Cutter: Yeah, we’ve been lying about the $5 trillion we said Romney’s lying about
posted at 12:41 pm on October 5, 2012 by Mary Katharine Ham
Here, CNN’s Erin Burnett takes Obama spokesperson Stephanie Cutter to task for leaving out half of Gov. Mitt Romney’s tax plan in order to claim he’s pitching a $5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy. What he has said is that he would like to lower tax rates for everyone by 20 percent, but that he would make his plan revenue-neutral by getting rid of some deductions and loopholes and producing higher economic growth. It’s perhaps understandable that members of the Obama campaign are utterly unfamiliar with the concept of higher economic growth, but simply ignoring half of Romney’s plan is dishonest.
As soon as Team Obama realized its excuse-making was getting embarrassing after the president’s debate performance, they pivoted to a replay of the response to Rep. Paul Ryan’s convention speech in Tampa. They can’t call either of them dumb, so they have to call them liars. In the service of that narrative, they either present mere philosophical disagreements as “lies” or they dishonestly represent parts of Mitt Romney’s plan to make him into a “liar.”
Until, inexplicably, the campaign’s most reliable fudger of facts decided to get all truthy when pressed by Burnett. Burnett starts pushing her at about 40 seconds, after the Obama clip.
BURNETT: Let me play this one and then get your reaction.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When I got on to the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.
BURNETT: Stephanie, let me ask you about that. Because here at CNN, we fact checked that, that $5 trillion in tax cuts and we’ve come and said that’s not true. Mitt Romney has not promised that. because he’s also going to be closing loopholes and deductions. So his tax cut wouldn’t be anywhere near that size.
CUTTER: So you’re disputing the size of the tax cut? Or are you disputing also how he’s going to pay for it?
BURNETT: We’re disputing the size.
CUTTER: Erin, he has campaigned on lowering tax rates by 20% for everybody, including those in the top 1%. that was one of the main selling points in the Republican primary.
BURNETT: So you’re saying if you lower them by 20% you get a $5 trillion tab, right?
CUTTER: It’s a $5 trillion tab.
BURNETT: But when he closes deductions he won’t be anywhere near $5 trillion. That’s our analysis.
CUTTER: Well with, okay, stipulated, it won’t be near $5 trillion, but it’s also not going to be the sum of $5 trillion in the loopholes that he’s going to close.
Cutter then pivots to arguing that there won’t be enough loopholes or deductions to remove from high-income earners to prevent affecting middle-income earners. That’s debatable, as both Burnett and Princeton economics professor Harvey Rosen note.
“If you are lowering the rates the way you describe, Governor, then it is not possible to come up with enough deductions and loopholes that only affect high-income individuals to avoid either raising the deficit or burdening the middle class,” Obama said. “It’s — it’s math. It’s arithmetic.”
Obama was basing his claim on a study by the Tax Policy Center, a project of the center-left Brookings Institution and Urban Institute. But there are at least three critical flaws the the TPC study: (1) it assumes pro-growth tax reform can’t actually produce economic growth, (2) it assumes two tax expenditures worth $45 billion per year are not ‘on the table’, and (3) it assumes tax reform must pay for repealing Obamacare’s tax hikes, rather than assuming that the repeal of Obamacare’s spending will pay for repealing the tax hikes. If one corrects these erroneous assumptions, the math checks out.
As Princeton economics professor Harvey Rosen writes, Romney’s plan would neither require a net tax hike on the middle class nor a tax reduction for the rich under “plausible” growth assumptions.*
The whopping growth rate required to make the math work? 2.29 percent, according to Rosen, which in a world before Obama seemed plenty plausible.
Cutter also complains that Romney hasn’t named specific deductions and loopholes, though the Tax Policy Center study on which Obama’s team is basing its claims assumes two big loopholes/deductions worth $45 billion are off the table for Romney, when they’re not.
Romney’s arithmetic and specificity are both more legitimate lines of debate than Cutter’s original distortion—ones, I might add, President Obama had more than enough opportunity to press Romney on when he was standing 7 feet from him Wednesday. Yet he declined to do so. Maybe next time, champ. But next time, Romney will have done significant work on narrowing the gap Obama had opened on the tax issue, and he’ll have Cutter’s “stipulation” in his back pocket.
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What did those concerns and alerts consist of, exactly? Without knowing that, it’s hard for me to get all outraged at the US govt. at this point.
It’s rather easy in retrospect to blame the FBI, but all they can do is interview the guy or keep surveillance on him, and they did interview him.
How does one predict that a guy will in fact blow up Americans at some time in the future?
If they knew back in 2011 or whenever that the guy was looking at radical Islamic web sites, what then? I’m sure there are other nuts in the U.S. today who are fans of those sites too, but are all of them going to blow up Americans, and how do you determine that, or which ones will do so, and when?
