Media villagers clutch their pearls over Harry Reid’s tax attack

August 7, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have previously posted about how the corporate media villager "fact checkers" like Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, PolitiFact of the Tampa Bay Times, and even FactCheck.org have "jumped the shark" in political fact checking, substituting their subjective opinions and political bias for, you know, actual facts. The Romney 'Fact-Checking' Scandal | Consortiumnews.

The latest shark jump by the corporate media villager "fact checkers" is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's allegation that he'd heard from a Bain Capital investor that Mitt Romney hadn't paid income taxes for 10 years.

It is fair to characterize Harry Reid's statement as careless, reckless, irresponsible, or unfair — it is an unsubstantiated claim from an undisclosed source of unknown credibility — but to say that Reid's statement is a "lie" is to assume facts that are not in evidence: Willard "Mittens" Romney's tax returns.

Yet this is exactly what the corporate media villager "fact checkers" have done. On Monday, PolitiFact gave Reid's claim its "Pants on Fire" designation. Based upon what evidence?

Reid has produced no evidence to back up his claim other than attribution to a shadowy anonymous source. Romney has denied the claim, and tax experts back him up, saying that the nature of Romney's investments in Bain make it highly unlikely he would have been able to avoid paying taxes altogether — especially for 10 years.

Reid has made an extreme claim with nothing solid to back it up. Pants on Fire!

There is only one definitive source of evidence: Romney's tax returns.

The Great Recession, Tea Party Obstructionism and Recovery

August 6, 2012

By Karl Reiner The Tea Party’s agenda developed during the tumultuous housing sector collapse that sent the economy into a tailspin.  Its adherents in Congress want to solve the federal deficit problem and other national economic ills by reducing government, cutting taxes and chopping spending.  The solution is flawed because it ignores the problems caused … Read more

The Romneys La Jolla McMansion got a property tax reduction

August 6, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: About that beachfront home in La Jolla, California, you know, the single-story 3,000-square-foot house that the Romneys are bulldozing to replace it with a 7,400-square-foot home and an additional 3,600 square feet of subterranean "trophy basement" with its own car elevators. The Los Angeles Times reports today, Romneys, caught in housing bust, … Read more

Romney’s ‘The Italian Job’

August 6, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Bloomberg News has a detailed investigative report into Willard "Mittens" Romney and "The italian Job" he pulled while he was at Bain Capital, before he "retroactively retired." It is not a very flattering portrait of this vulture capitalist. Romney Persona Non Grata in Italy for Bain’s Deal Skirting Taxes:

Mitt Romney skipped Italy on his swing through Europe. That was probably prudent.

That’s because Bain Capital, under Romney as chief executive officer, made about $1 billion in a leveraged buyout 12 years ago that remains controversial in Italy to this day. Bain was part of a group that bought a telephone-directory company from the Italian government and then sold it about two years later, at the peak of the technology bubble, for about 25 times what it paid.

Bain funneled profits through subsidiaries in Luxembourg, a common corporate strategy for avoiding income taxes in other European countries, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. The buyer, Italy’s biggest telephone company, now has a total market value less than what it paid Bain and other investors for the directory business.

In Italy, the deals have spurred at least three books, separate legal and regulatory probes and newspaper columns alleging investors made a fortune at the expense of Italian taxpayers. Boston-based Bain wasn’t a subject of the inquiries, which didn’t result in any charges.

The sale of the government’s directory business is “a dark chapter in the country’s privatization history, one that has hurt Italians deeply,” said Bernardo Bortolotti, an economics professor at Turin University who advised the Italian Treasury on asset sales from 2002 through 2005. “It was a mistake from the start, damaged by a lack of transparency and the use of offshore funds.”

A word of warning about your ballot

August 6, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: I noticed that some of you are posting photos of your completed early ballots to Facebook and Twitter. This may run afoul of Arizona law. A.R.S. § 16-1018 Additional unlawful acts by persons with respect to voting; classification, at paragraph (A) provides: 4. Shows the voter's ballot or the machine on which … Read more

‘Small government’ is already a reality – and ‘austerity’ is depressing job growth

August 6, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Tea-Publican candidates love to claim that the size of the government has grown under President Obama — probably because they heard it from some drug addled bloviating gas bag they listen to on the radio or they saw it on FAUX News Fraudcasting. But as Stephen Colbert said, "The facts have a well-known liberal bias."

The Atlantic reports We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years:

Since the official end of the Great Recession, America's public sector has shrunk. And shrunk. And shrunk some more. We've said goodbye to about 600,000 government jobs, handing the economy a nasty self-inflicted wound in the process. 

But how small has our public sector really become? Here's one way to think about it: Compared to our population, it hasn't been this size since 1968.

* * *

First, credit where it's due. The Hamilton Project has produced a beautiful graph illustrating the government employment to population ratio. As it shows, there are now fewer public sector employees per American than at any time dating back to the Carter administration (To be clear, we're talking state, federal, and local here).

To match where we are now, though, you actually have to head back to the days of LBJ. The graph below compares the number of government workers to our civilian, non-institutional population all the way to 1950. Again, we're right where we were in 1968.

So how badly has this actually hurt the job market? The Hamilton folks estimate that, if the share of government workers was back to 2007 levels, we'd have about 1.7 million more jobs than we do today.

I previously posted this chart from Ezra Klein, Public-sector austerity in one graph – The Washington Post: