Michael Tomasky: "Romney is Bush On Steroids"

Clinton loyalist and Democracy EIC Michael Tomasky comes from a working class West Virginia background -- he attended WVU as an undergraduate -- and has always been equally fascinated and horrified at how his home state votes against their economic interests and embraces the Republican party. This year will be no exception. During an essentially uncontested Democrat primary this year, a convicted extortionist named Keith Judd essentially got 4-in10 votes in West Virginia against President Obama.

But back to Tomasky, who has wondered for years how poor West Virginians could vote for Republicans. From The Daily Beast:

"Romney is Bush on steroids. His tax plan is far more extreme. He wants to give millionaires an average—average!—tax cut of $250,000. The same plan would add $3 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Haven’t we tried this before, and didn’t it help lead—along with massive deregulation, which Romney also promises to pursue—to the biggest meltdown in 80 years?

"The radical tax plan and its affect on the deficit hasn’t stopped Romney from backing “cut, cap, and balance,” a congressional GOP plan that calls for a Balanced Budget Amendment! Imagine that chutzpah. It’d be as if I torched all my neighbors’ azaleas and then demanded we form a block-beautification committee. Cut, cap, and balance is so extreme, so ludicrous, that 35 GOP senators—a pretty hardened assemblage, you’ll agree—haven’t signed it. It’s out there in Tea Party land.

"Want more hypocrisy? Glad you asked. Cut, cap, and balance requires gargantuan and immediate cuts to the federal budget. But remember what Romney told Time magazine in May?: 'if you take a trillion dollars, for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.'

"Then there’s the Ryan budget and assaults on Medicare. The fact that Romney has no actual jobs plan beyond letting the free market work its magic... It’s just endless. Complete and willful vacuity. Vacuity as a matter of principle. Almost virginal vacuity, as if intercourse with facts were somehow deflowering, leading to a lapsarian state of loss of ignorance. Nothing adds up at all. No attempt is made for things to add up. Except, of course, for those core items that Romney and the congressional Republicans will agree on: cut taxes for the rich, deregulate as much as possible, and re-wreck the economy."

More Tomasky here.