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Mitt Romney's 5-point plan for the economy
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/08/15/romney-economy-plan/?source=cnn_bin
Helped by an all-star team of advisers - and now Paul Ryan - the Republican candidate maps out ways to stimulate business.
By David Whitford with Doris Burke
FORTUNE -- On the Friday after the Fourth of July, while the Romney clan was enjoying an extended midsummer break at the family manse on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee and photographers with telephoto lenses were snagging pictures of the candidate in swim trunks, real news was happening, unobserved, 100 miles away.
Nearly two dozen luminaries from the worlds of finance, government, and academe had gathered in secret behind smoked-glass windows in a three-story concrete office building on Commercial Street in Boston's North End -- Romney campaign headquarters -- for a meeting of the governor's recently assembled Economic Policy Steering Group. Some had only to cross the river from Cambridge. Others flew in from Chicago, D.C., and the West Coast. Tough duty in the middle of a holiday weekend, but as one participant says, anonymously, it was "for a good cause." Each had been requested by e-mail to "exercise discretion in keeping the contents of the discussion and the membership of the group private." Indeed, no one who was there will confirm for the record that the meeting even took place.
Lanhee Chen, Romney's brainy, combative chief policy director, presided. Among the attendees (a few phoned in) were five former chairmen of the President's Council of Economic Advisers -- Martin Feldstein, Michael Boskin, Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and Ed Lazear -- representing every Republican administration since Reagan's. Also present were Al Hubbard, the top economic policy adviser during George W. Bush's second term; Robert Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank (rumored to be a candidate for Treasury); Kathleen Cooper, the chairwoman of the National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford professor John Taylor; hedge fund managers (and donors) Robert Grady and Chris Shumway; philanthropist Marie-Josée Kravis (third wife of billionaire Henry Kravis); and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.
It's an all-star lineup, and groups like this one serve as holding pens for senior officials in waiting. Columbia Business School dean Glenn Hubbard, who wrote the foreword to Romney's campaign tract, Believe in America, and Mankiw, who teaches introductory economics at Harvard and wrote the textbook read by undergraduates everywhere, are among several holdovers from the 2008 campaign. There are deep ties to the Republican Establishment. (Ron Suskind, author of three bestselling books on George W. Bush's presidency, compares the list to the "repeating landscape on a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.") Some Ivy League, some University of Chicago, a lot of Stanford, especially scholars affiliated with the conservative Hoover Institution. And definitely no Tea Partiers or obvious allies of the vice presidential candidate Romney would choose several weeks later, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
The question about Ryan's selection is this: Does his presence on the ticket push a potential Romney presidency further to the right than it was before, or even give a vice presidential candidate unprecedented sway on budget matters? "My perception is that he has a very clean, free-market approach," says University of Chicago professor John Cochrane (who spoke to Fortune without acknowledging his membership in Romney's kitchen cabinet). "What I see in the choice is that they want to bring ideas to the forefront and not have the campaign be all about Bain Capital. And make the statement that this is a crossroads for America."
Romney's critics complain that he's not saying enough. That he's long on grand gestures -- rein in the federal government, unshackle the private sector, restore America's greatness -- but short on specifics. The critics are not wrong. Romney says, for instance, that he favors lowering tax rates but preserving current tax revenue. He says he can achieve that by "broadening the tax base" -- Washington-speak for closing loopholes and fiddling with deductions. But closing what and fiddling how?
During the second of two interviews with Fortune, Romney took issue with the TPC analysis: "They made garbage assumptions, and they reached a garbage conclusion." He said he'll model his approach on that proposed by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, chaired by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, and "will under no circumstances raise taxes on the middle class." But Simpson-Bowles achieves its revenue-neutral goal by gutting three popular middle-class deductions that Romney vows to protect -- mortgage interest, charitable donations, and health care expenses. Assuming Romney really does have a plan to pull off this feat of fiscal wizardry, he's keeping the details to himself.
I gathered as much during a Romney bus tour in June that wound through half a dozen Northern battleground states. Along the way I did meet some hard-core Romney backers, but they were the exceptions. At a rally in Troy, Ohio, Zelda Hockaday, 75, a retired lab technician and former Newt Gingrich supporter, told me, "I'm not sure yet," when I asked her why she was supporting Romney. "That's what I came to find out. The main thing is, he's opposing Obama."
