Matt On Mitt August 31, 2012August 30, 2012 CORRECTION: WEAPONS BANNED, NOT GUNS James Valente: “If you scroll down in the link you posted, you’ll see that an update/correction was subsequently posted. No guns were allowed in the convention hall by Secret Service, but the 7.4 mile radius refers only to ‘weapons,’ which did not, incidentally, include guns. (Tampa’s Democratic mayor requested the ban, but Florida’s Republican Governor refused to include guns.) I’ll refrain from commenting on the logic of all this, but assume you don’t want to be spreading a mistaken fact.” I do not. THE CRACKPOT CAUCUS Here. Do we really want to entrust the House committee that oversees climate change to a climate-change denier? At a 2009 hearing, [Representative John] Shimkus [of Illinois] said not to worry about a fatally dyspeptic planet: the biblical signs have yet to properly align. “The earth will end only when God declares it to be over,” he said, and then he went on to quote Genesis at some length. It’s worth repeating: This guy is the chairman. Remember, according to Rush Limbaugh, science is one of the “four pillars of deceit.” Have I mentioned Barney Frank’s preferred bumper sticker? WE’RE NOT PERFECT, BUT THEY’RE NUTS. RECORD-LOW WAGES, RECORD-HIGH PROFITS Here. Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. This is both cause and effect. One reason companies are so profitable is that they’re paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those “wages” are other companies’ revenue. — Business Insider RELATIVE PERFORMANCE Ohio Governor John Kasich told the Republican Convention Tuesday night that on his watch he had taken Ohio from 48th in the nation in job creation to 4th. He made a big deal of this, and attributed it to his cutting taxes (no mention of the auto-industry bail-out Ryan voting against that may have helped the auto-industry-dependent midwest rebound). The implication? A governor CAN boost his state’s job creation rank and SHOULD be judged by this. Which bears note, becausewhen Mitt Romney was sworn in as governor, Massachusetts ranked 37th in job creation. When he left: 47th. He had taken it down almost to the bottom of the heap. His Democratic successor has boosted it all the way up to 11th or so. So while Kasich was trying to promote a Romney presidency, the logical point he was making is that he, Kasich, had done a very good job on job creation; Romney had done a very bad job. (Romney supporters purposely miss the point and stress the low unemployment rate Romney’s Massachusetts enjoyed. But of course times were very different then — Romney left office two years before the 2008 collapse — and it’s widely acknowledged that a principal reason for Massachusetts’ low unemployment rate back then was that so many people left the state to look for work elsewhere. Kasich is right: what matters is relative job-creation performance. In Kasich’s case, from 48th, near dead last, all the way up to 4th. In Romney’s case, from 37th to an even worse 47th.) BUT HE RESCUED THE OLYMPICS! HE FIXED +THAT+ AT LEAST And do you know how? By getting a larger taxpayer-financed federal bail-out than had been required by all seven prior U.S. Olympics, combined. If that’s an argument for miraculous government-shunning job-creation skills, it’s not a great one. MATT TAIBBI ON MITT In Rolling Stone. Here. . . . And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth. By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. . . . And that’s the gentle part of Taibbi’s article. Taibbi writes with such heat and outrage that it will scare off, turn off, anyone who isn’t already predisposed to agree. After all, how could anyone as nice-looking as Mitt Romney — a good family man who wants to reduce the estate tax rate on billionheirs from 45% to zero — not be striving to achieve whatever is in the best interest of those less advantaged than he? But it’s worth a few minutes of your weekend to read it anyway. Decide for yourself whether Taibbi’s venom is justified, his tone appropriate, his world view skewed too far left — I’m not comfortable with all of it myself. But separate from that, what do you think of his account of, for example, Ampad? Of KB Toys? And what do you think: Is this the guy to whom we should entrust our future and, essentially, the weightiest responsibility in the world?
