Romney’s Advice To The Uninsured: Go To The ER

By Sy Mukherjee/Think Progress

During a 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley on Sunday evening, Mitt Romney suggested that there are already adequate measures in place to protect Americans who lack health insurance. According to Romney, Americans should just go to the hospital to seek care, regardless of the crippling expenses they may incur without adequate health coverage:

PELLEY: Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don’t have it today?

ROMNEY: Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance, people — we– if someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care.And different states have different ways of providing for that care.

PELLEY: That’s the most expensive way to do it…In an emergency room.

ROMNEY: Different, again, different states have different ways of doing that. Some provide that care through clinics. Some provide the care through emergency rooms. In my state, we found a solution that worked for my state. But I wouldn’t take what we did in Massachusetts and say to Texas, “You’ve got to take the Massachusetts model.”

However, as Pelley points out, ambulatory care is extraordinarily expensive and shifts costs from often-uninsured emergency room patients into the overall health care market, effectively driving up everyone’s cost of care.

All Americans are entitled to care though the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act or (EMTALA), a law Ronald Reagan signed. It requires hospitals that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to treat patients for emergency medical conditions regardless of legal status or ability to pay. But EMTALA only applies to medical emergencies. “So, yes, if you’re actively giving birth, you can expect to receive care at an emergency room,” Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll explain. “If you’re actively having a heart attack, you can also get emergency room care. If you’ve been seriously harmed in a car accident, you can go to the emergency room.” Patients with chronic conditions that don’t require emergency interference — the millions of Americans with diabetes who need “regular access to medication to stay alive,” asthma patients, or women diagnosed with breast cancer — would not be able to access needed treatments.

Although Obamacare and Romney’s own health reform law in Massachusetts both overcome this hurdle by mandating and subsidizing health insurance for all residents, irrespective of pre-existing conditions, Romney no longer seems to believe that his own program — which has improved the lives of millions in Massachusetts while nearly eliminating the children’s uninsured rate in the state — is effective enough to be implemented in other states.

UPDATE

Romney has not always believed that emergency rooms are the best route for the uninsured. Back in 2008, Romney decried uninsured emergency room visits as “free riding,” declaring, “If somebody could afford insurance, they should either buy the insurance or pay their own way. They don’t have to buy insurance if they don’t want to, but pay their own way. But they shouldn’t be allowed to just show up at the hospital and say, somebody else should pay for me.” According to Jonathan Gruber, a close adviser and architect for Romney’s Massachusetts health care law, overcoming this “free-rider” dilemma was at the heart of Romneycare. “The guy has come completely full circle,” Gruber said.

Millionaire Mitt: It’s ‘Fair’ For Me To Pay Lower Taxes Than Middle Class Americans

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

Mitt Romney told CBS’s 60 Minutes that it’s “fair” for him to pay a tax rate of just 14.1 percent on his investment income of $20 million, a lower rate than someone earning $50,000 a year in wage income:

SCOTT PELLEY (HOST): Now, you made on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year. And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?

ROMNEY: It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.

PELLEY: So you think it is fair?

ROMNEY: Yeah, I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.

There is little economic evidence to support Romney’s argument that higher capital gains and dividend rates will discourage investment. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, the current very low rate of 15 percent, wasn’t enacted until 2003. Between 1986 and 1997 “long-term capital gains were taxed at close to 30 percent” and under President Clinton, the rate sat at 20 percent, while dividends were treated as regular income. “I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain,” Warren Buffet explains.

Indeed, investors continued to invest, despite the higher rates, and throughout the Clinton period, the nation actually saw stronger investment. So it’s difficult to take Romney’s argument seriously — both because history shows that the wealthy don’t need a capital gains rate 20 points below the top marginal income tax rate (currently 35 percent) in order to invest their money and because Romney himself believes he paid too little in investment taxes, choosing to forfeit $1.8 million in charitable deductions.

10 Questions Romney Must Answer About His Taxes

Seth Hanlon/guest blogger for Think Progress

On Friday afternoon, the Romney campaign releasedthe candidate’s 2011 tax return, which showed that he paid a tax rate of approximately 14 percent on more than $13 million of reported income. The campaign also disclosed that Romney voluntarily forfeited about $1.8 million in charitable deductions to inflate the tax rate he would have to disclose to the public. The campaign continues to refuse to release returns prior to 2010, flunking an accepted standard of transparency, first established by Mitt’s father George Romney, of releasing multiple years’ returns.

