Crocodile tears.  The new Romney litany is , tsk, tsk, isn't it a shame that so many more people are on food stamps.  Let's give tax breaks to the rich and throw regulation under the bus to create jobs so those people can get off of food stamps.

Perhaps the increased number on food stamps is directly related to the policies that caused the crash and the loss of 8.3 million jobs?

Conor Doughtery, writing in the Wall Street Journal, 8/22/2012, noted the timing of the loss of the middle class and the increase in poverty and the reason.

"The middle class — defined as households with between two-thirds and double the nation’s median income — has shrunk considerably over the past few decades, a decline that has been greatly exacerbated by the recession and housing bust.

In 2011, the nation’s middle class income bracket held 51% of households, down from 61% in the 1970s, according to this report released today by the Pew Research Center. Over the same period, both the upper and lower income brackets have grown. Pew notes that while middle class incomes fell over the 2000s decade, the bigger hit was falling home and asset values. The median middle class income fell 5% over the decade, but total wealth — assets minus debt — fell 28%."

Here is what Romney proposes to do:  In embracing the Ryan plan, he would cut discretionary spending to pay for a 5 trillion tax cut for the rich would include cuts to  Pell grants for the poor to attend college, federal support of  education, Medicaid by 30%, and food stamps.  Most of those cuts affects kids and their grandparents, but it also directly affects the ability of their parents to give them a ladder  break out of poverty and minimum wage jobs, no matter how many  jobs that pay enough to support a family  are made available. 

 Not only that, never, never has cutting taxes to the rich ever created jobs in an economy recovering from a recession.  Romney may bemoan those "victims and dependents of Government dole", but he only supports policies that would cut the rungs of the ladder the poor could climb to a better future. His tears are only tools to make a point that trickle down and cutting the safety net are how he plans to bring people out of poverty.

Mitt Romney's moral fools gold on plans for the poor

My column in the Sky Hi News today
have heard arguments this campaign season that I have not heard since the 1960 debates over President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

One repeated often by conservatives is “it is immoral for government to help the poor because we are making them dependent.” That is a fools gold kind of morality, lots of glittering rationale for those who care about the poor but still want to feel good about themselves while they support policies that hurt them.

Mitt Romney expresses concern for the poor from one side of his mouth: “I am not worried about the poor because they have a safety net” and “I have an absolute moral commitment to help every American help themselves”( by providing them jobs). Out of the other side of his mouth he proposes to poke holes in the safety net and make cuts in other programs that make it much more difficult for the poor to help themselves.

These comments appear to be Romney's response to the Catholic bishops calling it immoral to cut the social safety net in order to pay for the tax benefits to the rich and higher defense spending as the Ryan/House GOP budget proposes, and Romney called “marvelous.” Romney's own particular spin is it is more moral to provide jobs so the poor can “help themselves” than to make them dependent on government assistance.

No one can argue that work is better than welfare for those who are able to work and have the qualifying skills. Clinton-era welfare reforms did much to address this. However, the fix that Romney proposes is a flub. He bases his case on economic theories that have never worked well to create jobs in an economy recovering from a recession, he failed to apply his self-extolled job creating expertise to public policy, and he has a disconnect from realities of the poor's ability to find work.

Romney supports economic theories of trickle down and European-like austerity that have failed to create jobs in the past. Gov. Romney had a dismal job creation record in Massachusetts and when he left office, unemployment was still higher than the national average. Pumping up “job creators” with deregulation and low taxes does not necessarily spring loose investment in manufacturing capacity unless business anticipates more demand.

But Romney's plans are demand killers. Fighting Obama's jobs bill and/or any aid to rehire state and federal employees, such as teachers, firefighters and police, the core of GOP austerity plans, leaves less money in consumer pockets to buy products and services.

When Europe undertook austerity cold turkey, demand dropped and unemployment soared, a pertinent example. The conservative line on the “dependence” issue is, “If we reduce their safety net, more poor will go to work.” Even if jobs are created, will the poor benefit? Reducing access to a good education (Per Romney: “we do not need more (teachers)” and good nutritional brain food needed to learn, we are guaranteed pools of manual laborers who do not have the skills to be hired in today's or tomorrow's tech economy.

The GOP disconnect: Most of these safety net programs are for children that give them tools to escape dependence. Three-quarters of food stamp recipients are families with children. Of the nutrition programs for the poor (8.7 million recipients), 4.3 million are women with children, 2.2 million with infants. National school lunch programs: 30.5 million kids benefit. Children's health programs (CHIP) keep them healthy enough to go to school and Head Start gets them ready to enter first grade. By reducing money to these programs, we guarantee more poor do not have good nutrition needed to learn, or to gain the ability to qualify for jobs Republicans hope to create.