Lying August 30, 2012August 29, 2012 From the New York Times, on Tuesday’s convention speeches: . . . the Republicans’ parade of truth-twisting, distortions and plain falsehoods arrived on the podium of their national convention on Tuesday. Following in the footsteps of Mitt Romney’s campaign, rarely have so many convention speeches been based on such shaky foundations. . . . Conventions are always full of cheap applause lines and over-the-top attacks, but it was startling to hear how many speakers in Tampa considered it acceptable to make points that had no basis in reality. . . . We are becoming numb to this kind of thing. Down is up, up is down. But that is a terrible thing. Without honesty (Iraq did not have a role in attacking us on 9/11 even though 70% of the people who voted to reelect George W. Bush were made to believe it did; “by far the vast majority” of candidate Bush’s proposed tax cuts did not go to “people at the bottom of the economic ladder” as he promised they would) voters cannot make informed choices. And as the Times notes, it’s gotten worse than ever: President Obama has simply not waived the “work” component of welfare to work, but the Republican machine has decided they should just lie — with millions of dollars in TV ads and from the podium of their convention — and say he has. The President did not say, “if we talk about the economy we will lose” — he was quoting the staffer of his opponent — but that was snipped out to make it seem as though he had. The President did not say entrepreneurs didn’t build their businesses, he said they didn’t build the roads and other infrastructure that made their businesses possible (try starting the same business in Somalia, he might have added) — but the Romney team, needing a straw man to attack because the President has in fact an excellent record on small business, simply lies about it. I cringe when we do this, too, but it’s rare, and not remotely the foundation of our campaign as it is theirs. I can think of only one significant example — that clip we show where Mr. Romney says he likes to be able to fire people (without showing the context “who provide services [poorly]”) — but at least there is some (small) justification: Mr. Romney’s fortune has been made in significant measure by laying off tens of thousands of people, either by adding so much debt out of which to scoop huge fees and dividends that it bankrupts the company or by shipping their jobs overseas. So even if he doesn’t literally enjoy firing people, he’s sure profited mightily from doing it. Contrast that with the charges against President Obama, who stabilized a collapsing economy, rescued the auto industry, increased by 20% the work requirement of welfare states must incorporate in order to be granted waivers, improved the environment for entrepreneurs and small business people in numerous ways. (The very same woman who told the Convention how bad Obama is for small business turns out in real life to give small businesspeople a Powerpoint exploding this myth. See it here. “Bidding on government contracts has never been easier,” her first slide leads off.) FEAR FOR DEMOCRACY You’re not allow to lie in toothpaste ads. Claim your toothpaste reduces cavities by 38% and you’d better be able to back that up. But political ads? Lying is totally legal. As bad as Citizens United is for democracy — making a mockery of “one man, one vote” by giving billionaires vastly more “votes” than their fellow citizens — what really may doom us is that that ocean of ads they pay for can be complete lies. And largely are. And it’s not just the superPAC ads that lie. It’s also the ads from the candidate himself. As when candidate Mitt Romney approves the message that Obama is removing the “work” component of welfare to work. Mitt Romney lies every time he approves that message. Well, he’s telling the truth that “he’s Mitt Romney” and that “he approved this message”; but the message itself is a complete straight-out lie. Shouldn’t that matter?
Doubling the Dow August 29, 2012August 28, 2012 REPUBLICANS RELY ON GOVERNMENT, BAN GUNS Of all the places to impose a 7-square-mile ban on guns! How weird. Don’t Republicans know guns don’t kill people, people kill people? They should be banning people, not guns, from their convention. The ironies abound. AND IN RELATED NEWS This fake video from the Onion News Network is so X-rated I won’t provide the link, just the headline: “Tampa Bay Gay Prostitutes Gearing Up For Flood Of Closeted Republicans.” MORE FROM THE ECONOMIST Adding to yesterday’s excerpt: . . . In theory, Mr Romney has a detailed 59-point economic plan. In practice, it ignores virtually all the difficult or interesting questions . . . A businessman without a credible plan to fix a problem stops being a credible businessman. So does a businessman who tells you one thing at breakfast and the opposite at supper. . . . WHAT HAS OBAMA DONE? James Musters: “Here Are 200 Accomplishments. With Citations! Well organized and presented.” Not included — as it’s not something the Obama Administration has directly done — is the performance of the stock market. But it’s relevant, because the market is a barometer of how investors feel about the future. From the day George W. Bush was inaugurated to the day he left office — eight years of Republican stewardship — the Dow fell 20% and was headed lower fast. It would fall a further 20% to bottom out at 6,500 six weeks later. Investors feared a terrible future. Yet from that bottom just six weeks after President Obama was sworn in, the Dow has doubled. Doubled. This suggests investors see a brighter future. I worry that the market’s no bargain here — especially because there’s a real chance the Republicans may win in November and impose the austerity budget they are so deeply committed to, out-Hoovering Hoover and sending the world economy over the cliff. But right now, after nearly 4 years of the President’s stewardship, investors look into the future with double the optimism they displayed (if the Dow is a measure of investor optimism) just six weeks after he was handed the reins. Given what he was handed, it seems to me that counts as an accomplishment, too.
