Free Republic

The worst gaffe a politician can make, it's been said, is not the mistakes he makes on the campaign trail but when he tells the truth. The vice president of the United States, who's a kind of genius at embarrassing himself, did it again the other day when, almost in passing, he mentioned the hallmark of this president's stewardship of the American economy, "the middle class that has been buried these past four years." Oops. Even a blind hog will stumble across an acorn now and then, but this time the vice president had hit on an essential truth, one...

The Lehrer debate on Wednesday, October 3, was an utter disaster for Obama. He seemed to be saying, "I HATE this job. Get me out of here so I can play golf and hang with my peeps." It was the worst performance by an incumbent President in my experience...maybe the worst performance by ANY candidate, including the awful job Walter Mondale did in '84. Romney is no Ronald Reagan, but he appeared "presidential" and in full control of the facts. Obama, on the other hand, told obvious lies over an over and Romney even called him on them a time...

Democrats have been saying — or, in the case of Joe Biden, trying to say — that Mitt Romney plans to raise taxes on the middle class. This claim is flatly untrue. The word “lie” probably is thrown around too casually in our politics, but this qualifies. Romney has no such plan, has forsworn taking such a course of action, and has in fact proposed to cut tax rates for the middle class — and everybody else who pays the federal income tax — by reducing all brackets by 20 percent. Romney’s plan would be revenue-neutral, making up for forgone...

A study by the Tax Policy Center, a project of the center-left Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, claims that Mitt Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible. TPC claims that Romney cannot cut tax rates by 20 percent across the board and maintain revenue neutrality without raising the net tax burden on the middle class. According to TPC, in the year 2015 under Romney's tax plan, "maintaining revenue neutrality mathematically necessitates a shift in the tax burden of at least $86 billion away from high-income taxpayers onto lower- and middle-income taxpayers. This is true even under the assumption that the maximum...

In this peculiar election year, President Obama is pulling off the small miracle—no, make that the kind of thing that happens in Lourdes—of winning the tax debate. This should be impossible, and Mitt Romney has to turn that around if he wants to win. Despite a tax platform that is a Walter Mondale replay, polls show that Mr. Obama has sanded off the traditional GOP tax edge and the lead Mr. Romney held as recently as late summer. An ABC-Washington Post poll gives Mr. Obama a 49%-44% advantage on taxes, with Mr. Romney's credibility slipping from 48% in August, and...

President Obama doesn’t think Americans should fret about the exploding national debt. As he told talk show host David Letterman recently, “We don’t have to worry about it short term. Right now interest rates are low because people still consider the United States the safest and greatest country on Earth, rightfully so. But it is a problem long term and even medium term.” So, in Obama’s view, dealing with the debt is more of a tomorrow thing than a today thing. Or maybe even a day-after-tomorrow thing. But every day that the debt grows, the burden on Americans grows, too....

In case you missed the latest and greatest from God's gift to conservatives see it here.

ice President Biden said Tuesday that the middle class has been "buried the last four years" -- a practically gift-wrapped gaffe that Republicans immediately grabbed to hammer President Obama on the eve of the first presidential debate. Biden made the remark at a campaign stop in Charlotte, N.C., in the course of slamming Republican tax policies which Democrats claim would cut taxes for the rich and hike them for the middle class. "This is deadly earnest," Biden said. "How they can justify -- how they can justify raising taxes on the middle class that's been buried the last four years....

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking on the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. today, offered an unvarnished assessment of the Obama economy: First, he repeats the myth that Mitt Romney will “raise taxes” on the middle class— “raising their taxes with this tax cut,” as Joe so Bidenly puts it. Second, he says Romney can’t possibly justify that mythical tax hike because the Obama presidency has been so hard on the middle class. The Romney campaign agrees and Jim Pethokoukis has the charts to prove it. It’s not the first time Biden has eloquently described the toll the Obama economy has...

Vice President Joe Biden said the middle class "has been buried the last four yeas" at a campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina: "This is deadly earnest, man. This is deadly earnest," Biden said. "How they can justify--how they can justify--raising taxes when the middle class has been buried the last four years... How in Lord's name..." Of course, Barack Obama has been president the last four years, and Biden has been vice president.

