US Presidential Primaries

[h=1]Mitt Romney and Rick Perry accused of blatant untruths about Barack Obama[/h] Republican candidates criticised for TV ads that step over line





  • Chris McGreal in Washington
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 November 2011 14.29 GMT
  • Article history
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    Republican presidential candidates Rick Perry (left) and Mitt Romney have both defended their TV spots. Photograph: Benjamin J Myers/Corbis

    Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have been accused of telling TV viewers blatant untruths about Barack Obama.
    The candidates deny their TV commercials are deceitful and dishonest but both ads selectively quote the president to make it appear he is saying one thing when he is saying another.
    The advertisements have been widely scorned for crossing a line from a longstanding practice of political campaigns pushing the truth to its limits, over to misrepresentation. One ad appears to show Obama admitting he will lose next year's election if he talks about the economy. The other has him calling American workers lazy.
    Romney's campaign ad is airing on TV stations in New Hampshire, which holds its primary in January. It shows the president saying: "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."
    The ad appears to have the president admitting he is vulnerable on the economy. But Obama's words were from his 2008 campaign, and he was quoting a statement by a strategist for his Republican opponent, John McCain, who was the one on the back foot over the economy.
    Perry's ad shows a short soundbite of Obama saying: "We've been a little bit lazy I think over the last couple of decades."
    The ad switches to Perry saying: "Can you believe that? That's what our president thinks is wrong with America – that Americans are lazy. That's pathetic."
    But a viewing of Obama's full statement shows that he was saying the US government had been lazy in attracting foreign investment.
    Darrell West, director of governance studies at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Romney and Perry had gone further than previous campaigns in misrepresenting the truth.
    "Those ads are blatant misrepresentations," he said. "They are much more egregious than what we've seen in the past. Typically candidates have tried to be close to the truth because they know journalists are paying attention, but with all the problems of the news industry politicians have concluded they can get away with murder." The president's spokesman, Jay Carney, said of the Romney ad, which is the first TV spot of his campaign: "It's a rather remarkable way to start. And an unfortunate way to start."
    But the Romney campaign defended the commercial, saying they were merely turning the tables on Obama for having mocked McCain on the economy three years ago.
    Gail Gitcho, Romney's press secretary, said in a blogpost on the candidate's website: "President Obama's campaign is desperate not to talk about the economy. Their strategy is to wage a personal campaign – or 'kill Romney'. It is a campaign of distraction.
    "Now, the tables have turned – President Obama and his campaign are doing exactly what candidate Obama criticised [in 2008]."
    Perry defended his ad while appearing on Fox News. "That's a fair ad, absolutely," he told host Bill O'Reilly. "He said 'We've been a little lazy.'"
    O'Reilly challenged him by pointing out that Obama was talking about the government, "not the folks". But Perry brazened it out. "I think he's talking about Americans … I think that's exactly what he's talking about," he said.
    Romney's campaigners are delighted at the attention the controversial ad has drawn, giving it a wider audience than it would otherwise have had. They appear to have calculated that hitting Obama on the economy outweighs whatever damage may be done by charges of untruths.
    West is sceptical. "It plays to Romney in the sense that his ad is getting a lot of attention," he said. "But I think the Romney campaign is on very shaky ground to be running a false ad. Voters do pay attention to the veracity of ads."
    But West acknowledged that politicians are less concerned about being exposed by reporters. "Politicians think that the news media have completely collapsed, based on the financial crisis, and so they are acting as if there's no accountability and they can say whatever they want," he said.

    "They know the news media don't have the same credibility as they had in the past. They think they can say whatever they want and get away with it."
    Romney's campaign has also borrowed a historic campaign ad from Margaret Thatcher's 1979 election campaign that declared "Labour isn't Working" and featured a long line of people waiting outside an unemployment office. Romney's campaign has substituted "Obama" for "Labour" and called it a tribute ad.




 
Hata Obama naye ni muongo vile vile. Bonyeza hapo chini ujionee mwenyewe..
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[h=2]Obama's Parents met 4 years after he was born?[/h]It may be hard to believe but our President actually claims to have been born 4 years after he was born. Perhaps some kind of twisted turn on the Messiah story? See the evidence for yourself:
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if you believe this then you will believe anything...........
 
[h=1]Mr. Romney on Foreclosures[/h] [h=6]Published: November 26, 2011 [/h]




Since the housing bubble began to burst six years ago, prices nationwide have fallen by a third. Nearly $7 trillion of home equity has been wiped out. Currently, some 14.7 million homeowners owe $700 billion more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Going forward, prices are likely to fall further as banks put a backlog of foreclosed properties on the market. As home prices fall and more homeowners sink underwater, there will be more foreclosures and more price declines.


So what is Mitt Romney's response? Bring it on.
In interviews and in the Republican presidential debates, Mr. Romney has said that the cure for foreclosures is for the government to get out of the way and let the process run its course. Once prices hit bottom, investors and want-to-be homeowners would presumably swoop in and prices would stabilize.
The argument might have some red-meat appeal, playing off the notion that any owners who lose their homes are getting what they deserve. It is wrong on several counts:
Efficiency. Mass foreclosures are a rotten way to stabilize the market. They impose huge costs on neighbors, communities and local governments, and on the broader economy, as falling prices erode equity, depress consumer spending and mire the housing market in a deep hole.
Logic. Who does Mr. Romney think will buy up millions of foreclosed properties? Borrowers who lose their homes to foreclosure or who sell their homes for less than the balance on their mortgages can be denied credit for years; many will never be homeowners again.
Many college graduates, unable to find jobs, are moving in with their parents, not starting careers, not starting families and not becoming first-time home buyers. High school graduates are despairing of any economic toehold. Investors are inclined to buy distressed properties only if they believe home values will rise, a confidence that is hard to come by in a market that is threatened by more foreclosures and renewed price declines.
Danger. With the economy still weak and vulnerable to shocks, more foreclosures and the resulting price declines would only weaken the economy further.
Fairness. The let-it-crash argument conveniently ignores that the housing bubble was the result not only of overborrowing but of reckless lending too. When the bubble burst, the banks were bailed out, while speculators and uncreditworthy borrowers - whom lenders had aggressively pursued during the boom - quickly began to lose their properties. But the economic damage went far beyond the "bad" borrowers, as evidenced by deep recession, ensuing slow growth, high unemployment and crashing home values - all of which has now harmed millions of homeowners who never went near a subprime mortgage. They are the collateral damage of the banks' binge and bailout. They deserve help, not scorn.
That is not to say that every troubled borrower can be saved. Of the estimated 14.7 million underwater borrowers, 1.6 million are lost causes, according to Moody's Analytics. Many have already abandoned their homes, leaving them vacant, or are hopelessly behind on their payments, often because of long-term unemployment. This group needs policies to help convert homes to rentals.
Another 1.6 million underwater borrowers have missed payments because of a setback, like job loss, that may prove temporary. They could be helped with forbearance, allowed to make no or reduced payments for a time, and make up the difference later, or with loan modifications that result in meaningfully smaller payments.
The remaining 11.5 million underwater homeowners are current in their payments, but are at high risk of default, since they have no equity to cushion a financial setback and no incentive to keep paying, especially if prices go down again.
Loan modifications that reduce principal balances are the best solution, because they restore equity and reduce monthly payments. The banks would take a hit on principal write-downs. So be it. Refinancings, which the Obama administration is in the process of expanding, also help, because a new loan with a lower rate makes staying in the home more affordable. Mr. Romney has said refinancing is "worth further consideration." Investors in mortgage-backed securities will take a hit on refinancings. So be it.

At a recent debate, Mr. Romney was asked why he was willing to risk further huge losses in home equity by pushing foreclosures. "What would you do instead?" he replied. "Have the federal government go out and buy all the homes in America?"

No one is suggesting that. What is needed is a set of policies - rentals, forbearance, principal write-downs and refinancings - on a scale that tackles the problem.
 
[h=6]News Analysis[/h] [h=1]Team Obama Gears Up for 2012[/h] [h=6]By JIM RUTENBERG[/h] [h=6]Published: November 26, 2011 [/h]




AS North Carolina Republicans tell it, the Obama for America volunteers stole in under cover of night and stayed, undetected - noticed belatedly only because of election results across the state.

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[h=6]David Drummond[/h]

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[h=6]Doug Mills/The New York Times[/h] David Axelrod, senior political strategist

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[h=6]William B. Plowman/NBC[/h] David Plouffe, chief political aide

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[h=6]Sally Ryan for The New York Times[/h] Jim Messina, campaign manager


