We’ve directed a lot of attention to the deficiencies of the House version of the highway bill ( here and here ). We must also work to defeat the Senate version, which is even worse. The 2-year $109 billion Senate bill ( S.1813 ) offers no reform to mass transit and continues to mandate that states use 10% of their funding for wasteful “enhancement projects.” As bad as the House bill is for conservatives, the Senate bill is absolutely indefensible. Yet, amazingly, it was reported out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee with unanimous support from Republican members last year. Last night, it was approved by the Finance Committee. The Senate bill will spawn even larger deficits in the long-run. Even for the two-year authorization period of the bill, there will be a $35 billion deficit between trust fund outlays and gas tax revenue. Both the House and Senate versions rely on drawing down all existing funds in the trust fund to cover some of the gap ( to the extent that those funds really exist outside of an accounting gimmick). However, there will still be a $13 billion shortfall over the next two years (and much more in the long-term). The House bill relies on new royalties from oil exploration (that will never be approved by Democrats), but the Senate bill relies on phantom savings (from revenues that are already used to offset other expenditures) plus…you guessed it; tax increases. After the EPW committee approved the underlying provisions of the bill, the Senate Finance Committee voted last night to approve $7 billion in sundry tax increases to fund this terrible bill. One of those provisions includes a tax hike on inherited “stretched” IRAs and 401(k)s. Here are the details from the horse’s mouth ( Baucus Chairman’s Mark ). Require Distributions of Inherited IRAs within 5 years . Under current law, holders of IRAs and 401(k)-type accounts are required to begin taking taxable distributions from those accounts once they reach age 70-1/2. However, they can stretch those distributions over many years if they leave their account to a very young beneficiary. When the account holder dies, the taxation of the account is then spread over the life of the beneficiary. The Chairman’s Modification would require the retirement savings accounts to be treated, for tax purposes, as distributed within five years of the death of the account holder, unless the beneficiary is the account holder’s age, a child with special needs or older than 70. This provision is estimated to raise $4.648 billion over ten years. Hence, if someone bequeaths a retirement savings account to his grandchild, the beneficiary will have to liquidate the fund within 5 years and pay full taxes on the distributions. This applies irrespective of how young the grandchild would be at the time of the grandparent’s death. This ridiculous bill also transfers some revenue on tariffs from imported cars to plug the hole in the trust fund. The problem is that this revenue is already accounted for and is used for other purposes. This bill merely spread the same money around and uses the savings for multiple expenditures; not unlike the effort to use “war savings” as pay-fors. The committee report passed with 17 ayes, 6 nays, and 1 present vote . Here is the breakdown of the vote: Ayes: Baucus, Rockefeller, Conrad (proxy), Bingaman, Kerry (proxy), Wyden, Schumer, Stabenow, Cantwell, Nelson, Menendez, Carper, Cardin, Snowe, Crapo (proxy), Roberts (proxy), Thune Nays: Hatch, Grassley (proxy), Enzi, Cornyn (proxy), Coburn (proxy), Burr (proxy) Present : Kyl (proxy) Snowe, Crap, Roberts, and Thune were the 4 Republicans who voted for this travesty. The full Senate will vote for cloture on the tax hiking, deficit-spending highway bill on Thursday afternoon. We must defeat both bills, especially the Senate version. Nevertheless, the House bill is almost as offensive. Once we agree to the premise that we must overspend the level of gas tax revenue purveying the trust fund, we will always be exposed to future tax increases and bailouts to bridge the gap. Call your Senators and tell them to vote no on cloture for S.1813 – the highway bill with tax increases. Cross-posted from The Madison Project [ Follow @RMConservative ]
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Alert: Senate Republicans Vote to Raise Taxes With Highway Bill
[Posted by Karl] Jay Cost did a little mythbusting Monday regarding conservative support for Mitt Romney: The conventional wisdom is that conservatives are dissatisfied with Romney, whose electoral coalition is comprised mostly of moderates and even liberal voters. That might be true of conservative media elites, but the broader electorate of conservatives have been much more amenable to Romney. *** No doubt, Romney is dominating among moderates and liberals, but his haul is just as strong among “somewhat conservative” voters . It is only among the “very conservative” that Gingrich has a lead – although even this is much less than what one might have thought based on the way the media has been covering the story. RTWT, as Jay has plenty of insights about how Romney’s voter base has changed from 2008 and the potential strength of his coalition. It’s also a detailed example of one of Jay’s enduring truths of elections: strong partisans do not dominate the political process . I would almost be tempted to end the summary here, as people who are sufficiently absorbed with politics to be reading (not to mention writing) are likely those most in need of a reminder that we are not all that representative a sample, even of Repbulicans or conservatives. That message might be even more important the day after Rick Santorum sweeps Romney in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado (an impressive feat, but one involving low turnout caucuses where Romney did not camapign much). However, as useful as Jay’s analysis is as a tonic, I doubt he would claim it tells the entire story of the GOP primary campaign. Notably, Jay wrote earlier this month about the growing regional divide among conservatives : Those in the North and Midwest are more sympathetic to Romney, viewing him perhaps as one of their own. But when we turn Southward, the links between Romney and the right seems to be much more tenuous. What is so fascinating about this is that we’re talking about people in different states who answer the ideological question similarly. This is geography, not ideology . I’m not