From the Economist to the Christian Science Monitor August 28, 2012August 27, 2012 THE ECONOMIST “Too much about the Republican candidate for the presidency is far too mysterious,” says The Economist. When Mitt Romney was governor of liberal Massachusetts, he supported abortion, gun control, tackling climate change and a requirement that everyone should buy health insurance, backed up with generous subsidies for those who could not afford it. Now, as he prepares to fly to Tampa to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president on August 30th, he opposes all those things. A year ago he favoured keeping income taxes at their current levels; now he wants to slash them for everybody, with the rate falling from 35% to 28% for the richest Americans. All politicians flip-flop from time to time; but Mr Romney could win an Olympic medal in it (see article). And that is a pity, because this newspaper finds much to like in the history of this uncharismatic but dogged man, from his obvious business acumen to the way he worked across the political aisle as governor to get health reform passed and the state budget deficit down. We share many of his views about the excessive growth of regulation and of the state in general in America, and the effect that this has on investment, productivity and growth. After four years of soaring oratory and intermittent reforms, why not bring in a more businesslike figure who might start fixing the problems with America’s finances? But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper. . . . ROMNEY’S LYING MACHINE Robert Reich, here, in the Christian Science Monitor: I’ve been struck by the baldness of Romney’s repetitive lies about Obama — that Obama ended the work requirement under welfare, for example, or that Obama’s Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare benefits. The mainstream media along with a half-dozen independent fact-checking organizations and sites have called Romney on these whoppers, but to no avail. He keeps making these assertions. Every campaign is guilty of exaggerations, embellishments, distortions, and half-truths. But this is another thing altogether. I’ve been directly involved in seven presidential campaigns, and I don’t recall a presidential candidate lying with such audacity, over and over again. Why does he do it, and how can he get away with it? The obvious answer is such lies are effective. Polls show voters are starting to believe them, especially in swing states where they’re being repeated constantly in media spots financed by Romney’s super PAC or ancillary PACs and so-called “social welfare” organizations (political fronts disguised as charities, such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have set up). Romney’s lying machine is extraordinarily well financed. By August, according to Jane Mayer in her recent New Yorker article, at least 33 billionaires had each donated a quarter of a million dollars or more to groups aiming to defeat Obama – with most of it flooding into attack ads in swing states. . . . We knew he was a cypher — that he’ll say and do whatever is expedient, change positions like a chameleon, eschew any core principles.Yet resorting to outright lies — and organizing a presidential campaign around a series of lies — reveals a whole new level of cynicism, a profound disdain for what remains of civility in public life, and a disrespect of the democratic process. The question is whether someone who is willing to resort to such calculated lies, and build a campaign machine around them, can be worthy of the public’s trust with the most powerful office in the world. And now, by contrast, a guy who tells you what he really thinks: TALK SHOW HOST GETS AN EARFUL James Musters: “A Tea Partier Decided To Pick A Fight With A Foreign President. It Didn’t Go So Well. Listen to the audio.” This is some four minutes! Hats off to the Irish.
Quick Hits August 27, 2012December 29, 2016 THESE GUYS Watch. The pay-off comes in 80 seconds. THERE’S A SITE CALLED YIDDISH CURSES FOR REPUBLICAN JEWS Well, of course there is. (Sample curse: “May you live to a hundred and twenty without Social Security or Medicare.” Or how about: “May the secretary your husband is schtupping depend on Planned Parenthood for her birth control.”) unPAC Too much money in politics? Watch this 3-minute video and see what YOU think. I signed up. PAUL RYAN’S ANA-GRANDMA If you take the letters of author AYN RAND and move them around a little you get (tell me there is not something greater than coincidence operating here) AYN RAND AND RYAN. Ayn Rand is Paul Ryan’s spiritual anagram. And if you’ve read Atlas Shrugged (which robust-memoried readers may recall I listened to on audible as I walked 120 miles), you will find Michael Kinsley’s send up . . . completely delicious. (“Paul Ryan laughed. He stood naked on top of the vice president’s desk in the Senate chamber, scanning the crowd of sniveling politicians below him. . . . It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that of all the men and women in this room, only he, Paul Ryan, had been selected for his current office by the president himself. The president. Ryan’s mind wandered as he thought about the only man who stood between him and absolute power. Mitt Romney was a weakling, Ryan thought — and not for the first time. He’s a man whose views can change. The thought filled Ryan with disgust. His own views were as solid as granite. They were the views of the only clear-thinking woman he had ever met: Ayn Rand. . . .“) BUMPER STICKER Barney Frank sums it up with this bumper sticker he had printed: “Vote Democratic: We’re not perfect but they’re nuts.”