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"It was very scary," said Chris Sinclair, a strategist for Billie Redmond, the Republican candidate for mayor in Raleigh. "You don't know what's going on until you wake up after Election Day and go, ‘Oh my gosh, what happened?' "
What happened was that candidates supported by Democrats trounced Republicans in the Raleigh and Charlotte mayoral races this fall, and even wrested control of the Wake County school board from Republicans associated with the Tea Party.
It was only after the damage was done that local party leaders learned of the hidden hand of thousands of Obama for America volunteers and staff members. Never publicizing their work, they went door-to-door across the state, successfully getting their voters out to the polls in a highly effective dry run for 2012.
"I have said to all of my Republican friends, ‘This is real,' " Mr. Sinclair said of the Obama organization. "I've seen it; I'm coming off the front lines - it ain't fun and we better be ready."
Mr. Obama's aides point to the victories in North Carolina and elsewhere as vindication of their insistence that all is not as bleak for them as the Democratic chatter has it. But, in a series of interviews about their strategy for the year ahead, they also indicated that they knew they were in for a feisty slog, one that would look and feel quite different from Mr. Obama's first, uplifting presidential campaign.
Back in the short-lived "recovery summer" of 2010, Mr. Obama and his aides were looking at a version of Ronald Reagan's 1984 "Morning in America" campaign. Now, with unemployment stubbornly at 9 percent and consumer confidence at or near record lows, they are settling on a strategy that incorporates the combativeness of Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 drive, the anti-Congress zeal of Harry S. Truman's 1948 campaign and the disciplined focus of George W. Bush's 2004 blitz against Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
The result is not your college-age daughter's Obama campaign of hopeful, transcendent politics. If 2008 was about lifting Mr. Obama up, 2012 will have at least some strong element of dragging down his Republican opponent (who the campaign believes will most likely be Mitt Romney). If 2008 was about "Yes We Can" and limitless possibility, 2012 will be to some degree about why we couldn't ("Republican intransigence"), and why we shouldn't, at least when it comes to anything the Republican nominee proposes ("His party got us here in the first place"). As Mr. Obama recently told a group of supporters in the deflated liberal bastion of San Francisco, "The Hope poster is kind of faded and a little dog-eared."
David Axelrod, the president's senior political strategist, put it this way to me, "The country has gone through a very difficult time, and any incumbent is going to bear some dings for that." Expressing optimism nonetheless, he added, "It's a closely divided country, so by definition it's going to be a close race."
The Message
As his team sets out in earnest for Mr. Obama's re-election, they tried to find a guide in history.
So there was a session with the historian Michael Beschloss at a White House staff retreat at Fort McNair last spring, where he walked them through various elections of the past.
And the Obama campaign manager, Jim Messina, has studied the losing stay-the-course campaign of George Bush in 1992 and the winning stay-the-course re-election of his son in 2004.
The president's team has come to conclude that they are on uncharted ground - lacking the sudden jump in employment that preceded the Reagan and Roosevelt victories, yet not suffering through the inflation-heavy malaise of the Carter years.
It has left them with no easy answer to the hardest issue they will face: for all of Mr. Obama's promises to get the proverbial car (the economy) out of a ditch, joblessness has barely budged.
Mr. Obama's aides say he will argue that the worst economic outcome was averted and that the Republican nominee would reinstate policies that led to the crisis. In seeking to disqualify their opponent, they will have to be careful not to alienate critical independent voters, who react badly to negative campaigning.
The president's aides believe that they can promote the benefits of his health care law. Mr. Obama has already been doing that on the stump, noting that "an insurance company can't reject you because you've got a pre-existing condition." (The Supreme Court's decision to take up a challenge to the law creates something of a political jump ball, strategists with both parties say.) Team Obama also plans to promote the success of the automobile bailout, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the winding down of the war in Iraq.
But will this be enough, given the economy? One former Democratic campaign strategist is not so sure.
"They can say they saved the financial system, saved the auto industry, that he was the first president to ever pass health care - shot bin Laden - I mean, it's not like he can't point to some things," the strategist, James Carville, said in an interview. But, as of now, he said, "You can only talk about the economy: nothing else counts."
The Map
In 2008, Mr. Obama upended expectations about the national blue and red political map. He won in places where no Democrat had won in a while, including Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana and Colorado. And he won in quite a few states that Democrats cannot traditionally rely on, like Florida and Ohio.
Mr. Obama's team acknowledges that it is not likely that the stars will align as well for them in 2012. But, having won in 2008 with 365 electoral votes when 270 are needed, they believe they have 95 to spare next year. That buys a lot of breathing room. Mr. Obama could lose Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa and Indiana and still win re-election - though that would mean having to win just about every other state he won last time.
Mr. Obama's team has been heartened by polls showing him beating Mr. Romney in Ohio and Pennsylvania. But polls at this stage of a campaign, even those with the best methodologies, cannot be taken as reliable predictors for what may happen a year from now. And there are serious danger signs in Florida, Michigan, Indiana and Nevada. Mr. Obama's advisers are charting several alternative paths to re-election. They say they are intent on avoiding a map that comes down to one or two deciding states, like the one Mr. Kerry faced in 2004. So, Mr. Messina said, the campaign is looking to buy some insurance in states it did not win four years ago. "We continue to look at Arizona and Georgia as map expansion." (No Democrat has won either state since the 1990s.)
Mr. Messina also said the campaign would focus on holding on to the "New South" states of Virginia and North Carolina that Mr. Obama won last time. It has gone all-out with its plan to have the Democratic convention in Charlotte in September. One number in North Carolina is challenging his prospects there - 10.5, the state's unemployment rate.
Mr. Messina however, likes to look at another figure: 20,000 - the number of volunteer teams the campaign is building for get-out-the-vote operations in all 50 states.
The Organization
The e-mail went out from Mr. Obama's Chicago headquarters at 11 p.m., Eastern time, 10 days before this month's elections: "We have less than two weeks until November's local and state elections," read the exhortation, written by Mr. Obama's national field director, Jeremy Bird. "That means we need to ramp up our organizing work block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood." Depending on the state and the locale, the e-mail told Mr. Obama's volunteers to go to specific events in their areas.
Dissecting that e-mail and the campaign's organizing work, Rob Lockwood, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party, said, "Charlotte was a laboratory" for Democrats.
The extent to which the Republicans were outhustled there was stark. Supporters of Anthony R. Foxx, who won with nearly 70 percent of the vote, made more than 200,000 calls to voters; those of his challenger, Scott Stone, made 20,000 such calls, Republican officials told The Charlotte Observer.
Mr. Obama's campaign said all the credit belonged to volunteers who were already motivated to work against local Republicans.
But, with all the attention focused on the Republican primary, Mr. Obama's campaign has quietly worked to reconnect and reenergize its old supporters - and, acknowledging that some of its younger foot soldiers may not return next fall, finding some new ones. The campaign's brisk fund-raising pace - $150 million already, raised along with the Democratic National Committee - has allowed it to open campaign offices in all 50 states.
Campaign aides say that in spite of the attrition in the ranks, thousands of volunteers had remained engaged on the grass-roots level, and had been talking up Mr. Obama with neighbors and friends on a regular basis. Information on their contacts is sent back to headquarters in Chicago, where they are stored in a vast database that includes each person's concerns, pet issues and voting histories. (The campaign recently announced that it had made its one millionth contact with a potential voter.)
"We shouldn't assume that we can't run a better campaign than we did last time - this election is going to be closer this time, we know that," Mr. Messina said, adding, "We refuse to believe that we can't."
It is not the relatively sexy stuff of television advertisements or the nominating convention, but, aides say, it is what could make the difference between in a close race. "They will not lose this election because of organization," said Steven Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who worked on Mr. Kerry's 2004 run.
The Team
If Mr. Obama took awhile to find his campaign voice - if he has even truly found it yet - it may be at least partly because his team went through some early growing pains.
After serving Mr. Obama in the White House as a senior adviser, Mr. Axelrod went off to "detox" after the 2010 midterm elections, settling back down in Chicago and taking a little down time.
Mr. Axelrod has been Mr. Obama's chief political guru since Mr. Obama's 2004 Senate run. And when he re-engaged with the campaign in Chicago he found himself in a new position of being at a physical remove from his star client, not to mention from the flow of information that courses through the White House every day.
At the same time, the new White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, found himself outside of the campaign loop as he worked to get on top of his new duties overseeing governing from the West Wing, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
All the while, Mr. Obama's chief campaign technician from 2008, now his chief political aide in the White House, David Plouffe, was fully engaging with Mr. Messina, his old deputy in 2008, in Chicago. With strains from the campaigning-governing bifurcation emerging by the late spring, and seeking to build a new cohesion, the senior advisers instituted a series of monthly meetings in a downtown Washington conference room, where, over takeout Italian, they discussed strategy. Those meetings expanded to eventually include other important aides, including the White House communications director, Daniel H. Pfeiffer, the former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, the campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt and Stephanie Cutter, a senior adviser to the president.
"It's working very well," Mr. Axelrod said. "This is new terrain for everybody - before, we were all under one roof, and it took some time to adjust." Mr. Axelrod and Mr. Messina travel to Washington regularly to meet with the president, Mr. Plouffe and others, and speak with their White House counterparts several times a day. The team also includes other key aides from 2008, including the lead pollster Joel Benenson and the advertising strategists Jim Margolis and Larry Grisolano.
For all of the preparation, the campaign has yet to have the full attention of its star attraction, Mr. Obama. He has yet to visit the Chicago headquarters.
When Mr. Obama has hit the stump, he has acknowledged that this time will be different. "I know that I'm now a little grayer, and it's not as trendy to be an Obama supporter as it was back in 2008," he said in the recent speech in San Francisco. "We made a lot of change, but we've got a lot more work to do."

