The first debate proved that Romney is no idiot. He’s a force to be reckoned with. But what does Romney actually have to offer?
Assessment below the fold.
Here is the two part plan that Romney is selling:
PART A: He will decrease expenditures by cutting programs.
- But he will not cut the military budget. He’ll increase it.
- And he will not cut Medicaid.
- And he will not cut Social Security.
- And he is a compassionate conservative who of course would not want to eliminate vital help for the needy.
- And he will not explain what he will cut, except he indicated he will cut funding for PBS.
- PBS accounts for less than 1/100th of 1 percent of the budget. Their grant is in the millions. Our budget is in the trillions.
PART B: He will increase revenue by lowering taxes on the wealthy to stimulate growth.
- He promises he will make his plan revenue neutral by closing loopholes.
- But he refuses to explain which loopholes.
- And even if you closed every last loophole (including charitable donations) it wouldn’t add up to enough.
- Incidentally, if you got rid of charitable donations it would create a chain reaction of misery in this country of epic proportions.
- The loopholes he’d close would disproportionately affect the middle class.
- Obama is right when he says this would raise taxes of the middle class to pay for a tax break for the wealthy.
- Romney claims this isn’t true, but he won’t give us a detailed plan to show why. We have to take his word.
- He will also get rid of burdensome regulations. (Only a conservative ideologue could look at the financial collapse and conclude the problem was over regulation.)
There are 5 problems with Romney’s campaign:
#1 – Romney is not being forthright about what he’ll cut. He is either hiding something or he doesn’t know. Either way is bad.
#2 – Cutting government spending in a recession is dumb. People will lose their jobs at the exact time when there are no other jobs for them to fill. If you are a staunch conservative and want to shrink the size of government, do it gradually once the economy is strong. Don’t do it precipitously when the economy is already struggling to recover.
#3 – Romney’s mysterious tax plan, to the extent that we can understand it using Sherlock Holmes-ian deduction, will burden the middle class. It’s highly dubious that it would grow the economy as much as it would hurt the economy. And there is no way it would actually balance the budget anytime soon.
#4 – Romney’s policy platform is like a smiling mannequin. The mannequin doesn’t say anything. It just stands there and smiles a perfect, plastic smile. By not saying anything at all, the mannequin invites creative interpretation. You can imagine the mannequin means to say whatever you want it to say. You can pin your fantasies, your hopes, your personal ideology upon it. You can believe it’s much smarter than it is. As long as the mannequin never speaks, it cannot be criticized.
#5 – Romney isn’t offering any well-crafted policies at all. He is selling himself as a superior human being. His campaign boils down to a promise that if he replaces Obama his judgment will be better, but he can’t go into details at this juncture about what he’ll do so we’ll just have to trust him on that.
I’m glad Romney is not an idiot. The guy could actually win so I want him to be competent. And I don’t want to win by default just because the other candidate is a nincompoop. A presidential election should hold up the brightest from both camps and pit their best ideas against each other, and the better of the two should win. Having good candidates on both sides is good for the country.
Republicans right now just have a failed ideology that feels good for them to believe but implodes catastrophically when actually implemented.
I want Obama to win because the Democrats’ practical policies – which are based upon the principles of sustainability, fairness, and equality – actually work.
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