Category Archives: Mitt Romney

Presidential Election and Aftermath

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It is 9:14 P.M. Mountain Standard Time on election day November 6, 2012 as I begin typing, and the announcement just came that Ohio will cast its electoral votes for President Obama. That virtually guarantees that President Obama has won reelection. What next?

I expect that Republicans will be quite critical of themselves and Mitt Romney’s campaign strategy. They will ask why he did not mention Libya in the foreign policy debate when there was ample evidence that the Obama administration bungled the security for the consulate by responding to requests for additional security by reducing the number of security agents. They then covered up the terrorist attack that resulted in the death of the ambassador and three other Americans by repeatedly claiming the attack resulted from a spontaneous demonstration. The only reason to cover up the truth was that the facts would be embarrassing to the administration. The focus was protecting President Obama’s chances for reelection, and the facts of what resulted in the four dead Americans might have been “problematic.”  The cover story succeeded because Mr. Romney did not make it an issue.

On a societal note, I find it distressing that we have reelected a president whose campaign was almost exclusively based on advocating that people who earn more should be taxed at higher rates. His campaign worked despite the flaw that it won’t work. Wealthy people already pay most of the taxes, and even if you take all of their money it won’t solve the budget deficit. The only way to control the deficit is to staunch the government thirst for more and more spending while getting out of the way of economic development. Economic development is the key. Romney’s approach would have encouraged entrepreneurs to develop businesses, the business would pay taxes, the employees would pay taxes, and the government would have more income. The majority of voters went with the guy who promised to raise taxes on people other than themselves. Continue reading →

Dueling Presidential Candidate Gaffes

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With less than a week until we learn who will be elected president it seems the time is right for a mention of gaffes by the two candidates. It wouldn’t be a duel if the subject referred to Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, since Mr. Biden would win on the numbers of gaffes by an overwhelming margin.

Mitt Romney stirred understandable criticism when he foolishly mentioned that he need not campaign to the 47 percent of Americans who are “dependent on government” and consider themselves “victims.” He later said that he understood that he wasn’t going to get the vote of people who expected that the government’s job is to redistribute wealth, and that “I’m not going to get them.” He added “I do believe we should have enough jobs and take-home pay to allow people to pay taxes. I think people would like to be paying taxes.”

Mr. Obama presented a different opinion in an appearance at Loyola University in 1998 when he was an Illinois state senator. The admittedly 14 year-old video has Mr. Obama saying, “The trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some [wealth] redistribution — because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.” Continue reading →

Joe Biden, Territorial Tax, and Social Security

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I often refer to Vice President Joseph Robinette “Joe” Biden, Jr. as the accidental comedian because of the strange things he says. He says them with such force and vigor that people often are swayed by the emotion conveyed and perhaps don’t notice the absurdity of what was said. During his convention speech he said (with great vigor) that “Governor Romney believes in this global economy it doesn’t matter where American companies invest and put their money or where they create jobs. He then went on to say that Romney was proposing “…a territorial tax, which the experts have looked at, and they acknowledge that it will create 800,000 new jobs—all of them overseas, all of them.” Joe, or his speech writers, apparently did not know that the business leaders on President Obama’s Export Council and his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness have said that the tax system Joe accused as originating with Mr. Romney would be a good idea for the U.S economy.

Those comments by Joe during his speech created a flurry of astonished articles, but it isn’t even my favorite recent “Joeism.” During the Vice Presidential debate he accused Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney of wanting to privatize Social Security and inquired where people’s retirement programs be if that idea had been accepted when George W. Bush proposed it. I did a posting in February in which I analyzed what would have happened to a worker who voluntarily put the suggested one third of their Social Security “contributions” into a S & P 500 index (which was called “privatization by Joe and others) on a dollar averaging basis. It would have been really worrisome to watch the value of the account plummet with the stock market in 2008, but the money being invested during that time would have bought more shares.