He has a year to see if voters will let him.

Jim Rutenberg is a national political correspondent for The New York Times.


 
[h=1]Woman Claims Affair With Cain, and He Denies It[/h] [h=6]By SUSAN SAULNY[/h] [h=6]Published: November 28, 2011 [/h]




An Atlanta woman came forward in an interview broadcast Monday night with details about what she called a 13-year affair with Herman Cain, the Republican presidential contender whose campaign was already struggling to overcome damage from accusations of sexual harassment.

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[h=6]Greg Bluestein/Associated Press[/h] "It was pretty simple," Ginger White said of the affair she recounted having had with Mr. Cain. "It wasn't complicated."

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[h=6]CNN[/h] Herman Cain went on CNN pre-emptively on Monday to dispute an Atlanta woman's claims.


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The woman, Ginger White, made the disclosure in an interview with Fox 5 News in Atlanta, becoming the fifth person to accuse Mr. Cain of improper behavior. Ms. White is not, however, claiming that harassment took place. Rather, she described what amounted, in her words, to a romance.
"It was pretty simple," Ms. White said. "It wasn't complicated. I was aware that he was married. And I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship."
Ms. White showed the news station some of her cellphone bills that included 61 phone calls or text messages to and from a number she said was for Mr. Cain's private cellphone. The contacts were made during four different months - as early as 4:26 a.m. and as late as 7:52 p.m. The most recent were in September.
The television station said that it had sent a text message to the number Ms. White gave it and that Mr. Cain had returned the call. In the call, Mr. Cain said that he "knew Ginger White" and that she had his number because he was "trying to help her financially."
Mr. Cain, speaking on Monday afternoon to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, acknowledged knowing Ms. White, whom he called an acquaintance, but denied having a sexual relationship with her.
"I have nothing to hide," he said. "I did nothing wrong."
Asked directly by Mr. Blitzer, "Was this an affair?" Mr. Cain responded, "It was not."
The accusations come as Mr. Cain's standing has been falling in recent polls with his campaign battling not only the earlier accusations of sexual misconduct but also the reaction to the candidate's trouble answering questions on subjects like President Obama's handling of the conflict in Libya.
In her interview, Ms. White told Fox 5 News that Mr. Cain had showered her with gifts and flown her around the country to meet him at various engagements after they met in the late 1990s in Louisville, Ky., when Mr. Cain was president of the National Restaurant Association.
After that first meeting, Ms. White said, she and Mr. Cain had drinks, and he invited her back to his hotel room, where they planned their next meeting. It went on like this for years, she said, until Mr. Cain began to seriously consider the presidency. She said their sexual relationship ended about eight months ago.
Ms. White said she came forward after seeing how Mr. Cain, a businessman who lives in Atlanta, treated the women who had accused him of harassment.
"It bothered me that they were being demonized," Ms. White said. "I felt bad for them."
She said she also "felt trapped," after a tipster alerted the local Fox station about her and other news outlets began to call.
"I wanted to give my side before it was thrown out there and made out to be something filthy," Ms. White said. "Some people will look at this and say that is exactly what it is. I'm sorry for that."
A lawyer for Mr. Cain, L. Lin Wood, released a statement about Ms. White's claim on Monday night. "This appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults - a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public," he said.
Ms. White is an unemployed single mother. Before the interview, Fox learned that she had filed a sexual harassment claim against an employer in 2001. That case was settled. The station also found a bankruptcy filing nearly 23 years ago in Kentucky, and several eviction notices in the Atlanta area over the past six years.
The station also reported that Ms. White had a former business partner who once sought a "stalking temporary protective order" against her for "repeated e-mails/texts threatening lawsuit and defamation of character." The case was dismissed, but it was followed by a libel lawsuit against Ms. White. A judge entered an order against Ms. White because she failed to respond to the lawsuit, Fox reported.
Mr. Cain went on CNN on Monday afternoon to pre-emptively address Ms. White's claims, saying, "I want to give you a heads-up and everyone a heads-up."
Mr. Cain took a nonchalant attitude in his attempt to get ahead of the story, saying he was not concerned for himself or his reputation. "I am more worried that this is going to hurt my wife and my family," he said. "I can take the lumps."
He refused to go into any detail about Ms. White, and also told Mr. Blitzer that he had already informed his wife, whose response was, "Here we go again."

Accusations of sexual harassment against Mr. Cain began surfacing at the beginning of this month, all dating from the years that he ran the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. Mr. Cain has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Asked on CNN whether he would consider dropping out of the race, as his campaign has been in crisis mode and off its message for weeks now, Mr. Cain said, "We're going to stay focused on this campaign."
 
[h=6]Op-Ed Columnist[/h] [h=1]Things to Tax[/h] [h=6]By PAUL KRUGMAN[/h] [h=6]Published: November 27, 2011 [/h]




The supercommittee was a superdud — and we should be glad. Nonetheless, at some point we’ll have to rein in budget deficits. And when we do, here’s a thought: How about making increased revenue an important part of the deal?

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[h=6]Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times[/h] Paul Krugman

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And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts? Why not also push some taxes above their levels in the 1990s?
Let me suggest two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions.
About those high incomes: In my last column I suggested that the very rich, who have had huge income gains over the last 30 years, should pay more in taxes. I got many responses from readers, with a common theme being that this was silly, that even confiscatory taxes on the wealthy couldn’t possibly raise enough money to matter.
Folks, you’re living in the past. Once upon a time America was a middle-class nation, in which the super-elite’s income was no big deal. But that was another country.
The I.R.S. reports that in 2007, that is, before the economic crisis, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — roughly speaking, people with annual incomes over $2 million — had a combined income of more than a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be hard to devise taxes that would raise a significant amount of revenue from those super-high-income individuals.
For example, a recent report by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out that before 1980 very-high-income individuals fell into tax brackets well above the 35 percent top rate that applies today. According to the center’s analysis, restoring those high-income brackets would have raised $78 billion in 2007, or more than half a percent of G.D.P. I’ve extrapolated that number using Congressional Budget Office projections, and what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit.
It’s instructive to compare that estimate with the savings from the kinds of proposals that are actually circulating in Washington these days. Consider, for example, proposals to raise the age of Medicare eligibility to 67, dealing a major blow to millions of Americans. How much money would that save?
Well, none from the point of view of the nation as a whole, since we would be pushing seniors out of Medicare and into private insurance, which has substantially higher costs. True, it would reduce federal spending — but not by much. The budget office estimates that outlays would fall by only $125 billion over the next decade, as the age increase phased in. And even when fully phased in, this partial dismantling of Medicare would reduce the deficit only about a third as much as could be achieved with higher taxes on the very rich.
So raising taxes on the very rich could make a serious contribution to deficit reduction. Don’t believe anyone who claims otherwise.
And then there’s the idea of taxing financial transactions, which have exploded in recent decades. The economic value of all this trading is dubious at best. In fact, there’s considerable evidence suggesting that too much trading is going on. Still, nobody is proposing a punitive tax. On the table, instead, are proposals like the one recently made by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio for a tiny fee on financial transactions.
And here’s the thing: Because there are so many transactions, such a fee could yield several hundred billion dollars in revenue over the next decade. Again, this compares favorably with the savings from many of the harsh spending cuts being proposed in the name of fiscal responsibility.
But wouldn’t such a tax hurt economic growth? As I said, the evidence suggests not — if anything, it suggests that to the extent that taxing financial transactions reduces the volume of wheeling and dealing, that would be a good thing.
And it’s instructive, too, to note that some economies already have financial transactions taxes — and that among those who do are Hong Kong and Singapore. If some conservative starts claiming that such taxes are an unwarranted government intrusion, you might want to ask him why such taxes are imposed by the two countries that score highest on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.
Now, the tax ideas I’ve just mentioned wouldn’t be enough, by themselves, to fix our deficit. But the same is true of proposals for spending cuts. The point I’m making here isn’t that taxes are all we need; it is that they could and should be a significant part of the solution.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 28, 2011


An earlier version of this column referred incorrectly to Hong Kong’s political status. It is one of China’s special administrative regions, not an independent country.
 