In a blog post, Romney’s lawyer and the trustee of his “blind trust” said, “After you have reviewed all of the newly-posted documents, you may have further questions.” Yes, we do. Lots.

Here are 10 unanswered questions about Romney’s taxes:

1. After the election, when the subject of your tax returns is outside of the public glare, will you file an amended tax return to claim your full deduction of charitable contributions? Was the tax rate you reported for other years similarly manipulated?

2. Why was your 2011 income $7 million lower than you estimated it to be in January? How does someone overestimate their income by $7 million?

3. Financial disclosures show that you have as much as $82 million in your tax-deferred Individual Retirement Account, despite the fact that tax rules limited contributions into such accounts to $30,000 per year. Did you lowball the value of the assets you put into your IRA, as tax experts suspect? And did you do the same with gifts into your sons’ trusts?

4. What was the purpose of your Swiss bank account and the myriad offshore entities shown on your return, based in countries like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, if not to avoid taxes?

5. Can you explain what one tax expert has called a “mysterious one-time infusion of foreign tax credits” in 2008?

6. You have not disclosed any foreign bank account reports (FBARs). Did you file all FBARs on all of your offshore accounts with the Treasury Department by the legal deadlines each year?

7. You claim to have paid an average tax rate of 20 percent over the last 20 years based on a flawed calculation. What was your real tax rate?

8. Your 14 percent tax rate –- not to mention the approximately 10 percent tax rate you would have paid had you not inflated it — is less than what many middle-class Americans pay. And you paid just 0.2% of your income in payroll taxes, while most Americans pay about 15%. Do you think that is fair?

9. Your tax returns show that the Marriott Corporation paid you $260,390 in directors’ fees in 2011. When you were the company’s audit committee chair in the 1990s, were you aware that the company was abusing a notorious illegal tax shelter?

10. You say you’ve made a “commitment to the public” that your tax rate should not be below 13 percent. If you believe that the richest Americans shouldn’t be paying an exceptionally low tax rate, why don’t you support President Obama’s “Buffett Rule”?

Romney’s lack of transparency on his tax returns is especially troubling given that he is similarly evasive on the details of his tax policies. From what we know about his tax plan, Romney would shower massive tax breaks on the wealthiest Americans, which means that it can only adds up with a major middle-class tax hike. How much will Romney raise your taxes in order to cut taxes for people like him? That’s the biggest unanswered question of all.

Fallout over 47% continues

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Romney Campaign Cautious With Ad Budget, Even in Key States

By JEREMY W. PETERS and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE/New York Times

Mitt Romney has had a light campaign schedule lately. He held his first rally in five days on Wednesday night.

And there is another place where his presence is oddly lacking: in the television ad wars.

Despite what appears to be a plump bank account and an in-house production studio that cranks out multiple commercials a day, Mr. Romney’s campaign has been tightfisted with its advertising budget, leaving him at a disadvantage in several crucial states as President Obama blankets them with ads.

One major reason appears to be that Mr. Romney’s campaign finances have been significantly less robust than recent headlines would suggest. Much of the more than $300 million the campaign reported raising this summer is earmarked for the Republican National Committee, state Republican organizations and Congressional races, limiting the money Mr. Romney’s own campaign has to spend.

With polls showing President Obama widening his lead in some of these states and the race a dead heat in others, Mr. Romney’s lack of a full-throttle media campaign is risky, especially as he struggles to get his message out over the din of news about his campaign’s recent setbacks.

In some states the disparity is striking. Mr. Obama and his allies are handily outspending Mr. Romney and the conservative “super PACs” working on his behalf in Colorado, Ohio and New Hampshire.

And in states like Florida, Iowa, Nevada and Virginia, where the Romney and Obama forces are roughly matching their spending dollar for dollar, the super PACs are responsible for nearly half the advertising that is benefiting the Republican nominee.

After three weeks of bad news for Mr. Romney — first that he received a negligible bounce from his convention, then that Mr. Obama was overtaking him in the polls and finally that he had been secretly recorded disparaging the president’s supporters as government-dependent freeloaders — the lack of a more forceful advertising offensive is one more way that the Romney campaign finds its message obscured.

Each day that slips by is a loss of precious television time in an air war that is only going to grow heavier and louder, making it difficult for any ad to leave a lasting impact.