Despite repeated promises that he would build prosperity from the bottom up, President Obama has presided over three years of income losses for the middle class, according to the latest household income data from the Census Bureau. Since 2009, the middle 20% of American households saw their average incomes drop 4%. In 2011 alone, they fell 1.7%. The poorest 20% have fared even worse under Obama, Census data show. Their incomes have dropped more than 7% since 2009, and are now lower than they’ve been at any time since 1985, after adjusting for inflation.

Pop quiz: Which of the following is true? (a) Over the past 40 years, the middle class has shrunk; (b) Over the past 40 years, the middle class has grown poorer; (c) The middle class just suffered through a “lost decade”; (d) All of the above. You could be forgiven for answering (d), given the angst-producing state of discourse on the economy, but the truth is that none of these claims about middle-class decline — made most recently by the Pew Research Center (PRC) — are supported by the best evidence. Like other analyses before it, PRC’s recent report “The...

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY – A recent study by the Department of Sociology at Princeton found that up to 98% of middle class white adults flash or “throw” gang signs when they are being photographed. The three year study also reveals that 99.9% of those throwing the gang signs have never been in a gang, haven’t the slightest idea what the sign they are throwing means and do not listen to rap music. “It is a perplexing phenomenon for sure,” Professor Allen Clydesdale told the Daily Rash. “It was quite surprising to meet a thirty-year-old physical therapist from Beardstown, Missouri, who...

President Obama's entire campaign strategy is based on an age-old political trick that he can overcome his weakness on the economy by changing the subject. His strategists concluded more than a year ago that he was unlikely to win a second term based on his promise to restore the economy to full health and put tens of millions of long unemployed Americans back work. So they fashioned a divisive campaign that was heavily focused on single issue voters -- women, for one, and the large Hispanic vote, for another -- in a handful of critical battleground states he needs to...

An interesting quote from Mitt Romney in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is $100,000 middle income? MITT ROMNEY: No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less. Hmmm. Maybe $200,000-$250,000 is middle income in Mitt Romney's world, but it's a tad higher than the middle when measured against most of America. In fact, $200,000-$250,000 is in the top 2%-3%. "Middle income" these days, at least measured by percentage of incomes, is something between $30,000 and $100,000. And maybe what Romney meant is the that $200,000-$250,000 can feel like middle income. And that's certainly true, especially in some...

The vise on the middle class tightened last year, driving down its share of the income pie as the number of Americans in poverty leveled off and the most affluent households saw their portion grow, new census data released Wednesday showed. Income inequality increased by 1.6 percent, the Census Bureau said in its annual report on poverty, income and health insurance. This was the biggest one-year increase in almost two decades and suggested that a trend in place since the late 1970s was picking up steam. As a snapshot of a nation recovering from one of its worst recessions ever,...

Maybe Democrats have some slick salesmen, like Bill Clinton and our current president, who can sell you swampland and have you convinced that you’ve bought choice beachfront property. But the omission of any mention of God and recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the Democratic Party platform, which were in it in 2008, and then the almost failed attempt to add them after the fact, showed the clear truth about the 2012 Democratic Party. It took three boisterous floor votes to add these principles to the platform and listening to the ayes and nays in the third vote, it...

The middle class is receiving less of America's total income, declining to its smallest share in decades as median wages stagnate in the economic doldrums and wealth concentrates at the top. A study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center highlights diminished hopes, too, for the roughly 50 percent of adults defined as middle class, with household incomes ranging from $39,000 to $118,000. The report describes this mid-tier group as suffering its "worst decade in modern history," having fallen backward in income for the first time since the end of World War II. Three years after the recession technically ended,...

What does it take to be middle class in America? The timely answer seems to be not home ownership or a college education, but a good job. In a survey released late last month, 86 percent of the 2,000-plus Americans polled by the Pew Research Center put a secure job at the top of their list of requirements to qualify for the middle class. The next most-popular answer was health insurance, which made the list for 66 percent of respondents in the survey, conducted in July. Owning a home was considered a sign of membership in the middle class by...

The middle class in America is being systematically destroyed. Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. The rest of the globe looked at us in envy and wondered what we were doing right. But now everything seems to be going wrong for the middle class. Millions of our jobs have been shipped out of the country and competition for the remaining jobs is keeping wages at depressed levels. Meanwhile, the cost of living just keeps going up and up and middle class budgets are being stretched...