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News

Mitt Romney raised taxes by $740 million while he was governor of Massachusetts

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Deroy Murdock explains in this Scripps Howard News Service article.

Excerpt:

Hot on the heels of his eight-vote Iowa-caucus landslide, Willard Mitt Romney is crisscrossing New Hampshire before Tuesday’s key primary. Romney is masquerading as a limited-government, free-market executive from next-door Massachusetts. From the Golden Gate to the Granite State, voters should greet Romney’s impersonation with a quarry full of skepticism.

In fact, Romney increased taxes by $309 million, mainly on corporations. These tax hikes, described by Romney apologists as “loophole closures,” totaled $128 million in 2003, $95.5 in 2004, and $85 million in 2005. That final year, Romney proposed $170 million in higher business taxes, the Boston Globe reports. However, the Bay State’s liberal, Democratic legislature balked and only approved an $85 million increase.

“Tax rates on many corporations almost doubled because of legislation supported by Romney,” Boston Science Corporation chairman Peter Nicholas explained in the January 6, 2008 Boston Herald. Also, Romney raised the tax on subchapter S corporations owned by business trusts from 5.3 percent to 9.9 percent — an 85 percent hike.

“Romney went further than any other governor in trying to wring money out of corporations,” the Council on State Taxation’s Joseph Crosby complained.

Romney also created or increased fees by $432 million. He was not dragooned into this by greedy Democratic lawmakers; Romney himself proposed these items. In 2003 alone, Romney concocted or boosted 88 fees. Romney charged more for marriage licenses (from $6 to $12), gun registrations (from $25 to $75), a used-car sales tax ($10 million), gasoline deliveries ($60 million), real-estate transfers ($175 million), and more. Particularly obnoxious was Romney’s $10 fee per Certificate of Blindness. Romney also billed blind people $15 each for discount-travel ID cards.

While Romney can take credit for a $275 million capital-gains tax rebate, property-tax relief for seniors, and a two-day, tax-free shopping holiday, he also must take responsibility for signing $740.5 million in higher taxes, plus that $85 million in business taxes that he requested and legislators rejected.

“Romney did not even fight higher death-tax rates,” notes former California State Assembly Minority Whip Steve Baldwin, a Romney critic. “When the (Massachusetts) legislature considered this issue, Romney’s official position was ‘no position.’ This echoed Barack Obama’s ‘present’ votes in the Illinois State Senate.”

As Romney drained his constituents’ pockets, the Public Policy Institute of New York’s Cost of Doing Business Index rated Massachusetts in 2006 as America’s fourth costliest state in which to practice free enterprise. The Tax Foundation dropped Massachusetts from America’s 29th most business-friendly state to No. 36. The Tax Foundation also calculated that, under Romney, Massachusetts’ per-capita tax burden increased from 9.3 percent to 9.9 percent. In real dollars, the Romney-era per-capita tax burden grew by $1,175.71.

As if impoverishing his own taxpayers were not bad enough, Romney’s March 5, 2003 signature raised taxes on non-residents retroactive to that January 1. Perpetrating taxation without representation, Romney’s law declared that, “gross income derived from… any trade or business, including any employment,” would be taxable, “regardless of the taxpayer’s residence or domicile in the year it is received.”

Consequently, according to data furnished by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, between 2002 and 2006, New Hampshire residents who work or do business in the Bay State shipped Massachusetts $95 million above what they paid when Romney arrived. The average tax paid by New Hampshirities to Massachusetts grew by 19.1 percent, from $2,392 in 2002 to $2,850 in 2006.

Romney has a pro-abortion record and pro-gay-marriage record. Not only did he pass Romneycare in Massachusetts, but now we know that he also raised taxes. Why is he running as a Republican? I don’t see anything in his record that would cause me to believe that he is a Republican.

You can see Mitt Romney explaining all of his liberal views in his own words in these videos.

News

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum: who has the pro-life record on abortion?

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Let’s start with an article from Stand to Reason which explains what pro-life politicians should sound like. (H/T Drew)

Excerpt:

Why are major pro-life presidential candidates so bad at answering for the pro-life position?

During the 1992 race, vice-presidential candidates Gore and Quayle went face to face. Quayle fumbled badly when Gore asked him directly, “Would you take away a woman’s right to choose abortion?” Here was a great chance to bring some moral clarity to the discussion. Instead, he babbled.