[h=1]Unemployment falls to 8.6% as US adds 120,000 jobs in November[/h] Jobless figures lowest since March 2009 – but Republicans say rate is still too high and Obama's policies are not working




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The government's non-farm payroll figures showed private companies added 140,00 jobs but cuts in the public sector led to the loss of 20,000. Photograph: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Unemployment in the US fell to 8.6% in November, its lowest level since March 2009, as private employers continued to add jobs at a healthy pace.
The government's closely watched non-farm payroll figures rose by 120,000 last month. Growth was driven by private companies, which added 140,000 jobs. Cuts in the public sector led to the loss of 20,000 jobs, the US Department of Labor reported on Friday.
The unemployment rate fell to 8.6% in November from 9.0% the previous month. The rate is the lowest since March 2009, when it was also 8.6%.
The drop in unemployment figures is a welcome boost for Barack Obama going into an election year. Recent political history shows that no president has managed to win re-election with unemployment as high as 9%, where it had been stuck.
In a statement from the White House, Alan Krueger, chairman of the council of economic advisers, said: "Today's employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. But the pace of improvement is still not fast enough given the large job losses from the recession that began in December 2007."
The Department of Labor revised its October figure to show a gain of 100,000 from a previously reported 80,000. September's numbers, too, were revised up to 210,000 from 158,000.
Some industries and some groups fared better than others: retail added 50,000 jobs, leisure and hospitality jobs rose by 22,000, and professional and business services saw a gain of 33,000. Healthcare jobs rose 17,000.
Although the White House can take no comfort until a clear downward trend in unemployment is established, it is a bonus for Obama in the short term in his battle with the Republicans over extending the payroll tax cut beyond December 31.
The president can conceivably claim that his policies are working and that failure to extend the tax breaks risks sending the downward trend into reverse.
Krueger said:"It would be a setback for the economy and American families if Congress were to allow extended unemployment benefits to expire at the end of the year."
Republicans in Congress are in a bind. As the party of tax cuts, they do not want to be seen as blocking the tax breaks, but at the same time do not want to support increased spending. Reflecting the confusion, the Senate on Thursday night blocked both a Democratic and Republican tax plan, with many Republicans voting to kill off their own party leadership's proposals.
Negotiations are underway between Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress to find a compromise that will allow the tax breaks to continue.
The House speaker, John Boehner, who on Thursday for the first time came out in support of extending the tax breaks, welcomed the unemployment drop, but maintained the figure was still too high.
"As you may remember, the Obama administration promised unemployment would stay below 8% if its 'stimulus' was enacted. That promise has gone unfulfilled," Boehner said.
One of the leading presidential candidates, Mitt Romney, told Fox: "It's very good news, obviously, going into the holiday season. People are shopping again. It's very good news that the unemployment rate is down. People are going back to work.
"But look: overall, the president's record on the economy – it's been miserable."
Ken Goldstein, economist at the Conference Board in New York, said the figures were encouraging but that the recovery remained fragile.
"We are not near levels that economists would call robust growth. There's a chance we could be there by this time next year," he said.
Goldstein said the figures added further evidence that younger men were finally finding jobs, but said the numbers for long-term unemployed remained stubbornly high at 6 million.
"This is good news on unemployment. Consumer confidence has been rising as well since the summer, but I think the lack of wage growth could put a damper on recovery," he said.
The unemployment rate for adult men fell by 0.5% to 8.3% in November. The jobless rate for whites (7.6%) also declined, while the rates for adult women (7.8%), teenagers (23.7%), black people (15.5%), and Hispanics (11.4%) showed little or no change. The jobless rate for Asians was 6.5%.

The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons – sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers – dropped by 378,000 over the month to 8.5 million.
Friday's report also showed Americans' hourly earnings declined by 2¢ to $23.18 in November. Wages are up by 1.8% over the past 12 months, below overall inflation.





 
[h=1]Herman Cain to make 'major announcement' about campaign[/h] As support plummets in Iowa and elsewhere, Cain to decide whether to stay in race after face-to-face talk with his wife Gloria





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Herman Cain speaks in South Carolina on Friday. Photograph: John Adkisson/Reuters