“In a world where we know advertising imbalances lend opportunities for persuasion, it is surprising that any campaign would allow imbalances to continue,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. “Especially following several weeks of ad dominance by the opponent.”

Mr. Romney’s absence from the air made sense before the party’s convention in late August, since the campaign’s cash flow became so slow over the summer that it was forced to borrow $20 million to carry it through the event, when his formal nomination freed up tens of millions of dollars for the general election.

Yet at the same time Romney aides worked hard to project the image of a fund-raising machine far outpacing the president’s.

Romney aides released informal dollar figures that lumped several pools of money — some available for his use, others not — into a single figure, providing a perception greater than reality: $106 million in June and $101 million in July, far more than Mr. Obama and the Democrats.

Yet those figures obscured the fact that most of the money Mr. Romney was raising was reserved for those other political entities like the Republican National Committee.

And the party committee, which Mr. Romney helped propel to record-breaking receipts in July, is allowed to spend only about $22 million on advertising that is coordinated with Mr. Romney.

Even now, a large though unknown portion of Mr. Romney’s fund-raising is not going directly into his campaign account.

A closer look at Mr. Romney’s own filings revealed that Mr. Obama, while trailing in overall party fund-raising, was pulling far more money than Mr. Romney into his campaign account, the most useful and flexible dollars a candidate has to spend, in part because of strong collection from small donors who could give again and again without hitting federal limits.

Mr. Romney’s aides declined to discuss their advertising plans, saying that unlike the Obama campaign, which has reserved more than $40 million in time through Election Day, it will not telegraph its intentions for competitors to see.

As of the end of July, the Republican Party had an additional $15 million left to spend in coordination with Mr. Romney before it reaches its federal spending limits. And though no one knows the precise amounts, the Romney campaign will have millions at its disposal that it can drop into a television market at any given moment.

So far it is only buying several days or a week of advertising at a time, a sign that it is being extremely frugal. According to a review of spending figures provided by a group that tracks political advertising, from Sept. 10 through Sept. 24, Mr. Romney and his allies reserved $3.7 million in advertising time in Ohio. That compared with $5.2 million for Mr. Obama and his allies.

In Colorado, Mr. Romney is being outspent $2.2 million to $1.5 million during that same period. In New Hampshire, Mr. Obama is spending $1.2 million, compared with $380,000 to benefit Mr. Romney. The vast majority of that is coming not from the Romney campaign but from American Crossroads, the conservative super PAC.

Asked about the campaign’s budget on Wednesday, Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney’s finance chairman, said simply, “We have spent our money smartly and efficiently.”

Obama leads Romney among small biz owners, survey says

Austin Business Journal

The economy and job creation is the most important issue in this election for almost half of small business owners polled in a new survey, which also found thatPresident Barack Obama leads Republican challenger Mitt Romney by 47 percent to 39 percent.

The survey of 6,145 small business owners was conducted by the George Washington University School of Political Management and Thumbtack.com, the Business Journals reports.

Romney trails Obama in latest poll

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Analyzing the math behind 47%

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Mitt Romney will probably get 95 electoral votes from ‘moocher’ states. Obama will probably get 5.

 by Dylan Matthews/New York Times

Mitt Romney’s comments on the 47 percent of Americans who make too little to pay income tax and “will vote for this president no matter what” are causing him some political problems this morning. But could they cause him any electoral problems? Is he really insulting anyone who would already be willing to vote for him?

Actually, yes. The Tax Foundation put out this helpful map of the states with the highest and lowest percentage of people who don’t file income tax returns. The biggest non-filing states are — except Florida and New Mexico — solid red states:

Source: Tax Foundation

Three of the states with the lowest number of non-filers are solidly conservative: Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming. Two, New Hampshire and Virginia, are swing states. All the rest are solidly Democratic, including half of New England. All told, Obama gets 50 electoral votes from the “maker” states to Romney’s 9 — 17 are tossups — while Romney gets 96 electoral votes from the “taker” states to Obama’s 5, with 29 as tossups.

Now, granted, many of the non-filers in red states vote Democratic. As Columbia’s Andrew Gelman and others have shown, those making less are likelier to vote Democratic regardless of whether they live in a red or blue state. But in terms of the electoral college, many of the states Romney is taking for granted, and some of the states he’s working hardest to win, have the highest populations of “takers” he derided as part of the Democrats’ base.