Romney has staked his claim to the presidency on a simple pitch: that he knows business, and so knows better than Obama how to turn the economy around. He makes a leadership case too, with reference to the Salt Lake City Olympics, and will sometimes boast (selectively -- it's tricky) about his achievements as governor of liberal Massachusetts. But otherwise he's all business. "I see businesspeople as friends, not as enemies," he told Fortune. "The President has embarked on a campaign of demonization of people who work in the private sector."
Article is too long. Click on link for the rest....
Helped by an all-star team of advisers - and now Paul Ryan - the Republican candidate maps out ways to stimulate business.
By David Whitford with Doris Burke
FORTUNE -- On the Friday after the Fourth of July, while the Romney clan was enjoying an extended midsummer break at the family manse on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee and photographers with telephoto lenses were snagging pictures of the candidate in swim trunks, real news was happening, unobserved, 100 miles away.
Nearly two dozen luminaries from the worlds of finance, government, and academe had gathered in secret behind smoked-glass windows in a three-story concrete office building on Commercial Street in Boston's North End -- Romney campaign headquarters -- for a meeting of the governor's recently assembled Economic Policy Steering Group. Some had only to cross the river from Cambridge. Others flew in from Chicago, D.C., and the West Coast. Tough duty in the middle of a holiday weekend, but as one participant says, anonymously, it was "for a good cause." Each had been requested by e-mail to "exercise discretion in keeping the contents of the discussion and the membership of the group private." Indeed, no one who was there will confirm for the record that the meeting even took place.
Lanhee Chen, Romney's brainy, combative chief policy director, presided. Among the attendees (a few phoned in) were five former chairmen of the President's Council of Economic Advisers -- Martin Feldstein, Michael Boskin, Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and Ed Lazear -- representing every Republican administration since Reagan's. Also present were Al Hubbard, the top economic policy adviser during George W. Bush's second term; Robert Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank (rumored to be a candidate for Treasury); Kathleen Cooper, the chairwoman of the National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford professor John Taylor; hedge fund managers (and donors) Robert Grady and Chris Shumway; philanthropist Marie-Josée Kravis (third wife of billionaire Henry Kravis); and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.
It's an all-star lineup, and groups like this one serve as holding pens for senior officials in waiting. Columbia Business School dean Glenn Hubbard, who wrote the foreword to Romney's campaign tract, Believe in America, and Mankiw, who teaches introductory economics at Harvard and wrote the textbook read by undergraduates everywhere, are among several holdovers from the 2008 campaign. There are deep ties to the Republican Establishment. (Ron Suskind, author of three bestselling books on George W. Bush's presidency, compares the list to the "repeating landscape on a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.") Some Ivy League, some University of Chicago, a lot of Stanford, especially scholars affiliated with the conservative Hoover Institution. And definitely no Tea Partiers or obvious allies of the vice presidential candidate Romney would choose several weeks later, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
The question about Ryan's selection is this: Does his presence on the ticket push a potential Romney presidency further to the right than it was before, or even give a vice presidential candidate unprecedented sway on budget matters? "My perception is that he has a very clean, free-market approach," says University of Chicago professor John Cochrane (who spoke to Fortune without acknowledging his membership in Romney's kitchen cabinet). "What I see in the choice is that they want to bring ideas to the forefront and not have the campaign be all about Bain Capital. And make the statement that this is a crossroads for America."
Romney's critics complain that he's not saying enough. That he's long on grand gestures -- rein in the federal government, unshackle the private sector, restore America's greatness -- but short on specifics. The critics are not wrong. Romney says, for instance, that he favors lowering tax rates but preserving current tax revenue. He says he can achieve that by "broadening the tax base" -- Washington-speak for closing loopholes and fiddling with deductions. But closing what and fiddling how?
During the second of two interviews with Fortune, Romney took issue with the TPC analysis: "They made garbage assumptions, and they reached a garbage conclusion." He said he'll model his approach on that proposed by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, chaired by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, and "will under no circumstances raise taxes on the middle class." But Simpson-Bowles achieves its revenue-neutral goal by gutting three popular middle-class deductions that Romney vows to protect -- mortgage interest, charitable donations, and health care expenses. Assuming Romney really does have a plan to pull off this feat of fiscal wizardry, he's keeping the details to himself.