Romney and the GOP are trying to fool well meaning conservatives, but presenting their plans for the poor as a jobs program or a moral plus is a shameful deception.

For more, go to www.mufticforum.com and www.mufticforumespanol.blogspot.com

Romney lacks a sense of community

My column in the Sky Hi News today

The Bain Capital vs. job creation debate has indeed gone off the rails. Two are at fault: the Democrats and the Republicans. Each side is attempting to twist and spin the accusations of the other. Their responses only make it worse.

Mitt Romney began his campaign with one premise: His expertise in venture capitalism uniquely qualifies him to fix the economy and create jobs, and the Democrats made a big deal of examples of his failure to create jobs. The conflict then devolved to whether Romney was qualified to be president and the Republicans claimed Obama was not qualified either because mostly — gasp!— he was just a community organizer and therefore anti-business and anti-capitalism.

Vice President Joe Biden once in a while gets it right and sometimes gets it wrong. Equating the governing skills of an investment banker with a plumber was silly but his assertions that “he (Romney) does not get us” (an audience of blue collar workers) was closer to the truth. The point Biden was making was that the less than elite did not have “rich” envy. They wanted to be rich themselves, but that they had “opportunity” envy and the GOP was bent on restricting their opportunity to succeed, whether it was access to education or to jobs in the face of layoffs caused by venture/vulture takeover capitalists' uncaring business practices.

The GOP's response, sneering that Obama's record as a community organizer disqualifies him to the president, hit me as strange, especially since they also try to define him as an ivory tower professor who is out of touch with the real world. What in the world is wrong about getting down and dirty with struggling people to understand how those who are different than you think, feel, and struggle?

More of that experience might have helped Romney connect with more people instead of trying to pose of one of them. It did not work. The GOP launched a diversionary strategy, that any attack on Romney's decisions at Bain Capital is an attack on all private equity corporate takeovers and capitalism as a whole. The Obama team fumbled a response, saying they were only attacking Romney's “values” and intensified attention to the collateral damage his decisions or his company caused to working people who lost income, health care, and pensions. Lately, Obama's surrogates have tried to clarify that their attack was not on capitalism but to make the case that Romney himself had not translated his expertise to good public policy.

The debate could be recast in terms of who has a sense of “community interests.” That is not the drumbeat of the Tea Party whose single-minded attention is to their own financial interests, whether it is opposing higher taxes or any restraint on their freedom to do what they please that benefits their own interests. I stumbled on a quotation posted on the Republican Men's Club website that defines what it means to be Republican in politics in today's society:

“… it requires listening to constituents and understanding their role in the ‘global' perspective. Leadership is involvement: the prudent application of wisdom for the benefit of the whole, or at least as many as possible while ensuring that those in the minority have a say …”

Many investment bankers have successfully taken their skills to government and the Obama administration, but they brought with them a sense of community they already possessed. Romney has not demonstrated that his sense of community extends past his skills to analyze a balance sheet and to act on the bottom line. Political leadership also demands a cost benefit analysis of community impact.

For more go to www.mufticforum.com, www.mufticforumespanol.blogspot.com 

Does Mitt Romney's expertise translate to his ability to lead the US economy?

My column in the Sky Hi Daily News today:
We live in a short-hand, sloganeered and sound bite world but it is worth our time to get into the weeds, especially when complex issues of the economy are involved.

I took a deeper look at some recent sound bites regarding the auto bailouts, Wall Street regulation, and debt/budgets  and came out of the wonky weeds shaking my head. Mitt Romney's expertise has not translated into good judgment, or good public policy, or even good banking practices.

Let's look at Romney's claim that a private sector auto industry bankruptcy would have been better than the Obama bailout. It is fundamental to his claim he was a fixer of the economy's problems and a job creator and it illustrates why a banking perspective does not always make for good public policy. The number of jobs that could have been lost in 2009 if GM and Chrysler went under (including the ripple effects to parts suppliers and others), would have been 3 million, auto executives predicted. If Obama had not fixed it with the government bailout, we would still be looking at an unemployment rate in 2012 much higher than 8.1 percent.

The fix Romney advocated publicly in 2009 and still defends was to let the private sector provide the capital for a structured bankruptcy. There must be capital provided by investors in a managed bankruptcy, or the enterprise has no way to pay its workers, parts suppliers, or any other costs of doing business. It padlocks the gates and employees become the unemployed.

The reality in 2009 was there was no private capital to do it. Either Romney was being deceptive to make a political point or he was blind to the investment climate. Even when challenged later to name any private investors willing and able, he couldn't. The Obama administration understood that and provided the capital by the way of government money (the bailout) so the factory gates remained open while needed changes were made. The U.S. auto industry has roared back and many of those laid off are now back to work.