sure that last bit (emphasis in original) is entirely true, depending on what Jay means by it. It seems entirely possible to me that Northerners who self-identify as conservative do not always mean the same thing as Southerners do when self-identifying as conservative. And the same is possibly true of other regions. Indeed, based on last night’s results in Minnesota and Missouri, it’s not clear that the Midwest is as sympathetic to Romney as Jay may think. Minnesota ends up looking more like Iowa than Iowa, let alone New Hampshire, Florida or Nevada (where, as Jay notes, Mitt won 57% of the somewhat conservative voters and 48% of the very conservative voters). The easy explanation of some of these regional differences would be religion, but in examining that issue, Sean Trende adds the following caveat: “religion could be a stand-in for ideology, and that, regardless of self-identification, a self-described conservative evangelical Republican is significantly to the right of a self-described conservative who is non-evangelical.” In sum, while I basically agree with Jay that political junkies tend to overstate the case that Romney does not appeal to conservatives, I also think we should be careful when we throw around the conservative label. To take a more obvious example, many look at polls showing twice as many identify as conservative than identify as liberal without considering that: (a) some still self-identify as conservative Democrats and are likely more liberal than moderate or liberal Republicans; and (b) many self-identifying moderates are functionally liberal, but have fled the label. Relying on self-identification may be a necessary evil in political polling. However, in a nation as diverse and sprawling as the US, we need to always keep in mind the limitations of self-identification and the necessity of any candidate appealing to more than one type of conservative. –Karl
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Romney, conservatives and conservatives
Renee Ellmers (R-NC), took on Henry Waxman (D-CA) in spectacular fashion today in a joint House-Senate hearing on the payroll tax cut extension. “What you say is completely and totally incorrect.” Unfortunately a transcript is not yet available, but Rep. Ellmers takes the whole committee to task on ineffectiveness, useless rhetoric, and grandstanding, in a classic rant. It is especially satisfying to hear someone in Congress call out Democrats on their use of “emergency” rhetoric after failing to take care of any of our economic problems, or even pass a budget, last year. More of this, please.
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“Let me go on. I’m not yielding my time.”
Via DC Examiner: Republicans are seizing on President Obama’s flip-flop on so-called Super PACS, calling it his Kerry moment. “He was against them before he was for them,” said a GOP official. Republicans predictably sneered, but that only brought shrugs from the Democrats who argued that by not aiding their own Super PAC, they
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Dems: Republicans “Have Their Panties In a Wad” Over Obama’s Super PAC Flip-Flop…
[Posted by Karl] Calling SuperPACs a “ threat to democracy ” is sooo two days ago: On a conference call with members of President Obama’s 2012 reelection committee Monday evening, campaign manager Jim Messina announced that donors should start funding Priorities USA, the Democratic super PAC run by two former White House staffers, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney. The move was a remarkable shift in approach toward the independent political expenditure groups, whose role in the political process Obama has criticized and from which his campaign had sought to keep distance. *** Just seven months earlier, Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt assured, “Neither the President nor his campaign staff or aides will fundraise for super PACs,” according to the LA Times . BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski collects video of Obama’s attacks on the Citizens United ruling that made this spending possible, while Ben Smith recalls Obama’s earlier campaign financing hypocrisy in rejecting public funding: That 2008 decision wasn’t made entirely out of some reformist purity. Obama would go back on a pledge to take public financing, accepting the hit on his reform credentials (which was enacted solely on the Times editorial page) in exchange for a serious financial advantage over John McCain. And his team decided that outside allies — whether the 527s or the more traditional DNC independent expenditure, could only muddy up the purity of his very pure message. So what has changed? One major shift is that Obama faces an opponent whose rich friends really will pour tens of millions into outside groups, unlike the underfunded and relatively isolated John McCain. Josh Kraushaar laid this out in detail last week. Based on the 2011 numbers: [T]he combined Obama and Democratic outside group totals to $98.3 million cash-on-hand, with the GOP groups tallying $94.1 million. Take out the Democratic groups strictly devoted to congressional activities, and it’s a virtual financial tie. With labor and environmental groups poised to help Obama’s re-election, Democrats still could hold a narrow edge. But it’s hardly the cash advantage that would allow Team Obama to run negative advertising uncontested against Romney, without an aggressive response. It’s a far cry from the vision of a billion-dollar Obama re-election campaign bankroll that Democratic strategists are now downplaying. And it shows that the amount of time Democrats spent complaining and attacking the liberalized campaign finance laws before the 2010 midterms would have been better spent preparing for an infrastructure utilizing super PACs to their advantage. Priorities USA, headed by former White House spokesman Bill Burton, hasn’t yet shown it can compete with American Crossroads so far — and time is running short. This was really a no-brainer for Obama. In my experience — and his — there is no political price to be paid for gaming the campaign finance system. Politico’s Jonathan Martin and others will sniff and move on, just to make sure it remains a Beltway story. Indeed, it’s barely a “Beltway story” — it made the front page of the NYT, but not the WaPo . –Karl
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Barack Obama, Super-hypocrite on SuperPACs