Embattled Republican candidate Herman Cain promised to announce Saturday afternoon at an event in Atlanta, Georgia, whether he will quit the race after a week in which he faced fresh sex allegations, saw donations begin to dry up and his poll ratings go into free fall.
Speaking at a campaign event in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Friday, he offered no hint of his decision, whether to battle on in the hope of recovering lost support or pull out.
"I am reassessing because of all this media firestorm stuff," he told the audience, adding that his wife Gloria and his children came first. He was due to meet Gloria at their home outside Atlanta late on Friday for their first face-to-face meeting since Atlanta businesswoman Ginger White claimed on Monday she had had a 13-year affair with him.
Cain told the audience he did not doubt that he retained a strong level of support among Republican voters. "Tomorrow in Atlanta, I will be making an announcement," he said.
His statement caught some of his staff off-guard. His campaign organiser in Iowa, Steve Grubbs, only moments before Cain's speech, denied there would be a major announcement Saturday.
Cain has demonstrated he is more tenacious than most candidates, carrying on in spite of a spate of negative reports that would have sunk other campaigns. He has survived four women coming forward to accuse him of sexual harassment. On top of this, his lack of knowledge of foreign affairs has been cruelly exposed in recorded interviews.
He said on Thursday night he would make a decision on whether to remain or stay by Monday.
Support for Cain has gone into a nosedive in Iowa, one of the key early states, according to a poll in the Des Moines Register.
The poll, published Friday, shows support among likely Republican caucus-goers has dropped from 23% in October to 8%. The first of a series of allegations that he had sexually harassed women emerged on October 31, but he appears to have suffered the most damage from a claim by White of a long-lasting affair.
The polls over the last few months have been volatile, and even now only an estimated third of potential caucus-goers have made up their mind who they will support. But the Des Moines Register poll has a good track record, being one of the few that was relatively accurate during the 2007-8 campaign.
Ed Rollins, who was campaign manager for the Republican candidate Mike Huckabee who won Iowa in 2008, told Fox News Friday that he thought Cain's campaign was effectively over and predicted he will quit the race over the next few days. "He is dropping like a rock," Rollins said. Cain could either get out or stay in and be clobbered, he added.
The Des Moines Register poll, carried out between November 27 and 30, was of 401 likely Republican caucus-goers. Iowa holds the first of the Republican nominating contests on January 3.
One of the most telling details in the poll is a sudden drop after Ginger White claimed in a television interview broadcast on Monday evening that she had had an affair with Cain. He denies it, acknowledging her as a friend he had helped out financially on a regular basis but insisting they had no sexual relationship.
On Sunday and Monday, 22% of those polled said he was the candidate they would most like to meet in person. Those polled on Tuesday and Wednesday showed a fall to 8%. Overall support for Cain stood at 12% on Sunday but had dipped to 4% by Wednesday.

Grubbs, Cain's campaign manager in Iowa, admitted that support for Cain in Iowa had slowed this week and the Des Moines Register's poll was not good news. But he told the Register that only 2% of the precinct captains needed to organise the caucus had deserted.

He said they had 901 precinct captains in place out of the 1,700 needed to get out the vote on January 3.




 
[h=1]Newt Gingrich gains after Herman Cain drops out of Republican race[/h] New favourite could hurt party's election chances as polls reveal distrust for liberal challenger Mitt Romney




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Newt Gingrich has revitalised his campaign for the Republican nomination. Photograph: Scott Mcintyre/AP

Republican strategists have long said that the party's search for a presidential candidate meant a choice between its ideological heart and its election-winning head.
As the first of the Republican primaries drew closer, there were growing signs that voters had sobered up from their indulgence of the Tea Party movement and were ready to plump for a candidate with a real shot at beating Barack Obama next year. That man was Mitt Romney.
Now it appears the heart might win out after all, in the unlikely form of Newt Gingrich. A career politician and former speaker of the House of Representatives, his sudden rise is likely to be strengthened by Herman Cain's decision this weekend to drop out of the race following revelations about his private life.
In the past months, other Republican candidates, including the Texas governor, Rick Perry, have risen to challenge Romney and then been dramatically brought down by public exposure of their inadequacies. But none took as strong a lead as Gingrich now commands on an anti-Washington, and fiscal and social conservative stance.
However, Gingrich is vulnerable to what rivals describe as his "serial hypocrisy" – for claiming to be a political outsider after decades in Washington, for being a paid lobbyist for corporations taking big government subsidies, and for his long history of adultery.
He drew stinging criticism recently for saying labour laws should be relaxed to let children work as school janitors.
Gingrich was confident that he is now the favoured candidate for the Republican nomination even before Cain dropped out.
"It's very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I'm going to be the nominee." he told ABC News last week.
Opinion polls consistently show that Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, stands a far better chance than Gingrich of beating Obama. Most surveys show Obama ahead of Romney by less than 2%. Against Gingrich, the president leads by up to 12%.
But the polls also show that many Republican voters are distrustful of what they regard as Romney's history of liberal positions on health care insurance and abortion rights, and his flip-flopping on those and other issues. Across the country, polls put Gingrich ahead of Romney by up to 20% among likely Republican voters.
One of the most recent polls shows Gingrich pulling away from the pack in Iowa, where the first selection of the Republican candidate takes place in caucuses next month. The Des Moines Register survey, taken before Cain quit, gives Gingrich 25% support among Republican voters. Romney, at 16%, is pushed into third place, 2 points behind Ron Paul.
Gingrich's support has also picked up dramatically in New Hampshire, the first state to have a full primary vote in mid-January, according to an NBC poll released on Sunday. Although he is in second place there, Gingrich has risen from just 4% to 23% support since October. Romney is still in the lead, with 39%. But his support is sliding dramatically. Cain was commanding around 10% support among Republicans before he dropped out on Saturday. Republican strategists expect the bulk of that support to go to Gingrich, who went out of his way to praise Cain within hours of his campaign being suspended.
But as frontrunner, Gingrich will come under closer scrutiny. He is vulnerable to accusations of being a Washington insider after his many years in Congress and then taking money as a political consultant for big business, and over his admission of serial adultery in two of his three marriages. A conservative Republican senator, Tom Coburn, said he will not back Gingrich after criticising "leaders that have one standard for the people they are leading and a different standard for themselves".
Paul called Gingrich a "serial hypocrite" in his latest campaign advertisement for being on both sides of issues such as global warming, and for taking money from the health care industry to back compulsory insurance while publicly opposing it.
Fellow Republican candidate Michele Bachmann recently attacked Gingrich as "memory challenged" over his denial of his previous support for amnesty for illegal immigrants.
But Romney is as vulnerable, if not more so, over changing his position. Last week he grew irritated in a Fox News interview at questions over his shifts on abortion rights, health care and other issues close to the hearts of conservatives.
 