Soledad O’Brien grills Romney aide: Your campaign is ‘just a hot mess’

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Romney adviser Bay Buchanan on Tuesday declared that the release of leaked campaign videos showing the Republican presidential nominee writing off 47 percent of the country as “dependant” and “entitled” was just a “bump in the road.”

In an edited video published by Mother Jones on Monday, Mitt Romney had told wealthy donors that almost half of the country “pay no income tax” and were going to vote for President Barack Obama.

“My job is is not to worry about those people,” Romney asserted. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

On Tuesday, Buchanan had the unenviable task of trying to do damage control while being grilled by CNN host Soledad O’Brien.

“As a candidate, he can’t worry about those he can’t get,” Buchanan explained, adding that the media should be focusing on “one out of every six Americans are in poverty today and that 47 million are taking food stamps in order to take care of themselves and their families.”

“Listen, I fully understand the strategy is to turn to the ‘real problem’ and talk about something else, but I’m going to keep you on this,” O’Brien said. “He says 47 percent of Americans pay no tax. That’s not correct. … Forty-seven percent of those people who pay no income tax — look at that chart there — 61 percent of those folks, they’re paying payroll tax, money is coming out of their paycheck. It’s being described as the myth of sort of the deadbeat nation.”

O’Brien continued by reading a satirical op-ed titled “Thurston Howell Romney” that was written by conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks: “The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.”

“So essentially, didn’t Mitt Romney in these leaked tapes bash his own voters?” O’Brien wondered. “Those are the people who are voting for Mitt Romney.”

“Honey,” Buchanan replied, “He recognized that more and more people are becoming dependant on government.”

“Aren’t the people he’s bashing to these wealthy donors, these are Republicans, these are white men with high school diplomas?” O’Brien pressed. “These very people are the people who are going to vote for him and now you have a major problem. … He’s not talking — 47 percent of the nation is not on food stamps.”

“It was inarticulate, I admit,” Buchanan said.

“There’s a sense that the campaign is in big trouble,” O’Brien pointed out. “Bloomberg [News] writes, ‘Today Mitt Romney lost the election.’ Politico says the wheels are falling off. Is that correct? Is it just a hot mess in there?”

“Certainly this is a bump in the road,” Buchanan agreed. “But is anybody looking at the campaign of Barack Obama? He’s spent the last week with America watching as his foreign policy of appeasement and apologies has disintegrated. We have problems around this world in all the Muslim countries, where anti-American sentiment is unbelievable. And that’s a good week?”

“But aren’t you kind of answering your own question,” O’Brien pointed out. “When you say, isn’t anybody looking at the campaign of Barack Obama, isn’t it like, ‘No because look at the headlines’? You’re drawing focus from your own campaign by these headlines.”

“No, that’s an indictment on the media, Soledad,” Buchanan insisted. “Is it not a story that one out of every six Americans is in poverty? Is that not a much bigger story, that 47 million Americans have to take food stamps to take care of themselves and their families and that’s because of four years of Barack Obama, and that he has no new fresh ideas on how to put America back to work? That’s what Mitt Romney’s all about, that’s what our campaign is about. That seems to be a whole lot more important than some comment that he may have inarticulately stated.”

“I appreciate your spin on it,” O’Brien concluded. “But I think ‘inarticulately stated’ is the least of the problems.”

Watch this video from CNN’s Starting Point, broadcast Aug. 18, 2012.

SCOTT BROWN SHUNS ROMNEY’S ’47 PERCENT’ COMMENTS

By Annie-Rose Strasser/Think Progress
Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is dissociating himself from Mitt Romney’s comments about the “47 percent” who he says “believe that they are victims.” In a statement to The Hill, Brown said, “That’s not the way I view the world.” Brown is following the lead of another Republican vying for the Senate in a heavily Democratic area, Linda McMahon. Like McMahon and Romney, however, Brown does not believe in raising taxes on the wealthy, and argues that Obama is increasing Americans’ dependency on government.

What Romney Won’t Tell You About The 47 Percent

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

The Romney campaign is in damage control mode today, trying to explain Romney telling wealthy donors in a private meeting that “there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

“These are people who pay no income tax,” Romney continued, in a video posted by Mother Jones. “My job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” But who are the 47 percent of Americans who currently have no federal income tax liability?

