We are still about 6 weeks out from the election, but I am beginning to feel cautiously optimistic. Between Romney's comments about the 47% and his release of his taxes, he has managed to show that he is just one more out-of-touch fat cat. Add in Ryan's plans for Medicare, and you have managed to alienate the only demographic that was tilted in Romney's favor. Romney/Ryan's budget plan would hit the poorest Americans the hardest, with cuts to programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and Pell grants in order to give yet another tax cuts to the richest Americans. Ryan, the supposed "numbers guy" of the team managed somehow to forget about $60k of his income last year. How often do you forget about sixty thousand dollars?
Now Mitt has shown that although he has degrees from BYU and Harvard, he is not smarter than a 5th grader when it comes to basic science. His comments about opening the windows on airplanes were bad enough--depressurization anyone? The notion that increasing oxygen would help put out a fire is even more preposterous. I would like to see his transcript.
Here's how desperate the Romney campaign has become. Here at casa blue jersey we have 5 registered Democrats on the voting rolls. On Monday night we received a robocall from Team Romney asking us to donate three dollars to defeat Barack Obama. Not bloody likely! On the other side, we periodically receive real calls from our local Democrats, including a home visit from one Dem. running for township committee.
Romney claims that he can fix the economy, but what he is offering is the same old tax-cuts-for-the rich prescription that has not worked from the past. Here are some data from Bloomberg (not exactly a left-leaning source) from earlier this year that show exactly how well the trickle down approach has worked. President Bill Clinton cited some of these statistics in his address to the Democratic convention.
The Bloomberg data show that since 1961, private-sector jobs have increase by an average of 150,000 jobs per month under Democrats and only 71,000 per month under Republicans. And here's some information that you don't see very often:
On a monthly basis, Democrat Bill Clinton averaged 217,000 new private-sector jobs. Democrat Jimmy Carter had an average of 188,000, followed by Republican Ronald Reagan’s 153,000, according to Labor Department data.
That's right, private sector job growth was better under the much maligned President Carter than it was under the sainted Ronald Reagan. Share these data with your conservative friends.
Here are the figures for private-sector job growth by President since 1961:
Republicans
Richard Nixon: Increase of 7.1 million jobs
Gerald Ford: Increase of 1.3 million jobs
Ronald Reagan: Increase of 14.7 million jobs
George H.W. Bush: Increase of 1.5 million jobs
George W. Bush: Decline of 646,000 jobs
Total: Increase of 23.9 million jobs under Republican presidents
Democrats
John F. Kennedy: Increase of 2.7 million jobs
Lyndon B. Johnson: Increase of 9.5 million jobs
Jimmy Carter: Increase of 9.0 million jobs
Bill Clinton: Increase of 20.8 million jobs
Barack Obama: Increase of 332,000 jobs
Total: Increase of 42.3 million jobs.
And what does Romney's actual record look like:
If you have any questions about the efficacy of Governor Romney's economic policies, just look at his job approval rating when he left office in 2007. His job approval rating went from 61 percent in 2003, his first year in office, down to 34 percent in his last year, making Mitt Romney 48th in popularity out of 50 U.S. governors.
Massachusetts came in 47th out of 50 states in job creation, and Mitt Romney 48th in popularity out of 50 U.S. governors. It doesn't get any plainer than that. Numbers don't lie. They may change, but they don't lie.
Today
Ruth Marcus succinctly summed up the problems with Mitt Romney's tax plan:
Romney has been appropriately chided for dangling the promise of lower rates — with unpleasant details left intentionally blank. But there are even more fundamental flaws with his approach.
The first is the argument that cutting personal income tax rates would lead to economic growth robust enough to help pay for a big chunk of the cuts. The second, related, fallacy is the contention that raising rates on top earners would hurt growth. The third is that raising capital-gains rates would be even more harmful.
Having said that, this is no time for complacency. It is very possible that the money that is now going toward the Romney campaign will be redirected toward the senate and congressional races. We need to re-elect president Obama and we need to give him a congress that he can work with.
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Follow me below the fleur de Kos for some recent pictures of the President.
Here President Obama and Bo greet Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Jyi
Here the President honors the Minnesota Lynx:
Here is President Obama on the Letterman show:
All photos from whitehouse.gov
And here's a reminder of what happens when we fail to turn out!
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