I gathered as much during a Romney bus tour in June that wound through half a dozen Northern battleground states. Along the way I did meet some hard-core Romney backers, but they were the exceptions. At a rally in Troy, Ohio, Zelda Hockaday, 75, a retired lab technician and former Newt Gingrich supporter, told me, "I'm not sure yet," when I asked her why she was supporting Romney. "That's what I came to find out. The main thing is, he's opposing Obama."
Romney has staked his claim to the presidency on a simple pitch: that he knows business, and so knows better than Obama how to turn the economy around. He makes a leadership case too, with reference to the Salt Lake City Olympics, and will sometimes boast (selectively -- it's tricky) about his achievements as governor of liberal Massachusetts. But otherwise he's all business. "I see businesspeople as friends, not as enemies," he told Fortune. "The President has embarked on a campaign of demonization of people who work in the private sector."
Article is too long. Click on link for the rest....
"He paid more in taxes, in the last 10 years, that all of us COMBINED will earn in our entire lives!!!"
Good for him...
"...Some 80% of Americans have an effective rate below 15%, according to the Tax Policy Center..."
"...For families making $50,000 to $75,000, the effective tax rate is 5.7%. From $75,000 to $100,000, it's 7.2%. And if you make $200,000, it goes up to 9.9%..."
GOOD middle class AMERICANS SHOULD have a LOWER tax rate. WE make this country......
Good for him...
"...Some 80% of Americans have an effective rate below 15%, according to the Tax Policy Center..."
"...For families making $50,000 to $75,000, the effective tax rate is 5.7%. From $75,000 to $100,000, it's 7.2%. And if you make $200,000, it goes up to 9.9%..."
GOOD middle class AMERICANS SHOULD have a LOWER tax rate. WE make this country......
"...For families making $50,000 to $75,000, the effective tax rate is 5.7%. From $75,000 to $100,000, it's 7.2%. And if you make $200,000, it goes up to 9.9%..."
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/16/news/economy/romney-taxes/
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/16/news/economy/romney-taxes/
"...Some 80% of Americans have an effective rate below 15%, according to the Tax Policy Center..."
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/16/news/economy/romney-taxes/
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/16/news/economy/romney-taxes/
Hey... 13% of $200Million is a TON of money!
He paid more in taxes, in the last 10 years, that all of us COMBINED will earn in our entire lives!!!
I'm glad he's proved Harry Reid wrong on THAT point at least.
So he HAS paid taxes in the last 10 years, directly contradicting what Reid said.
So... he exploited the same income-tax loopholes that I'm sure Reid, Obama, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, et-all-rich-people-all-over-the-United-States exploit yearly.
This makes me quite happy actually. Take THAT Harry Reid!!!
He paid more in taxes, in the last 10 years, that all of us COMBINED will earn in our entire lives!!!
I'm glad he's proved Harry Reid wrong on THAT point at least.
So he HAS paid taxes in the last 10 years, directly contradicting what Reid said.
So... he exploited the same income-tax loopholes that I'm sure Reid, Obama, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, et-all-rich-people-all-over-the-United-States exploit yearly.
This makes me quite happy actually. Take THAT Harry Reid!!!
TRENDING: Romney says he paid at least 13% in taxes for last ten years
cnn.com
cnn.com
WOW!! I kinda agree with you...Holy $hit!
Once again, a plan of hope & change, but no reference as to the HOW.
The Left has done it as well. They're presented a similar "this is what we're wanting to do", but there's never any mention of a HOW they're going to get it done.
Neither side has a darn clue how to fix the mess we're in.
If the Republicans win: the problem will get worse, but the rich will benefit and the middle class will suffer.
If the Democrats win: the problem will get worse, but the poor will benefit and the middle class will suffer.
Either way, the middle class is going to bear the burden of this mess.
The Left has done it as well. They're presented a similar "this is what we're wanting to do", but there's never any mention of a HOW they're going to get it done.
Neither side has a darn clue how to fix the mess we're in.
If the Republicans win: the problem will get worse, but the rich will benefit and the middle class will suffer.
If the Democrats win: the problem will get worse, but the poor will benefit and the middle class will suffer.
Either way, the middle class is going to bear the burden of this mess.
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