Mostly, they are either too poor to qualify for even the lowest tax bracket (but still pay federal payroll tax, and state or local sales taxes, gas taxes, and excise taxes), or they benefit from tax credits for the working poor, the elderly, or students, as these charts from the Tax Policy Center show. Only 7 percent of the country is non-elderly and has no federal tax liability, and most of them make less than $20,000:

Here are the reasons for those who paid no federal income tax reaching that point:

In 2011, payroll tax receipts totaled $818 billion, only $200 billion less than was brought in by the federal income tax. Those Americans who paid payroll taxes, but had no income tax liability, still pay about 15 percent of their income, higher than the 13 percent Romney pays.

As ThinkProgress has explained, more and more income has become concentrated at the top of the income scale in the last few decades, so the wealthy have paid a larger share of federal taxes, because they have a larger share of the income.

Romney is hardly alone in his contempt for those who don’t have any federal income tax liability (even though people who fall into that category disproportionately live in Republican states). Over the last few years, many Republicans have explicitly called for finding a way to make the poor pay more, so that the number of federal income tax payers rises.

Romney team in disarray

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Neocons Slither Back

By MAUREEN DOWD/New York Times
WASHINGTON

PAUL RYAN has not sautéed in foreign policy in his years on Capitol Hill. The 42-year-old congressman is no Middle East savant; till now, his idea of a border dispute has more likely involved Wisconsin and Illinois.

Yet Ryan got up at the Values Voter Summit here on Friday and skewered the Obama administration as it struggled to manage the Middle East mess left by clumsily mixed American signals toward the Arab Spring and the disastrous legacy of war-obsessed Republicans.

Ryan bemoaned “the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration.” American foreign policy, he said, “needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose.”

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption — it’s all ominously familiar.

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.

Senor is emblematic of how much trouble America blundered into in the Middle East — trillions wasted, so many lives and limbs lost — because of how little we fathom the culture and sectarian politics. We’re still stumbling in the dark. We not only don’t know who our allies and enemies are, we don’t know who our allies’ and enemies’ allies and enemies are.

As the spokesman for Paul Bremer during the Iraq occupation, Senor helped perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in American history. The clueless desert viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army, forced de-Baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency, and misled reporters with their Panglossian scenarios of progress.

“Off the record, Paris is burning,” Senor told a group of reporters a year into the war. “On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

Before he played ventriloquist to Ryan, Senor did the same for Romney, ratcheting up the candidate’s irresponsible bellicosity on the Middle East. Senor was the key adviser on Romney’s disastrous trip to Israel in July, when Mittens infuriated the Palestinians by making a chuckleheaded claim about their culture.

Senor got out over his skis before Romney’s speech in Jerusalem, telling reporters that Mitt would say he respected Israel’s right to make a pre-emptive, unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

While the Muslim world burned on Friday, Mitt was in New York with Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan confessing that he wears “as little as possible” to bed. With no global vision or historical perspective — he didn’t even remember during his Tampa convention to mention our troops or the years of war his party reigned over — Romney is simply kowtowing to the right again.

Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect, weighed in on Fox News, slimily asserting that President Obama should not be allowed to “slither through” without a clear position on Libya.

Republicans are bananas on this one. They blame Obama for casting Hosni Mubarak overboard and contradict themselves by blaming him for not supporting the Arab Spring. One minute Romney parrots Bibi Netanyahu’s position on Iran, the next Obama’s.

Romney’s cynical braying about Obama appeasement in the midst of the attack on the American diplomatic post in Libya and the murder of the brave ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was shameful. Richard Williamson, a Romney adviser, had the gall to tell The Washington Post, “There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation.”

He’s right — a scarier situation. If President Romney acceded to Netanyahu’s outrageous demand for clear red lines on Iran, this global confrontation would be a tiny foretaste of the conflagration to come.

Cheney, described by Romney as a “person of wisdom and judgment,” is lurking. On Monday, he churlishly tried to deny President Obama credit for putting Osama in the cross hairs, cattily referring to a report that Obama had not gone to all his intelligence briefings.

Well, yes. W. got briefings, like the one that warned him on Aug. 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” That didn’t work so well either, did it?

Romney accuses Obama of twisting the truth

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Romney: U.S. ‘middle income’ is $200K to $250K per year

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

In an interview on Friday morning with George Stephanopoulos for “Good Morning America,” presidential candidate former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) said that he believes that in the U.S., middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 per year.