A Weekend’s Entertainment August 24, 2012August 24, 2012 Four videos today. Let’s start with this one. Short, funny, and topical: HOW TO SPOT LEGITIMATE RAPE – 2 Minutes Evelyn MacPhee: “I adore this song. I am sending it to 60 of my closest friends.” Next up: FLIP FLOP MAN – 6 Minutes No one should be criticized for changing his mind as circumstances change or as he evolves in his thinking. Indeed, we should welcome evolved thinking — when it’s sincere. But, this guy? Allen Brand: “If you haven’t seen this . . .” Awesome. A 92-year-old World War II vet and retired North Dakota judge — in uniform, no less — reads the poem he wrote (text included, if you have any trouble hearing him) . . . O, Romney-O, Romney-O, Wherefore art thou, Romney-O? (If you have 20 minutes more, John Seiffer points us to “the ultimate Romney flip-flop collection.” You will be forgiven for not watching — we get it: he takes flip-flopping to an entirely new level — but just so you have it.) And now: THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES 3 minutes Well, the movie isn’t three minutes, but this trailer is. And if you can find the movie itself someplace (your hotel room?), take another hour-forty to watch the whole thing (94% of Rotten Tomatoes-approved critics liked it). It is the story of the Time Share King (you will never again even think about investing in a time share) and his young wife — basically nice people with absolutely no regard for anyone but themselves — and, tangentially, of their large brood of dreadful children and dogs, one of whom she has stuffed and keeps on display after it expires (dog not child) — who set out to build a 90,000-square-foot single-family house, the largest in America . . . and who basically epitomize all the excesses of inequality and personal consumption and salesmanship and leverage that have taken such a toll. (One nice touch: the Time Share King says he delivered Florida for George W. Bush in 2000, though he declines to say how because, he says, it may not have been legal.) Finally: DAN SAVAGE DEBATES THE MAN FROM N.O.M. – One Hour So what happens when perhaps the nation’s most articulate equality advocate, a lapsed Catholic, has an after-dinner debate with perhaps the nation’s leading anti-marriage-equality advocate? Watch — it makes for snappy video — or read the New York Times account (by the debate moderator) here. Have a great weekend.
Grandma August 23, 2012August 22, 2012 ROMNEY AND YOUR GRANDMOTHER Some helpful reporting by the New York Times, as swing-state voters are assaulted by dishonest Romney ads (emphasis added): Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say. Mitt Romney’s promise to restore $716 billion that he says President Obama “robbed” from Medicare has some health care experts puzzled, and not just because his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, included the same savings in his House budgets. The 2010 health care law cut Medicare reimbursements to hospitals and insurers, not benefits for older Americans, by that amount over the coming decade. But repealing the savings, policy analysts say, would hasten the insolvency of Medicare by eight years — to 2016, the final year of the next presidential term, from 2024. . . . Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr. Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.” Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at the American Institutes for Research, calculated that restoring the $716 billion in Medicare savings would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries . . . . . . “One can only wonder what’s going on inside their headquarters in Boston and among their policy people,” said John McDonough, the director of the Center for Public Health Leadership at Harvard. “But there are only two explanations: Either they don’t understand how the program works, which is hard to imagine, or there is some deliberate misrepresentation here because they know how politically potent this charge is.” Read it all here. IF SHE WEARS GLASSES The cool kids are wearing Warby Parkers. And saving money doing it. And changing lives. Check it out. I think you’d look good in these, by the way — and $95 for prescription glasses with frames and giving a free pair to someone who needs them . . . how can you beat that? Maybe your grandmama would like a monocle.