The part I find strange is that immediately following the attack on the marathon, one would think the FBI and other authorities would immediately go to a “Prior List ‘O’ Terror Suspects in the Vicinity of Boston” and skim down the page for names and start investigating those people, but it looks as though they did not do this.
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 3:59 PM
Tamerlan is being viewed only now as a suspect in light of the marathon bombings – prior to that, nobody suspected it. Last I heard, it’s still not been confirmed he is in fact responsible for the murders of the 3 guys in Boston.
Even if police figured “this looks like an Islamic style murder,” and even suspect that Tamerlan guy, how were they to know he would later blow people up?
A lot of men beat their girlfriends; those same guys don’t usually go on to make pressure cooker bombs and blow up spectators at sporting events.
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 4:06 PM
I’ve read that some Hindus in other parts of the world kill Christians.
Convert or we will kill you, Hindu lynch mobs tell fleeing Christians
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 4:20 PM
Maybe George W Bush only spouted the rhetoric about Islam being about peace so as to calm down the Islamic community worldwide?
Around that time, I remember a lot of people on the left were throwing a fit about not “profiling Muslim” (or Muslim looking people), how it was wrong for America to single out that one religion, etc., and some of the imams IIRC were already saying in the media in their nations that the USA was going to war against all Muslims, not just the Islamic kooks behind 9/11.
We’re talking about people (radical Muslims) who cause riots, burn property, and kill and rape people, over the least little thing, such as cartoon drawings of their prophet.
TigerPaw on April 24, 2013 at 4:31 PM
Actually his words were “… slander the prophet of Islam”.
Moreover you can only slander a person by speaking untruths, so it is perfectly OK to speak of Mohammed’s violent, cowardly, deceitful character, and his ignorance because that is the truth.
In order to slander the barbarian of Arabia you’d have to falsely accuse him of … well, that’s tricky … parking his camel behind a sand-dune reserved for use by disabled barbarians, perhaps.
YiZhangZhe on April 24, 2013 at 5:59 PM
CLICK!! and the light goes on over Ed’s head.
Look, there isn’t a cop or an agent or a fed out there that had any experience with the system who didn’t see this coming.
My buddy and ex-partner worked with them years ago during the Bush admin. He predicted every action that has been taken by the bureaucracy since the bombing. He told me Tuesday the day after, “They already know who it is, they had a file. The problem for them is explaining it. The efforts now will be all about CYA.”
He then went down a list over the next days pointing out what will happen.
1. The feds knew. They realized almost immediately who the bombers were. They didn’t know who else was involved (thus the false release of other photos). The first thing any cops does is pull possible suspects. How long do you think it took to find one Russia warned us about who lived two miles away, fit the description and had a young brother who looked like the second bomber? Hours? Maybe. Then there is the agent who created the file and his JTTF partner. They knew just by looking at the pics.
2. They were ALL ABOUT CYA up and down the line. The Obama administration’s ideology failed in Benghazi and now in Boston. The FBI is hogtied by new definitions and rules. The organizations, after all the power we’ve given them, still don’t talk to each other.
3. They will attempt to control the narrative. If you’ll note, every time there is a FBI investigation they always find a “cell” of more than one. However, if a bad guy gets by them it is always a lone wolf. Already the pliant MSM is being fed “they acted alone”, “they had no help”, blah blah while inside the investigation they are scrambling to find out just how big this is. We know it reaches into Dagestan and Russia. We know the mosque is involved. We know there is now at least one more person involved here. Yet, we get “move along nothing to see here.”
4. The Saudi was probably some rich spoiled kid secreted into the US on a speedpass by Obama’s people. That violates the law, which never slowed that Chicago crowd down. Now it’s cover up time. And as time passes, they’ll hope it goes the way of F&F and not Watergate.
5. The investigation will take two tracks. The real cops will be trying to solve it and stop the rest of the cell from acting. The bosses will be picking out Brook Brothers suits for their day in Congress and practicing a shocked dumfounded look in front of the mirror like the one Janet had the other day. “I’m Shocked, SHOCKED to find the system has failed again! We need to fix it. Yes, that is the course forward. Not fire anyone, not jail anyone for lying, but this time fix it!”
6. You have to understand just how serious this threat was to the Russians. To have them struggle through their bureaucracy to warn ours, repeatedly, even though we acted like idiots means they were scared for us.
That’s right. The Russians were more worried about our citizens than Obama.
Think about that.
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2013/04/24/conspiracy-no-taking-advantage-of-a-crisis-sadly-yes/
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2013/04/21/now-that-the-fbi-is-sweeping-up-the-cell-it-is-time-to-ask-how-they-missed-it/
archer52 on April 25, 2013 at 7:04 AM
Obama won’t even allow the FBI or DHS to acknowledge there is such a thing as an Islamic terrorist.
So how could we ever expect the FBI or DHS to stop any terrorist act under this administration?
Axion on April 25, 2013 at 4:47 PM
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