Somebody at Forbes didn’t get the message that being a conservative magazine means you have to lie for Romney. Exhibit A: “If Romney Cuts Taxes For The Rich By 20%, He Will Have To Raise Taxes For The Middle Class By $1 Trillion”. (via Buffalopundit)
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Villago Delenda Est
That somebody is not in Steve “Entitled Inherited Fortune Asshole” Forbes’ good graces, I’m sure.
The facts. They have an annoying bias against greedy assholes.
Southern Beale
Southern Beale is tired of Gannett’s shit.
Honestly, the media is over.
dmsilev
You’re assuming that Romney actually cares about holding down or even decreasing the deficit.
How sweetly naive of you.
KoolEarl
Good news from PPP: Obama up in VA 49-47
Schlemizel
David Stockman, St. Ronald’s budget director, told us WHILE THE HOLY ONE WAS STILL THE SITTING PRESIDENT that the goal of the administration was not to balance the budget but to bankrupt it. He said that in public, to reporters who reported the statement and he reiterated it in the book he wrote after he left the administration.
They are succeeding beyond their wildest dreams and performing this act of treason in broad daylight with the full knowledge of the media who stands by and lets it happen. Heaven forfend that they actually hold Willards feet to the fire and make him explain his tax proposal, or point out but its impossibility and his inability to defend it.
Baud
One should only read Forbes magazine in quiet rooms.
beltane
DoJ joins in lawsuit against the Gallup polling organization http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/story/2012-08-22/justice-department-joins-suit-against-gallup/57215932/1
Lurking Canadian
Somebody needs to update his resume with a quickness.
beltane
@Schlemizel: The media doesn’t just stand by and let it happen; the media actively assists the Republican party in their treason.
burnspbesq
Being able to do simple arithmetic is a core competency for business journalists. Not surprised that Forbes can figure out the effect of the latest ephemeral manifestation of Romney’s ever-changing tax plan. Would be much more surprised if Forbes said it was a bad thing.
MattF
This is surprising. I’d guess that there’s some bad blood between Forbes and Romney– nobody likes Mitt, particularly once you get to know him.
Chyron HR
@KoolEarl:
!YROTCIV
Southern Beale
I love the Money Boo Boo category, BTW. Plan to steal that some day, fair warning.
Hill Dweller
Mark Zandi, Moody’s head economist and McCain’s top economic adviser in ’08, called Willard’s numbers bullshit.
Willard’s entire campaign is bullshit. When pressed to justify his 12 million jobs plan, they cited 3 studies that don’t even support his claims.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
I don’t doubt that Forbes’ analysis is true. But whose mind is that going to change? What Forbes reader will look at that and think “Well, Obama it is then!”?
Omnes Omnibus
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist: Well, fuck it then. Why publish anything? Look, this kind of thing is useful; we joke about “even the liberal …”, but it can play. This is the reverse, a fairly conservative, business oriented publication calling bullshit on a conservative politician’s plans. This can be waved at “undecided” voters without being dismissed as the work of the liberal MSM.
22over7
@dmsilev:
This. Romney has no interest in deficit reduction. We’ll stop hearing about it and the issue will mysteriously go away. The few actual deficit hawks in Congress will be ignored or talked about as harmless cranks.
Social Security to Wall Street, Medicare to the insurance companies, and war, war, war (on brown people here and abroad) for the MIC and its plucky cousin, the Law Enforcement Industrial Complex. Drones will be used more at home, since they’re cheap and (relatively) easy to operate. They’re not a good revenue generator, though, so it’s back to tanks and submarines for the wars abroad.
arguingwithsignposts
@beltane:
I am shocked (!) that there is gambling going on in this establishment!
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@Omnes Omnibus:
My point wasn’t that it’s useless to tell the truth. Just that this close to the election, repeating once again the well publicized fact that Mitt’s tax plan is a fever dream and a fraud is unlikely to have an impact. 6 months ago, maybe.
InvincibleIronyMan
It’s not that surprising, you can usually count on the business press to tell the truth (from a certain perspective, of course).
weaselone
@22over7:
Oh, the deficit will be decreased. Just look for a several hundred billion dollars to be labelled special expenditures and shifted off budget.
22over7
@weaselone:
You’re right, of course. I forgot. Accounting magic!
ericblair
@burnspbesq:
I think this is debatable: the last couple of decades of business journalism involved a lot of bad arithmetic, sucking up to corporate management, and shilling for crappy investments. Of course most biz journalists should be able to figure out the impact of Romney’s “plan” (well, except for McArgleBargle et al). However, whether they choose to blow the whistle on it or cover it up and spin it as Bold Leadership is a choice.