The Romney/Ryan Budget August 22, 2012August 21, 2012 Yesterday I noted that Republicans want to make gun-buying easy but voting hard (at least where that will help them win). But the Republican in this radio ad doesn’t want gun-buying to be easy for everybody. BOWLES (OF SIMPSON-BOWLES) ON THE ROMNEY BUDGET Here, in the Washington Post: . . . This month, Romney said that his tax reform proposal is “very similar to the Simpson-Bowles plan.” How I wish it were. I will be the first to cheer if Romney decides to embrace our plan. Unfortunately, the numbers say otherwise: His reform plan leaves too many tax breaks in place and, as a result, does nothing to reduce the debt. . . . The Romney plan, by sticking to revenue-neutrality and leaving in place tax breaks, would raise taxes on the middle class and do nothing to shrink the deficit. KRUGMAN ON RYAN’S BUDGET Here, in the New York Times: . . . if we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars. . . . . . . What Mr. Ryan actually offers are specific proposals that would sharply increase the deficit, plus an assertion that he has secret tax and spending plans that he refuses to share with us [that would cut it]. THE TIMES’ TAKE ON IT Here: . . . More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan come from programs for low-income Americans. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops protested the proposal as failing to meet society’s moral obligations, saying the plans “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors.” . . . Mr. Ryan’s budget would not reach a surplus for 30 years, according to the C.B.O., because he would cut taxes, largely for the rich and for corporations, by $4 trillion. . . . CONSERVATIVE BILL KRISTOL ON ROMNEY’S TAX BURDEN He thinks it’s too low. Not (as Paul Ryan believes) too high. Watch.
Buying A Gun Should Be Easy; Voting Should Be Hard August 21, 2012August 20, 2012 Basically, if you make it easy for everyone to vote, say the Republicans, it won’t be fair — the Democrats will win. In 2008, according to this recent article, 100,000 votes were cast in the three days of early voting just prior to election day that the Republicans have now canceled. In justifying this, one county Republican chairman told the Columbus Dispatch: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.” People should be allowed to vote; we just shouldn’t make it easy or convenient. It was better in 2004, when as you can see in this YouTube, some Ohioans had to wait in line as long as 15 hours. Which meant a lot gave up, which gave George W. Bush his second remarkable term as the most important man in the world. To the great benefit of the wealthy, who want to see President Bush’s Harvard Business School ’75 classmate Mitt Romney win this time, so (as noted yesterday) we can get on with the business of slashing programs that help the formerly-middle-class (now poor) and cutting the estate tax on billionheirs, like the Koch brothers, to zero. Ohio’s 20 Electoral College votes made all the difference in 2004. (Bush won 286-251; but would have lost 266-271.) As it may again this year, which is why Republicans are working so hard to make it difficult to vote. Remember: it should be easy to buy a semi-automatic weapon (let’s not close the gun show loophole!) but difficult to vote (let’s cut back on the improvements Ohio made in 2008!). It’s a pretty stunning four minutes, that YouTube. Watch — and send it to your friends. Maybe we can take it viral.
