a trillion dollars is a hell of a lot of money.

Then there are the significant non-economic issues that will likely be determined in November, like the winner getting the right to make the (likely) Supreme Court nomination which will decide Roe v Wade.

In light of the stakes, how is it at all acceptable for the candidates to hold events for a few thousand supporters where they give the same stupid stump speech over and over again, when they could be appearing on national TV before tens of millions having their views tested by the media and each  other?  It would be one thing if the candidates were actively engaging their relatively small audiences at these events, as some sort of expression of direct voter involvement.  But for the crowd, it's mostly a lot of standing around waiting for the candidate to give his spiel.

Why do candidates want to campaign this way, anyway?  They exhaust themselves and create traffic jams all over the country to give safe, boring speeches  to small crowds of diehards.  A candidate with nothing to lose (like Romney) could embark a 21st century version of a Front porch campaign, constantly reaching millions of voters a day in interviews and televised speeches which can originate from anywhere in the world.

Of course, such wide distribution would preclude repeating the same material over and over again, as viewers would stop tuning in and networks would move on.  They would lose the safety and comfort of a canned stump speech.  It would be a risky move, but the huge amount of free media, not to mention good will from voters who become more informed/involved, might make it worthwhile.

Trillions and trillions

Let's assume a year's worth of someone's labor is worth $50k.  50 years of work is $2.5 million.  A billion dollars is 400 lifetimes of work.  A trillion dollars is 400,000 lifetimes of work. That's comparable to the population of Summit County.

Random facts that may only interest me

Today, Romney appeared at a rally in Las Vegas attended by 2,000 supporters.  Obama appeared at a rally with 12,000.  63.2 million watched the second debate between Obama and McCain in '08.