Rich man Romney wants to tax the rich

RETIII of the Daily Kos community discussed a recent op-ed written by Mitt Romney for the New York Times. Its title is Mitt Romney: Tax the Rich, Like Me. Romney looks to be retired now or at least retired from politics, though he had been a Republican senator, governor, and presidential candidate and is described as having lots of money, though not at the billionaire level. So, on to what he’s calling for. I’ll summarize both quotes of Romney’s statements and RETIII’s comments and add a bit of my own. The need for the government to raise more revenue or to cut spending is obvious if the nasty guy can add a trillion dollars to the national in just a couple months. Tariffs won’t raise enough. The biggest part of federal spending (beyond the military?) is Social Security and Medicare. There are endless articles about both programs being in fiscal trouble (though many of those are excuses to limit the programs). Mucking with them too much can bring great wrath from senior voters. One proposal is to raise the income limit on FICA. This supports Social Security and incomes higher than $176K aren’t subject to FICA. Romney supports getting rid of the limit. Along with that Romney wants to add a means test to Social Security and Medicare. In a sense there is a means test for Medicare. The higher your income the higher your premiums. But Social Security was designed as a benefit to all. RETIII understands why. If there is a Social Security cutoff or reduction then the rich will see it doesn’t benefit them. Increased FICA and they will pay more for a benefit they don’t get. If they don’t get it they will more easily brand Social Security as “welfare” and work even harder to undermine it. Romney calls for raising the retirement age because we live longer than when Social Security was enacted 90 years ago. But RETIII says working longer at a job that is physical labor is quite different than working longer at a desk job. Romney wants to eliminate tax “caverns,” what are usually called loopholes. One proposal is to eliminate the current practice of not taxing capital gains at death. Romney explains:

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario using Elon Musk as a proxy. If he had originally purchased his Tesla stock with, say, $1 billion and held it until his death, and if it were then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24 percent federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit. Why? Because under the tax code, capital gains are not taxed at death. The tax code provision known as step-up in basis means that when Mr. Musk’s heirs get his stock, they are treated as if they purchased it for $500 billion. So no one pays taxes on the $499 billion capital gain. Ever.

Romney mentions a couple more. I can think of more that RETIII doesn’t mention: Tax capital gains at the same rate as wage income. Raise the tax rate for the higher income brackets. RETIII’s conclusion and a few comments say why Romney’s comments are important. They get the debate started. Having a rich guy talk about taxing the rich is much more important than when a poor or middle-class person says the same thing. Much of politics is about persuasion and Romney has started his persuading. We’ll see how hard he keeps at it. Mark Sumner, Kos staff emeritus, commented that the nasty guy has long complained that Biden used an autopen a lot and claims anything signed by an autopen wasn’t officially signed. But the nasty guy is an autopen – between naps he signs anything put before him without reading it. Sumner calls him Grandpa Snoozy. Think about the large number of times he’s asked about something he’s signed and he says he knows nothing about it. That means his staff – including Russel Vought and Stephen Miller – are actually running the place. Well, no surprise there. And that means they will never invoke the 25th Amendment that allows the VP and Cabinet to declare the president incompetent, which would end his term. And perhaps theirs. Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the problem of the nasty guy’s executive order declaring fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. First, it isn’t – it isn’t so destructive as to kill millions in a single moment. Second, the chemicals that are used to make fentanyl also have other good and important uses, so banning them doesn’t make sense. Third, Venezuela does not produce fentanyl. Fourth, this isn’t about fentanyl. It’s about providing an after-the-fact justification for bombing Venezuelan boats. It also allows the Department of Justice to get the Department of Defense involved.

This looks like a pretty blatant attempt at getting a widespread permission slip for military personnel to be used in domestic criminal investigations, which is not great! ... There’s also the problem that the administration has reassigned everyone to the “brutally torturing immigrants” project, which means drug arrests have already dropped, and fewer new investigations are being opened. But rather than do those actual investigations and prosecutions, which is what should be happening if we face such a deadly scourge, this instead is an attempt to get full war on terror authority, a blank check for Trump and Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem to do anything they want, any time, anywhere.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Krugman discussing the nasty guy’s viciousness:

Yet, on reflection, I realized that there’s a story here that’s bigger than Trump, a story in which Trump is one especially egregious example of a larger pattern. What is that pattern? That being vicious and bigoted is cool, is based in current slang. Trump is one data point in the midst of an epidemic of performative hatemongering in America. And while most of this is emanating from right-wing extremists, not all of it is.

I wanted to see what current slang reflects bigotry. So I went to Krugman’s article. It doesn’t discuss slang, though it does chart the rise of antisemitism and does talk about the increase in people of the far right around the world who say vicious and bigoted things. In the comments bjkeefe posted a cartoon by John Darkow of ICE agents picking crops. One of them says, “I guess we should’ve seen this coming!” Almost two years ago, about the time of Epiphany, marking the time the Wise Men visit the infant Jesus, I saw the phrase, “grifts of gold, frank nonsense, and merch.” Now Graeme Keyes did another take. His cartoon shows three guys in red “MAGI” hats. They guys could be Musk, the vice nasty, and the nasty guy. Their gifts are “Gold, Frankly dense, and Mire.” The Naked Pastor posted a cartoon of a brown Joseph and brown Mary – they lived in the Middle East – yet the just delivered baby boy is white. Which is how Westerners see him.