Mr. Quayle might have simply answered: I think the question is phrased wrong. Rather, “Why do you think it’s OK to kill an innocent human being just because it’s in the way and can’t defend itself?” If Al Gore objected to that characterization, it would be very fair to say, “Which one of my terms is inaccurate? Kill? Innocent? Human being? Defenseless? In the way? (Maybe you’d prefer “troublesome,” “expensive,” or just simply “crippled”?)

The most recent squandered opportunity came last night. (Alan Keyes went on a hunger strike. Maybe if that doesn’t work he’ll just hold his breath until he turns blue. That’ll really show ’em.)

“If a woman was brutally raped and would be emotionally traumatized by carrying to term, would you allow her to have an abortion, or would you force her to have the child?”

This is a perfect forum for clarifying this issue, an ideal opportunity for a leader to offer clearheaded advocacy for the unborn, a terrific time to clear the rhetoric from the air and get to the real issue.

The simple answer is: Why complicate the crime of rape with the crime of taking an innocent child’s life? Or, to put it another way: Why should the child pay with its life because its father is a rapist? (This is even a better response because it asks a question.)

Greg was writing this in 1996, but we do actually have several pro-life candidates this time, and one of them, Rick Santorum, is actually pretty articulate on social issues.

Excerpt:

As a member of the U.S. Senate from 1995 until 2007, Santorum was the prime author and champion of key pro-life bills, including the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, a ban on partial-birth abortion, and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which makes it a separate crime if an unborn child is harmed or killed during the commission of a stipulated list of federal crimes.

Santorum not only has signed the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life Presidential Pledge, but he has helped raise money for that organization, too.

Santorum believes that abortion is never justified, including in cases of rape or incest. During a Republican presidential debate last summer in Ames, Iowa, when panelist Byron York noted that many Americans favor abortion under certain circumstances, Santorum didn’t flinch or back off from his uncompromising position.

“You know, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a recent case, said that a man who committed rape could not be killed, would not be subjected to the death penalty; yet the child conceived as a result of that rape could be,” he said. “That sounds to me like a country that doesn’t have its morals correct. That child did nothing wrong. That child is an innocent victim.”

Rick Santorum actually tries to convince you if you don’t see things his way on social issues. I think there are two candidates who would be pro-life activists if they were elected – Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. But I have more confidence in Santorum’s ability to persuade people who are not already pro-life  to be sympathetic to the pro-life view. He can build consensus, because he is a pro-life apologist, rather than just being pro-life. Rick Santorum is doing exactly what Greg Koukl said that real pro-lifers do.

Now let’s take take a look at Mitt Romney’s record on abortion.

Excerpt:

Two months after his pro-life conversion, Mitt Romney appointed Matthew Nestor to the bench in Massachusetts. Romney seeming bowed to political pressure making Nestor a judge even after Nestor, according to the Boston Globe as far back as 1994, had campaigned for political office championing his pro-abortion views.

One year after his pro-life conversion, in July of 2005, Mitt Romney vetoed legislation that would expand the use of the morning after pill arguing that it would contribute to abortions. But just three months later Mitt Romney slid back and signed a bill that expanded state subsidized access to the morning after pill.

Writing in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2005, Stephanie Ebbert noted:

Governor Mitt Romney has signed a bill that could expand the number of people who get family-planning services, including the morning-after pill, confusing some abortion and contraception foes who had been heartened by his earlier veto of an emergency contraception bill. … The services include the distribution of condoms, abortion counseling, and the distribution of emergency contraception, or morning after pills, by prescription …

But that’s nothing. Two whole years after the pro-life view had settled into Mitt Romney’s conscience and a year after Mitt Romney had vetoed legislation expanding access to the morning after pill, he expanded access to abortion and gave Planned Parenthood new rights under state law. Yes, that Planned Parenthood.

[Romneycare], in addition to providing healthcare coverage for the uninsured and forcing everyone to have insurance, expanded abortion services in the State of Massachusetts. It also required that one member of the MassHealth Payment Policy Board be appointed by Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts.

From Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006:

SECTION 3. Chapter 6A of the General Laws is hereby amended by inserting after section 16I the following 6 sections: . . . Section 16M. (a) There shall be a MassHealth payment policy advisory board. The board shall consist of the secretary of health and human services or his designee, who shall serve as chair, the commissioner of health care financing and policy, and 12 other members: … 1 member appointed by Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts … (Massachusetts General Court Website, http://www.mass.gov, Accessed 2/5/07)

That’s an example of Mitt Romney’s record on abortion. Those are the facts on Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney when it comes to abortion.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum on abortion – in their own words

We’ve already seen that Santorum has the pro-life record and Romney has the pro-abortion record. So now let’s compare Mitt Romney in his own words with Rick Santorum in his own words.

Mitt Romney:

Rick Santorum:

Just to be clear, if you are a pure social conservative, there here is the candidate ranking for you:

  1. Rick Santorum
  2. Michele Bachmann
  3. Newt Gingrich
  4. Rick Perry
  5. Ron Paul
  6. John Huntsman
  7. Mitt Romney

Social conservatives need to vote for a candidate that has a pro-life record, not just pro-life rhetoric and a charming smile.

Commentary

RINO Mitt Romney now open to European-style VAT tax

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ABC News reports.

Excerpt:

In a December 24 story in the Wall Street Journal, Romney is described not favoring the idea of “layering a VAT onto the current income tax system. But he adds that, philosophically speaking, a VAT might work as a replacement for some part of the tax code, ‘particularly at the corporate level,’ as Paul Ryan proposed several years ago. What he doesn’t do is rule a VAT out.”

A value added tax, or VAT, is a form of the consumption tax in which the tax is levied based on a product’s price, not including the cost of materials, that originated in and is popular in Europe, imposed by the European Commission, and the governments of France and the UK, among others.

Gingrich’s campaign was not the only one to notice. The American Enterprise Institution‘s James Pethokoukis wrote that “(m)any conservatives/libertarians simply hate, hate, hate the idea of a VAT….They view it as a way to fund a massive expansion of government. I would be surprised if those quotes don’t end up in a 30-second, anti-Romney ad in Iowa or New Hampshire”

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist once called the VAT “a European-style sales tax. It’s assessed on the profits generated at every stage of production (raw material, manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, etc.), so there is constant reporting and payment. As such, it’s an extremely efficient money machine for big government. The VAT is embedded inside the price of a good … As such, people forget they pay it, and European governments have found it too easy to raise the tax repeatedly over time.”

People think that Romney should be the candidate because he “is the most electable”. But is that true?

Seven reasons why Romney’s electability is exaggerated

John Hawkins writing for Townhall.com lists the seven reasons. (H/T Right Wing News)

Reasons 2 and 3:

2) He’s a proven political loser: There’s a reason Mitt Romney has been able to say that he’s “not a career politician.” It’s because he’s not very good at politics. He lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994. Although he did win the governorship of Massachusetts in 2002, he did it without cracking 50% of the vote. Worse yet, he left office as the 48th most popular governor in America and would have lost if he had run again in 2006. Then, to top that off, he failed to capture the GOP nomination in 2008. This time around, despite having almost every advantage over what many people consider to be a weak field of candidates, Romney is still desperately struggling. Choosing Romney as the GOP nominee after running up that sort of track record would be like promoting a first baseman hitting .225 in AAA to the majors.

3) Running weak in the southern states: Barack Obama won North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida in 2008 and you can be sure that he will be targeting all three of those states again. This is a problem for Romney because he would be much less likely than either Gingrich or Perry to carry any of those states. Moderate northern Republicans have consistently performed poorly in the south and Romney won’t be any exception. That was certainly the case in 2008 when both McCain and Huckabee dominated Romney in primaries across the south. Mitt didn’t win a single primary in a southern state and although he finished second in Florida, he wasn’t even competitive in North Carolina or Virginia. Since losing any one of those states could be enough to hand the election to Obama in a close race, Mitt’s weakness there is no small matter.

For my own part, I find it surprising that people who are ostensibly pro-life are willing to appoint a Republican candidate who has no pro-life record. Until he started running for the Presidency, Mitt Romney was 100% pro-abortion. That’s 12 years of abortion advocacy. His record is pro-abortion. Many of the other candidates, especially Santorum and Bachmann, have a pro-life record. Newt has a 98% pro-life voting record. So why are we settling for someone who has a question mark on social issues?