MattF
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist: Still, this feeds the basic unease about Romney. If elected, what is he actually going to do? It’s certainly possible to theorize– but the only thing you can be completely sure of is that he can’t do most the things he says he’s going to do, because they are impossible.
ericblair
@MattF:
The only thing you know he’s going to do is lower his own taxes.
Was just listening to a BBC documentary on Obama and Romney, and it was funny listening to them analyze Romney’s positions with a lot of “seems to be”, “reminiscent of”, and the like, because there just is no there there. Trying to analyze it is useless.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
This is probably old news but Rolling Stone has a good 2-page article summarizing a number of tax dodges that Mitt has or may have used. Makes him look like a Taker rather than a Maker.
22over7
MattF, the people who will vote for Romney are not at all interested in what is possible. Look at what they believe right now.
Besides, these issues are boring and complicated. All that matters is defeating the Kenyan Muslim Atheist Bisexual Socialist Communist blah man who’s going to take away all the guns and the white women.
MattF
@22over7: What I think is that, every four years, we rediscover the irritating fact that Presidential elections are decided by people who can’t make up their minds. It’s frustrating, but that’s the group that has to be targeted.
Frankensteinbeck
@ericblair:
Obviously you CAN’T be sure because the man’s so damn inconsistent in his promises, but as a governor he rubber stamped whatever was handed to him, as a Mormon Bishop (presumably a position where he reported to no one) he was rabidly right wing social conservative (particularly anti-abortion and anti-pornography), as a businessman he would do absolutely anything, ANYTHING, for another buck, and as a person he has admitted that he hates the poorer half of the country.
I’d say this gives us at least a good guess.
Davis X. Machina
@MattF: “Things are bad. Obama didn’t fix them all. Romney won’t fix them either. But Obama didn’t fix them all. So I’m voting for Romney. Who won’t fix them.”
The ‘thinking’ of your basic swing voter.
Paul
@Davis X. Machina:
Just added a tweak that I think more accurately describes the situation and “thinking” of the basic swing voter.
“Things are bad. Romney’s party caused things to be bad. Obama didn’t fix them all in less than 4 years. Romney won’t fix them either. But Obama didn’t fix them all. So I’m voting for Romney. Who won’t fix them. And whose party caused them.”
I read an interesting article that followed up on some of the undecided voters after the last debate. Amazingly, most of them are still undecided. It just boggles the mind.
Davis X. Machina
@Paul: It’s a winning formula.
Cameron and the Tories fought the last election on the platform of “Things are bad. In response we promise you, up front, that we’re going to do things known and calculated to make them worse. Not only that, they made things worse the last time we did them, and that’s within the memory of most voters, like you.. Vote for us. Hey, we’re not Labour.”
And 40%, give or take, of the electorate did so. Nick Clegg’s ego — the only man-made object in Britain visible from the International Space Station — did the rest.
gelfling545
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist: True. Everybody who wants to know about this already does including his fellow billionaires in the “I’ve got mine” club who know & think it’s a fine idea. It is nice for the media to report facts for a change, however.
burnspbesq
@ericblair:
Fortune figured out Enron long before DOJ or the SEC.
Villago Delenda Est
@Davis X. Machina:
Also, Obama is, how shall we say it, a ni*CLANG*.
blingee
Maybe it has something to do with Jack Welch being given the boot. Who knows.
Davis X. Machina
@Villago Delenda Est: Heaven forfend! These are the thoughtful independent, swing voters, whose minds would never drift in that direction — because they’re busy drifting in aimless circles instead.
shortstop
@Villago Delenda Est: Our “independent” downstairs neighbors “just can’t figure out” what they don’t like about Obama. They know they don’t like Romney’s policies, but something troubles them about Obama, and it’s just too elusive for them to identify. Since they call the cops every time there’s a brown person in the parking lot, I think I might be able to nail down the source of their worry.
Frankensteinbeck
@shortstop:
This is important to understanding race in this country. Being identified as racist is punished socially, but behavior that is deniably racist is not. This stuff gets internalized, and you have a whole bunch of people who really believe they’re not racist, believe they don’t have a problem with blacks, would never use the N-word or any other undeniably identifiable marker of racism – but still actually do hate and fear blacks. Like libertarians are closet Republicans, they accept everything but the label.
Jewish Steel
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes, but he is very sweet to his family. Wait! No he’s not! He’s a competitive asshole even with his daughters-in-law.
Paul
@Frankensteinbeck:
People that claim they are libertarians are not much than those people that claim that President Obama is a socialist. They have no clue whatsoever what the two words really mean.
James E. Powell
@22over7:
The few actual deficit hawks in Congress will be ignored or talked about as harmless cranks.
The actual deficit hawks, those who wail about the deficit no matter what the current economy is doing, are cranks. But they are not harmless and they are never ignored.
It is something about debt/deficit and how those issues resonate in the minds of voters who have no idea how the economy works. Deficit hawks have a permanent seat at the Sunday talk show tables; NPR and Charlie Rose love them.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Frankensteinbeck:
Despite our high hopes at the time, the Civil Rights Act didn’t end racism – or even begin to end it. Instead, overt racism has been tamped down (a bit) while racism continues to thrive. The mindless opposition to anything and everything Obama proposes is given momentum and cover by ingrained racism. When a universally disliked phony like Mitt Romney is competitive in this election, the conclusion that much of this this nation remains irredeemably racist is foregone.
Forum Transmitted Disease
“even the liberal Forbes magazine…”
you know that’s next!
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
They’re compelled to hire TIna Brown?
Frankensteinbeck
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I have higher hopes than that. The Civil Rights Act didn’t change any minds already made up. Younger people have grown up with only some signals that the races are enemies, rather than a constant unified message. In the South less has changed because of social isolation, and having grown up there I can say they just plain hate everybody. They hate, period.
I truly believe things have improved and are improving, but yes, Obama’s presidency has made plain that racism remains powerful. When people don’t want to admit their racism even to themselves, you get exactly what we’ve seen – frothing, incoherent anger that assumes that everything Obama stands for must be evil. They’re angry and they don’t know why, so they spread it around to excuses.
EDIT – Ironically, this fits the ‘Who are we voting for, dear?’ ‘We’re voting for the nigger.’ story perfectly. This couple, having no need to cover their racism, didn’t have to go crazy when it smacked them in the face.
WereBear
Undecided voters have no clue how things work. That is why they cannot decide on the issues: it’s alsknkjsdao vs. 2938hsoieyi!
So they go by gut hunches, the last article headline they saw, what their friends say…
JustAnotherBob
@Frankensteinbeck:
I suspect there’s a slightly less odious form of racism as well. A number of people probably have a hard time believing that someone with dark skin could be competent enough to do a quality job as president. They think only white males can do the really hard jobs.
JustAnotherBob
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I totally disagree with this statement, the last part of the statement.
I grew up in the segregated South. In the 1940s and 1950s.
The Civil Rights Act ripped down the legal barriers which had prevented non-whites from entering mainstream America.
If you think that we haven’t made tremendous progress toward eliminating racism you aren’t aware where we started. That’s not to say that we don’t have further to go or that it would be better were we moving faster, but don’t piss on the progress we’ve made. This is totally different country than the one in which I grew up.
James E. Powell
@JustAnotherBob:
This is totally different country than the one in which I grew up.
I was born in 1955 and I agree with you completely.
If you consider where we are right now on gay/lesbian rights generally and same-sex marriage specifically we aren’t even the same country we were in 2004.
We can’t rest on what has been achieved, but we ought to acknowledge and honor what we have achieved to remind ourselves that we have the power to produce positive changes.
JustAnotherBob
@James E. Powell:
It is very important to recognize and celebrate progress.
That helps fire ourselves up to do even more.
Beating ourselves up over what has not yet been done brings only despair and drains motivation. We need to identify what needs to be done, but we need to remind ourselves that we’ve made tremendous change and we can make more.
McJulie
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
With the second part, I think you are being to pessimistic. I don’t think Obama could ever have won without significant strides forward on the racism front.
I just think progress always has so much pushback that it’s easy to feel like we aren’t moving forward even when we are. Like walking headfirst into a Santana* wind.
*Or Santa Ana, as the proper name for the extremely strong, dry, and sometimes oven-hot winds is debatable. But when I grew up in Santa Ana we always called them Santana winds, possibly because we otherwise found the duplicate names confusing.
Patricia Kayden
So if Romneybot lowers taxes for himself and his rich buddies, we are screwed! Thank you Forbes for saying the obvious.
Mike G
I’m still dumbfounded that Forbes acknowledged that the well-being of Americans who aren’t rich is a legitimate concern.
Starlit
@Davis X. Machina: You know, that just made it all clear to me: they all hate work, except for the fact that people who do useful things in community life can be despised as common.