The calculations I made were based on a person earning $50,000 a year with $3100 being withheld for Social Security and matched by the employer. One third of the monthly total would have resulted in about $170 dollars a month going into the private account. There would have been about $8300 invested since the beginning of 2005, and the value would have dropped to  $5700 at the worst of the market collapse. However, the investors that took advantage of the lower market value and continued to invest would be pleased with the results. They would have invested about $15,700 by now, and, with the improved stock market, the account would be worth about $17,600.

No one knows what the stock market is going to do in the future, but history has shown it to be a good place to create value for investments. The individual with the private account would have the advantage of being able to use the money however they wished upon retirement instead of having the government calculate how much money they would receive each month. They also could designate the person or persons of their own choice to be beneficiaries who would receive the full remaining value. Social Security payments stop immediately after the death of the person.

All of that may or may not be of interest, but let’s get back to Joe. When he asked where we would be if Social Security had been “privatized,” he apparently didn’t know that the individuals who had voluntarily began the investment process would have more money. What is even more astonishing is that he apparently hasn’t noticed that the stock market has improved since Mr. Obama and he took office. Wouldn’t that be something to brag about?

Romney Remarks About Voter Dependency

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Mitt Romney made the astonishing mistake of speaking freely at a private fund raising event. How could someone who has campaigned for so long have forgotten that everything is says in public will be recorded and analyzed for possible anti-Romney ads? Also, how could he have gotten his facts wrong?

I won’t bother to look for a link to add for the comments, because they are everywhere. I haven’t seen the Obama ads quoting their favorite parts, but I’m certain that’s because I haven’t watched much television in the past couple of days. He said, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right? There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for the president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of lower taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so mu job is to not worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

People who don’t pay taxes either are those who don’t make much money, have more deductions than income, or have good advisors who can see that income is sheltered from taxes (such as income from tax-free municipal bonds.) Many of those who don’t pay taxes are elderly and young people who can’t find jobs other than perhaps a low-paying part time job. I expect that some portion of those people will be more attracted to Romney than to Obama. I do see that Mr. Obama has a solid 47 percent of the vote, but a large part of that number are people who are loyal liberals/progressives/Democrats. Many of them are very well paid and pay significant amounts of taxes. I’ve seen data that well over fifty percent of lawyers voted for Mr. Obama.

I believe Mr. Romney was onto something. I do think it is true that Mr. Obama believes a primary role of government is to redistribute wealth to “make things fair.” I also believe that there are many voters who will vote for him for that very reason, and that his only challenge is to make certain that those who think he will look out for their “entitlements” will go to the polls.

What Mr. Romney should have done was to read or paraphrase a quote from Thomas Jefferson. “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Or he could have paraphrased the quote from Adrian Rogers, “You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it.  You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it.  Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.” He also could have mentioned that the top ten percent of earners pay 71 percent of income taxes. Mr. Obama says that isn’t enough to be “fair.”

Climate Change Continues

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I’ve written in previous blogs that I think Al Gore and the others who pound the drum of manmade global warming should change the title of their mantra to “climate change.” They would finally be right this if they predict climate change, because the climate has always changed and it always will. The warnings in the 1970s were that man was going to create a global cooling climate disaster. The climate did change, but there was a warming trend instead of the predicted cooling. Some researchers responded by developing computer models that correlated warming temperatures to carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. They never mention the oceans warm when the sun is more active and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. Man has no control over the warming of oceans that causes higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A recent Denver Post editorial took both Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney to task for not proposing more aggressive actions to battle climate change. Much of the basis for the editorial is the low level of Arctic ice coverage. The Sea and Ice Data Center indeed does show that ice levels dropped below the average levels and the 2007 levels beginning around the first of August. I expect the Post was also influenced by the record number of over 90 degree days this summer. However, there are other indications that “catastrophic global warming” is not occurring. A web site that has numerous graphs of the average temperature of Gulf of Mexico waters shows 2011 had one of the largest drops in temperature in eighty years.