This month JP Morgan-Chase lost over $2 billion in proprietary trades gone bad. Luckily JPM is strong enough to survive, but the same could not be said for other banks. Had Wall Street Reform (Dodd-Frank) with its Volcker rule been implemented, it may have prevented certain kinds of proprietary trades that risk a bank's own funds. If trades were simply bad judgment calls that could take down a bank, the reform would provide a way to wind down a big bank without taking down other banks, avoiding what  caused the 2008 crash and bailouts. The financial service lobbyists have successfully delayed implementation of Wall Street reform that includes the Volcker rule. Romney's position? Repeal Wall Street reform. Bad business, Mitt Romney.

Coming to a head this summer is the Ryan plan and GOP's extreme reliance on austerity as the solution to both the budget and debt. Romney has called this approach “marvelous.” The GOP's reliance on cuts in social programs while increasing Pentagon spending has been condemned as immoral by the Catholic Bishops because it cuts into the poor's safety net. This is the same single-minded reliance on cuts to recover from the 2008 crash that Europe has tried, with Great Britain and seven countries in the Euro Zone now facing a double dip recession, higher debt, and no growth.  

The GOP scares the pants off of voters, pointing to the Greek situation with “we too could go their way if we do not get our debt under control.”  Even Democrats agree we must solve the debt problem. The question is “how?” The GOP identifies the right problem and advocates the wrong solution. To tackle debt takes a balanced approach like Simpson-Bowles of some stimulus and some austerity as Obama has done. Relying on cuts alone cripples recovery. That is the lesson Romney and the GOP should take from Europe.

For more, visit www.mufticforum.com, www.mufticforumespanol.blogspot.com

How Obama could win the economy argument

My column in the Sky News today:

Is Mitt Romney a sheep in wolf's clothing or putting on an act that he is wolf in sheep's clothing?

Is he looking like a serious conservative or will he govern as an extreme conservative in spite of his supposed inner moderate self? Or is he like a Navajo shape-shifter, taking on the animal form that gets him the most visibility?

Now that the primaries are over, he will have to look more sheep-like to appeal to the swing voter moderates.

Obama's positions on women's rights and a kinder approach to immigration issues have helped his poll numbers. However, he is tied with Romney on the economy. He needs to do more.

A case Obama has not yet made: We do not need to trade away fair social policies for bad economic policies proposed by the GOP. He has a better, fairer plan for both. To make such a case, Obama does not need to be a shape shifter because he is consistent with his past policy priorities, but he also must attack Romney's plans more effectively than he has.

There are those who believe Romney had been appearing as a wolf on social and economic issues to get the support of his party's far right, but he is really a sheep inside that would govern as a moderate once he got elected. Obama can make the point they are fooling themselves. The pressure on Romney from the ultra conservatives dominating the GOP and Congress would make a second term improbable if he flip-flops on tax, health care, immigration and women's issues.

Romney‘s way out of this schizophrenic dilemma to appeal to moderates has been to make the conversation only about the economy, while hoping they forget the bargain he made to with the GOP right wing to support them on social issues. Simultaneously he claims his plan to decrease taxes on the rich and to increase military spending while slashing and burning discretionary programs that benefit the middle class, will be the better route to economic prosperity.

The route Romney has irrevocably tied himself to is the closest version of a European austerity program that exists in the US: the Ryan budget. Even the Catholic bishops opined that the Ryan budget "fails to meet the moral criteria" (to protect the poor) because it takes money away from the safety net. One phrase will come back to haunt him: He called that plan “marvelous” because it would reduce the deficit and create jobs.

This last weekend Obama began to make that case that his plans for the economy would better for America in the future although we may not have climbed out of the economic hole left by the GOP as quickly as we want. So far Obama has relied on reminding us that Romney's sole reliance on budget cuts /pump up the rich plan was a throwback to the policies that never dug us out of the holes in the past, so how could it be better?

That argument is not strong enough: Obama needs to take his attacks to the another level, arguing Romney's plan could even make the economy and debt worse, linking GOP plans to the extreme approach in Europe that led to the rejection of austerity by voters this past week in France and the experience of austerity in the United Kingdom. Obama could now argue that too much reliance on austerity there has led to stagnant growth or a double dip recession, job loss, and higher debt. Those are exactly the opposite results for which the GOP hopes and the Democrats have achieved in part.

The president's moderate, middle way, combining budget cuts, fiscal, tax, and income stimulants, has resulted in GDP growth, steady private sector job creation, and unemployment decreasing significantly. His balanced approach, similar to the Simpson Bowles recommendations, will also improve the debt situation.