[h=1]Herman Cain suspends campaign for Republican presidential nomination[/h] Former pizza magnate tells supporters he made the decision because of the hurt caused by false allegations against him




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Herman Cain has announced the suspension of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Beleaguered Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, whose effort to win the White House was rocked by claims of infidelity and sexual harrassment, suspended his campaign on Saturday.
Cain, a black former pizza magnate turned hero of the Tea Party right, told a crowd of supporters in his home base of Atlanta, Georgia, that he had made the decision because of the hurt caused to his family and message by allegations he insisted were false.
"As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching I am suspending my presidential campaign," Cain told the crowd, who had spent several hours gathered outside a building that was to have opened Saturday as Cain's national campaign headquarters.
Though Cain's popularity was already collapsing, the end of this campaign will likely be a blow to Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney, as Cain's remaining supporters are likely to go to another conservative candidate, such as former congressman Newt Gingrich, and not Romney who has a history of taking more liberal positions he has since disavowed.
Cain strenuously denied allegations of sexual misbehaviour that have been made against him and feverishly reported in the press but said they had deeply hurt his family. "It hurts my wife, it hurts my family, it hurts me and it hurts the American people because you have been denied solutions to our problems," he said.
Cain made the decision after a meeting last night with his wife Gloria; the first time the candidate had met his spouse of 43 years in person since the infidelity allegations had emerged. Gloria Cain joined her husband on the stage as Cain made his announcement, smiling and waving at supporters who chanted her name. Cain repeatedly denied that there was any truth to repeated claims of sexual harassment when he was head of the National Restaurant Association and that he had also conducted a 13-year affair with an Atlanta woman. "I am at peace with my God. I am at peace with my wife and she is at peace with me," he said.
The astonishing scene – not least because Cain effectively ended his presidential bid at a ceremony intended to open a huge new headquarters for it – likely puts a permanent full stop to one of the most unusual campaigns of recent years in America politics. His critics have slammed his bid as little more than a book tour masquerading as a run for the presidency. Cain has certainly spent less time developing the "ground operation" in key early states than some other candidates. But what was not in doubt was the excitement that Cain brought to conservative elements of the Republican base desperate to avoid the nomination of frontrunner Mitt Romney. Cain's radical 9-9-9 tax plan became a national talking point and forced some other candidates to consider flat tax schemes themselves. He also wooed audiences with engaging debate performances, his natural charisma and a gift for comic timing. Cain paid an emotional tribute to his supporters in his Atlanta speech. "Cain supporters are not warm weather supporters and I can't thank all of you enough for what you've done," he said. He also gave a typically barnstorming slam of Washington's political culture, which played into his image as a genuine outsider.
That sort of speech showed why he was able to tap into a deep well of Republican anger at government and surge unexpectedly in the polls throughout October. The flow of support saw Cain become a frontrunner in several key states and national polls, triggering a wave of scrutiny and intense focus from the media.
Cain and his campaign appeared deeply unprepared for their moment in the spotlight. First Cain himself made a series of embarrassing gaffes, including a complete mishandling of a question about Libya in which he appeared to struggle with recognising the North African country. But the most serious problems were accusations that arose from Cain's time as the head of the NRA. Several women came forward in a devastating series of revelations to accuse Cain of acting inappropriately towards them. It culminated last week with the appearance of Ginger White, an Atlanta businesswoman who alleged that she had a long sexual affair with Cain. The candidate denied that, though admitted that he knows White and had helped her financially.
Whatever the veracity of the many allegations now flung at Cain, what is certainly true is that they damaged his chances of ever winning the nomination. Cain's plummet from frontrunner to also-ran was as dramatic as his rise. A swath of professional political pundits slammed the amateurishness of his operation and top conservatives abandoned him for other candidates. His support in Iowa collapsed from 23 percent towards the end of October to just eight percent in one recent survey. During his fiery Atlanta speech Cain finished by saying he would still influence politics in the US by endorsing one of his former rivals and also by the creation of a new online organisation, called Cain Solutions, to promote his beliefs. He also admitted that he had made unspecified mistakes in his conduct. "I have made many mistakes in life. Everybody has. I have made mistakes professionally, personally, as a candidate … and I take responsibility for the mistakes that I have made," he said.
 

Herman Cain and the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee perform a gospel song in Cain's tent at the Ames straw poll at Iowa State University
 
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