Tough On Poverty August 20, 2012August 19, 2012 POSSIBLE SLOGAN “Republicans: Dedicated to diminishing democracy, one voter-suppression tactic at a time.” Seriously: what do you think? Where for decades the country trended toward making it easier to vote — allowing women to vote, for example, and then blacks — the Republicans are now working full throttle to make it harder: cutting back on early-voting; purging voter files of legitimate voters; requiring photo ID (ostensibly to combat the nonexistent problem of people showing up with fake ID); disallowing university-issued photo IDs that lack expiration dates (ostensibly to combat the nonexistent problem of . . . what?); and, of course, withholding the vote from people who’ve paid their debt to society (in many cases for drug possession that should arguably not have been criminalized in the first place). In Ohio, they cut back on voting hours in heavily Democratic counties — but not in heavily Republican counties. And though that ultimately got squashed, they still plan to eliminate early voting the weekend before Election Day, knowing that this is when African American churches typically carpool their congregants to the polls. In Pennsylvania . . . well, here’s Jon Stewart on what they’re doing in Pennsylvania, in case you missed it. POVERTY Whitney Tilson: “Here is a very insightful New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story, by Paul Tough, about poverty in America and what Obama has (and hasn’t) done to address it. It’s stunning to consider that there are SEVEN MILLION children today who live in households struggling to survive on income equal to less than HALF the poverty level! Ah, but forget all that – I just need to remind myself that the future of our country depends on more savage cuts to our already tattered safety net so that private equity and hedge fund millionaires (like me) can pay even lower taxes. It makes me sick to my stomach (and despair for the future of our country).” Just a few excerpts (it’s worth reading it all): In 1966, at the height of the War on Poverty, the poverty rate was just under 15 percent of the population; in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, it was 15.1 percent. And the child-poverty rate is 22 percent — substantially higher today than it was then. And yet as a political issue, especially during this presidential campaign season, poverty has receded almost to silence. The idea that Obama hasn’t done much for poor Americans is simply not true; by some measures, he has done more than any other recent president. But [columnist Bob] Herbert is right that Obama has stopped talking publicly about the subject. Obama hasn’t made a single speech devoted to poverty as president, and if you visit barackobama.com these days, you would be hard-pressed to find any reference to the subject whatsoever. [O]ver the last two decades, and especially during the Obama administration, the way the federal government gives aid to poor people has shifted away from cash transfers toward noncash transfers — food stamps, Medicaid subsidies, housing vouchers — none of which are included in a family’s income for the purposes of poverty statistics. If you do count food stamps and other noncash aid, the poverty rate has, according to some calculations, not gone up much at all during the Obama administration, during the worst economic crisis in 70 years. That is a remarkable accomplishment. When I asked William Julius Wilson last month for his thoughts on the current administration’s antipoverty efforts, he said that Obama had “done more for lower-income Americans than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.” But, Republicans might ask: is that a good thing? Isn’t it better to enact the Ryan budget, that slashes the social programs, so we can lower taxes on people at the top? (The Ryan budget passed the house with unanimous Republican support.) Isn’t it better to cut the estate tax on billionheirs from 45% to 0% as Mr. Romney is pledged to do? And lower Mr. Romney’s own tax rate from 13.9% to under 1%? When administration officials talk about longer-term solutions to poverty these days, they often talk about education. And the cabinet member who expresses the most personal concern about the plight of disadvantaged children is Arne Duncan, the education secretary. . . . There is a growing body of evidence that for many low-income children, a great school can provide a route out of poverty. And Duncan is a firm believer in the idea that transforming the schools in neighborhoods like Roseland will in turn transform the lives of the children who live there. But the record of school reform in Roseland is not encouraging. . . . Lett’s analysis has support from many of the academics who study how poverty has changed over time. Looking back on the lives and prospects of the American poor during President Johnson’s War on Poverty, you can see two broad changes. In material terms, the trends have been mostly positive. Americans who live below the poverty line are much less likely to be hungry or malnourished today than they were then. A majority of families below the poverty line now have material possessions that would have been unthinkable luxuries in the 1960s: air-conditioning, cable TV, a mobile phone. But while the material gap has diminished, a different kind of gap has opened between poor and middle-class Americans: a social gap. In the 1960s, most Americans, rich, middle-class and poor, were raising children in two-parent homes; they lived in relatively stable, mixed-income communities; they went to church in roughly similar numbers; their children often attended the same public schools. Today, those social factors all diverge sharply by class, and the class for which things have changed most starkly is the poor. Damien may have a cellphone, but he has never met his father. A critical factor perpetuating poverty from one generation to the next is family dynamics and their effects on child development. This means that if we want to improve social mobility, we need to find a better way to help disadvantaged parents and their children. While this theory of poverty is still being debated by social scientists, it is not particularly controversial in poor neighborhoods. Obama saw it himself in Roseland. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote that poor African-Americans were well aware of the role that family breakdown played in the perpetuation of urban poverty. As he put it, “black folks can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic, inadequate parenting and declining sexual mores with a fervor that would make the Heritage Foundation proud.” Poverty is not the top priority in most churches that it once was; now it’s the unborn and the threat that I might have married Charles that are the key issues. But even if the Deeply Religious skew Republican, believing this is what Jesus would have done, a lot of us think Romney/Ryan have it all wrong and applaud the (admittedly limited) success the Obama Administration has had dealing with this most difficult of problems.