Linkmeister

Jonathan Chait points out the inconsistencies between Romney’s economics speech yesterday in Des Moines and the facts recognized by most of the rest of the sentient world.

In the real world, the following things are true: The budget deficit was projected to top $1 trillion even before President Obama took office, and that was when forecasters were still radically underestimating the depth of the 2008 crash. Obama did propose temporary deficit-increasing measures, an economic approach endorsed in its general contours, if not its particulars, by Romney’s economists. These measures contributed a relatively small proportion to the deficit, and their effect is short-lived. Obama instead focused on longer-term measures to reduce the deficit, including comprehensive health-care reform projected to reduce deficits by a trillion dollars in its second decade. Obama put forward a budget plan that would stabilize the debt as a percentage of the economy. Obama has hoped to achieve deeper long-term deficit reduction by striking bipartisan deals with Congress, and he has tried to achieve this goal by openly endorsing a bipartisan deficit plan in the Senate and privately agreeing to a more conservative plan with John Boehner, both of which were killed by Republican opposition to any higher revenue.

The story told by Romney is one in which all of these things are either untrue or could not possibly be true.

This is the line in Romney’s speech that strikes me as most bizarre: “This is why I do not, for one moment, share my opponent’s belief that our spending problems can be solved with more taxes.” Apparently, in Romney’s world (the world of great business success, he’s quick to remind us!), arithmetic is meaningless. If you increase your income, Mitt, that offsets some of your spending and the net result will be greater than it was if you did not do so.

Say you have two dollars of income and two dollars of spending. Your net cash position is zero (2 -2 = 0). Then say you add a third dollar of income. If your spending remains at a two dollar level, then three dollars of income minus two dollars of spending equals net of a dollar: 3 – 2 = 1. Thus, increasing revenue by a dollar means your net deficit falls by a dollar and your cash position rises by that dollar, all other things being equal.

Apparently in Romney’s world these basic principles are inconvenient and should be ignored.

In and of itself, the WaPo story about Romney’s attack on a long-haired possibly-gay kid in high school is pretty sickening, but it alone probably wouldn’t have much impact on how he’s perceived by voters in November. But it does show an early start to a pattern of behavior which should have some impact.

The punk rich kid who thought it was funny to charge a kid and forcibly cut his hair because he was “different” grew up to be a rich guy who concluded that it wouldn’t hurt his dog to travel a long distance on the roof of his car, a rich guy who “likes to fire people,” a guy who made his living finding “inefficiencies” in companies and destroying them in the name of “enhancing shareholder value,” and a guy who thinks Paul Ryan’s “granny-starving” budget is “marvelous.”

This is not a man who has much empathy for anyone not in his class. He would govern of and for the 1% of the country, and wouldn’t worry a lick about the 99% of us who aren’t included in that group. He’s essentially a “Richie Rich” or “Daddy Warbucks” without the publicly redeeming qualities those two characters have.

Alex Koppelman at The New Yorker sees the same thing I do.