During the interview Friday that Stephanopoulos asked Romney if he believes that “middle income” in the U.S. is around $100,000 per year.

“No,” Romney replied, “middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less.”

The U.S. census bureau reported on Thursday that the U.S. median annual household income in 2011 was $50,054 — that is, half of American households make about $50,000 or less. That number is down 1.5 percent from the 2010 median, declining for the second year in a row.

In a week that has seen Gov. Romney lambasted in the media for his grandstanding approach to the events in Libya that resulted in the tragic deaths of U.S. personnel, the salary gaffe could further an already problematic narrative for the Romney campaign, that the candidate is out of touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans in hard economic times.

Watch video of the “Good Morning America” interview, embedded below:

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Jennifer Rubin: Romney Surrogate Rallies To Romney

SIMON MALOY/Media matters for america

Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is defending Romney's attacks on President Obama over the deadly assaults on U.S. diplomatic personnel in Libya, writing that Romney's position is drawing support from "conservative foreign policy hawks."

Conservative foreign policy hawks, outraged at the media's circle-the-wagons reaction to the attacks on two embassies, are speaking out in defense of Mitt Romney.

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells Right Turn: "The perception of American weakness that provided the foundation for these attacks is largely because of Obama administration mistakes and lack of resolve. A repetition of 1979 in Tehran is nor fetched, especially given the weakness of Obama's statement this morning." He dismisses the media storyline as pure boosterism: "The press criticism of Romney's statement is so clearly at the administration's behest that they are giving lapdogs a bad name."

John Bolton is, of course, a Romney campaign surrogate. So the fact that he's defending Romney isn't exactly surprising.

Rubin also notes that a pair of American Enterprise Institute scholars are also rallying to Romney's side, as is Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). But they remain in the distinct minority, as many prominent Republicans are showing reluctance to echo Romney's attacks on the president.

Obama Has Equaled His Biggest Gallup Lead Yet Over Mitt Romney

Brett LoGiurato/Business Insider

President Barack Obama's lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney ticked up a point Wednesday in Gallup's daily tracking poll, equaling his biggest lead yet in the Gallup survey. 

Obama leads Romney, 50 percent to 43 percent. That matches his lead from the April 21-26 period, right after the general election began as Romney virtually locked up the Republican nomination. 

Obama's 7-point lead is up from 6 points on Tuesday. Romney dropped a point day to day. 

Obama's approval rating is also up in the latest daily tracking numbers. His approval rating hit 51 percent, above the 50-percent threshold that usually ensures re-election for incumbents. His disapproval rating is also down a point to 42 percent.

Romney exploiting tragedy for political points

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New Study Finds High-Income Tax Cuts Don’t Stimulate Economic Growth

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

Congressional Republicans and their party’s presidential nominee have both pushed plans to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans in hopes that such a move would stimulate the economy and aid the recovery from the Great Recession. A new study, however, indicates that tax cuts for the wealthiest earners fail to generate economic growth at the same pace as tax cuts aimed at low- and middle-income earners.

The study, conducted by Owen M. Zidar, a former staff economist on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a graduate student at California-Berkeley, examined economic growth in the states with the most high-income earners. Zidar reasoned that “states with a large share of high income taxpayers should grow faster following a tax cut for high income earners” if the tax cuts had the economic effect conservatives claim.

What he found, though, is that the effect of tax cuts for the rich was “insignificant statistically,” as Reuters’ David Cay Johnston reported:

“Almost all of the stimulative effect of tax cuts,” Zidar found, “results from tax cuts for the bottom 90%. A one percent of GDP tax cut for the bottom 90% results in 2.7 percentage points of GDP growth over a two-year period. The corresponding estimate for the top 10% is 0.13 percentage points and is insignificant statistically.”

Zidar’s study provides more empirical backing to what the U.S. has experienced over the last 30 years. Supply-side tax cutting policies have not led to the growth their Republican proponents promised. The Bush tax cuts, for instance, were followed by the weakest decade for economic expansion on record.

Still, Republicans, some of whom admit that the Bush tax cuts didn’t lead to the desired growth, are sticking to their ideology. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney proposed a tax cut that is four times larger than the Bush tax cuts; the GOP has fought efforts to allow the high-income tax cuts expire at the end of the year, arguing that doing so would dampen growth; and Republican governors across the country have pushed tax cut packages aimed at the wealthy even as their states struggle with budget shortfalls.