The book Climatism reviewed on that link of this web site is a good place to start if you want to read details of why man is not the cause of global warming and most if not all of the efforts to develop alternative energy sources are doomed to fail because of simple economics.

Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. were at a twenty year low last year because significant amounts of power are being generated with recently inexpensive natural gas. Power generated with natural gas creates half the carbon dioxide compared to coal. One report says that it is expected there will be 175 coal burning plants will be replaced by natural gas plants over the next five years.

Michael Mann of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University seemed to be grumbling about the improvements created by the shift from dirtier-burning coal to natural gas. He commented that “ultimately people follow their wallets on global warming.” Roger Pielke, Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado had a bit different take. He said, “There is a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources.”

Some environmentalists aren’t happy about the good news. They don’t like the “fracking” that has resulted in production of huge amounts of natural gas and caused the price of the fuel to drop by more than half. They believe the practice will pollute underground water sources and cause leakage of methane to the atmosphere despite the belief by many government officials that the practice is safe if done properly. My suspicion is that those who are grumbling are mostly worried that there will be even less emphasis on development of expensive solar and wind generated energy. “Installation of new renewable energy facilities has now all but dried up, unable to compete on a grid now flooded with a low-cost, high-energy fuel.” The massively advertised “shift to renewable energy” has added scant amounts of power generation. “Wind supplied less than 3 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2011…and solar power was far less.”

I won’t be in the grumbling camp. I find it refreshing that ingenuity and economics have resulted in improved air quality.

Selecting a Presidential Candidate

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There were three articles in the Sunday, September 02, 2012 Denver Post that were pertinent to the choice for voters. The first was titled “Evaluating Obama’s grade on economy by Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post. People usually “vote their pocketbook,” so the state of the economy is crucial to both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. Mr. Samuelson leads his article with, “President Obama’s economic report card is at best mediocre. I’d give him a C-plus while acknowledging that presidents usually don’t much influence the economy…For the first six months I’d award him an A-minus; for the rest a C-minus or D.” The latter grade is based on the insistence of Mr. Obama at focusing on the health care law (for his legacy) despite the fact the complex law discouraged job creators from expanding their businesses. The battle over the health care law also created gridlock between the two political parties that dominates politics in Washington, D.C.  Mr. Samuelson writes that there is no way of knowing whether Mr. Obama’s missteps have weakened the economy. “My guess is that Obama’s errors have had a modest effect.”

The second article is by Dave Maney, and is titled “Third vision needed.” The article proposes that Republicans are good at clearing impediments to economic change while Democrats are good at identifying those needing help. The author writes that Democrats “…prescribe an attack on healthy parts of the body to somehow cleanse it and make the sick parts well again. It’s like stabbing yourself in the stomach because you’re having a heart attack—it brings zero relief but lots of additional pain” But then he turns to the Republicans and says “We just need to go back to the way things were in 1984, and we’d be in great shape.” That is characterized as being equivalent to telling an ailing patient in his 70s that they would feel better if they were still 40. I didn’t read an alternative between the two visions presented by the two parties except something to the effect that we need to do things differently in the different world.

My favorite article was titled “American optimism in eye of the beholder” by Ann Sanner and Calvin Woodward of The Associated Press. According to the article, young people continue to be optimistic while older people are pessimistic. There are examples of those in their 50s who have lost optimism for their retirement goals because of the layoffs and reduced value of investments. One fifty year old woman is quoted as saying that she firmly believes in the American Dream “…but in the sense of dreaming it, not grasping it. I’m not seeing anything to strive for; I guess….I’m settling.” “Nearly two thirds lack confident that life for today’s children will be better than it has been for today’s adults…”

There are several disturbing statistics about the pessimism of older voters and the continued optimism of younger people despite their college debts and the dismal employment situation. Mr. Obama has noticed younger people are happier with the current economic situation, and he has arranged many of his campaign appearances on college campuses. No one can accuse him of not being politically astute.