The saga over Mitt Romney’s finances keeps getting more complex. The latest involves his Individual Retirement Account.
The IRA was introduced as a means to encourage people to save for their retirement by putting away some money each year that was tax-deductible (up to a certain income level) and where the accrued interest was tax-exempt. The idea was that when you started withdrawing the money in your retirement, your tax rate would be lower because you were now in a lower income bracket. For most people, it is their IRA, coupled with the Social Security income, that they depend upon in their later years. [Read more…]
… it would make politics much more interesting.
The 1998 comedy Bulworth stars Warren Beatty and Halle Berry, with the former as a politician having some sort of breakdown that rids him of all his inhibitions and allows him to speak his mind. [Read more…]
Every presidential election something occurs that dominates the news over an extended period that has nothing to do with any substantive issue that affects any of us directly but consumes so much media attention that people seem to talk of little else. This year that issue is turning out to be Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and his objection to releasing his tax returns except for 2010, and for 2011 when they are completed. (It beats me why someone who must be paying an army of accountants to do his returns still needs an extension to file.) [Read more…]
Much has been written about Mitt Romney being booed by the audience when he spoke to them at their annual convention about repealing ‘Obamacare’. It was immediately obvious to me from his use of this label instead of the correct Affordable Care Act that he was deliberately provoking them to get this reaction. He has likely written off the black vote and now uses them as a prop to court white voters who see the black community as representing those who favor more government involvement in society. [Read more…]
One of the remarkable features of the modern Republican party and its Tea Party ground troops is their ability to spin on a dime and rally behind anyone they see as their own and defend them against all charges, even if it involves a total reversal of things they had previously held to be really important to them. [Read more…]
If you needed more evidence of the blatant double standards and hypocrisy practiced by the US government when it comes to dealing with Israel compared to countries that it does not like, this exchange between Associated Press reporter Matt Lee and State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland should settle any doubts.
They don’t even bother to pretend any more.
Those of us who have argued for a strict separation of church and state warned those who wanted the wall breached that if they were successful they should be prepared to live with Muslim and other minority religious encroachment in public life in those communities where those groups happened to be the majority or had significant influence. [Read more…]
In all the hoopla over the main verdict concerning the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act and the Chief Justice’s vote on it, two other important features have had less attention paid to them. [Read more…]