Camera

Enumerati

• 70%

  Proportion of political ads produced in 2012 that have been negative, according to a study by Wesleyan University cited by the Los Angeles Times. At this point in 2008, 9% of ads were classified as negative. Most of the increase is attributed to super PACs and the Supreme Court’s decision to allow anonymous corporate money in races in the Citizens United ruling.

  Comment » 

• 46% to 39%

  Margin by which a new Fox News poll finds Presdent Obama leading Mitt Romney nationally. Just three weeks ago the candidates were tied at 46%. The finding is the reverse of a New York Times/CBS News poll put out earlier this week which found Romney moving into a lead.

  Comment » 

• +/- $230 million

  Forbes’ estimate of Mitt Romney’s wealth after an extensive analysis. Asked earlier this year for his own estimate, Romney told Univision that “It’s between $150 and about $200-and-some-odd million dollars.”

  Comment » 

Poetic Justice

Verbatim

• GOP Super PAC plans ad campaign against Barack Obama, the “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln” whose “misguided mentor” was Jeremiah Wright.

  — Jake Beckman, Bloomberg News assignment editor, tweeted regarding the $10 million super PAC attack campaign being mounted by GOP strategists in September to disrupt the Democratic convention.

  In reply, Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones blogger, wrote: “Which part of ‘metrosexual black Abraham Lincoln’ was supposed to make me not want to reelect that dude?”

  Comment » 

• Mr. Speaker, I like it when you cry. You give new meaning to compassionate conservative.

  — Bill Clinton, quoted by Washingtonian magazine, to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

  Comment » 

• Newt Gingrich’s campaign is so dead Mitt Romney wants to baptize it and Rick Santorum wants to put it in a jar and show it to his kids.

  — Talk-show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, telling Howard Stern the joke Kimmel didn’t tell at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

  Comment » 

Veritas

• Romney’s Call for 500,000 Jobs Per Month is Pure Bluster

  On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney added another rhetorical superlative to his record when he criticized the slow but steady employment improvement by saying, “We should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month.” In fact, such a figure would be an aberration.

  Although the most recent employment numbers reflected 19 months straight of growth, the 115,000 jobs figure from March, 2012 is one everyone would like to see go higher. But Romney’s half-million jobs a month figure has never been consistently maintained, and has in fact only been reached a few times, according to the New York Times’ Peter Baker.

  Baker looked at the past 50 years and found only five instances where job growth reached 500,000 in a month. First, the following presidents never attained Romney’s ideal:

  • John F. Kennedy (1961 – 1963)
  • Lyndon B. Johnson (1963 – 1969)
  • Richard M. Nixon (1969 – 1974)
  • Gerald R. Ford (1974 – 1977)
  • George H.W. Bush (1989 – 1993
  • George W. Bush (2001 – 2009)

  The list of presidents who did see that rate of growth is short, and to some, surprising.

  Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton saw the creation of 500,000 jobs once each during their eight years in office.

  The only president in the last 50 years to see it happen twice (and in only four years at that) was…Jimmy Carter.

  The final president to see that level of employment growth was Barack Obama in 2010. No doubt Obama will meet — and break — fellow Democrat Carter’s record in his second term.

  Comment » 
• Reagan Placed a Higher Tax Burden on Americans Than Obama

  The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein recently refuted the Republican/Tea Party touchstone that Obama has placed a higher tax burden on Americans than other presidents. Klein shows you have only to look to Ronald Reagan for evidence.

  Today’s problems, Klein says, are radically different from Reagan’s era, and they began under Clinton, who allowed the crumbling of the wall between insured and uninsured investing and the deregulation of the mortgage industry, and were exacerbated under Bush II, who continued deregulation and used deficit spending to finance tax cuts for the rich and the war he declared in Iraq.

  Contrary to popular belief, taxes are lower under Obama than they were under Reagan. In 1983, when Reagan was trying to get the economy out of recession, revenues were 17.5 percent of GDP. In 2010, when Obama was trying to guide the economy into a recovery, revenues were 14.9 percent of GDP.

  Taxes are so low under Obama in large part because of the Bush tax cuts and the effects of the financial crisis. But they’re also low because of the tax cuts passed by Obama in the stimulus bill.

  Klein adds that the long-term outlook under the Obama plan is good.

  In 1988, when Reagan left office, revenues were 18.2 percent of GDP. Under the Congressional Budget Office’s alternative-fiscal scenario — which is their most realistic projection — revenues only rise to 18.4 percent of GDP by 2021. If Obama manages to pass his most consistent tax-policy demand and sunset the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000, that would rise by less than half a percentage point. In other words, taxes were never as low under Reagan as they are under Obama, and Obama’s policies would not lead to a significantly different tax burden than Reagan’s policies did.

  Finally, Klein notes that Obama isn’t done yet so while we can definitively rate Reagan’s initiatives, Obama’s are a work in progress.

  Comment » 
• Raising Taxes on the Rich Would In Fact Fuel Job Growth

  We’ve all heard the Republican argument that if we continue to keep personal income taxes low for Scrooge McDuck, he will take this personal money he would otherwise pay in taxes and which he could spend on any number of things – a newer car, travel, really, really expensive and delicious june bugs – and invest it in enterprises that produce jobs.

  Republicans tells us, as did former Gov. Mitt Romney, “With over 20 million people who are unemployed or who have stopped looking for work, the last thing we should be doing is raising taxes on job-creators, entrepreneurs, and small business owners across America.”

  Except they’re dead wrong. Michael Linden, at the Center for American Progress, crunched the numbers.

  In the past 60 years, job growth has actually been greater in years when the top income tax rate was much higher than it is now.

  For instance, in years when the top marginal rate was more than 90 percent, the average annual growth in total payroll employment was 2 percent. In years when the top marginal rate was 35 percent or less—which it is now—employment grew by an average of just 0.4 percent.

  And there’s no cherry-picking here. Pick any threshold. When the marginal tax rate was 50 percent or above, annual employment growth averaged 2.3 percent, and when the rate was under 50, growth was half that.

  In fact, if you ranked each year since 1950 by overall job growth, the top five years would all boast marginal tax rates at 70 percent or higher. The top 10 years would share marginal tax rates at 50 percent or higher. The two worst years, on the other hand, were 2008 and 2009, when the top marginal tax rate was 35 percent. In the 13 years that the top marginal tax rate has been at its current level or lower, only one year even cracks the top 20 in overall job creation.

  Comment » 

Platforms