I think the Romney Campaign just ended….
The transcript:
ROMNEY: We have to make sure that the promises we make — and Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare — are promises we can keep. And there are various ways of doing that. One is, we could raise taxes on people.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We can raise taxes on —
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, they’re not!
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn also goes to people.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It goes into their pockets!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend. So number one, you can raise taxes. That’s not the approach that I would take.
You should see Twitter right now. It is brutal, and hilarious, at the same time. This is one of those huge major gaffes that’s simultaneously partly true, partly funny, and totally devastating. And the Romney campaign is so tone deaf that it just defended the line by saying “Do folks think corporations are buildings?” It reminds me of Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it.” It reminds of Dean’s scream. Gingrich’s line of credit at Tiffany’s. Bush, Sr.’s amazement at the use of the bar code scanner and then not knowing the price of milk. A gaffe so simple yet so memorable.
Yes, Romney is right in two ways. First, Corporations are technically “citizens” under the law in that you can sue a corporation itself (i.e. ABC, Inc.) rather than suing all of the corporate officers, and the corporation itself can sue in its own name. The corporation pays taxes as a single corporate entity, and, according to recent unfounded and horrible Supreme Court decisions, the corporation has an unlimited right to free speech.
Second, the corporation itself does not exist without human beings running it. Yes, Mitt, we get that space aliens and robots are not running every corporation on the planet (yet). Yes, Mitt, we get that human beings are the employees and corporate officers and the CEOs.
And yes, Mitt, some of those people who are corporate officers and CEOs make tons of money, millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year in salary, and those CEOs and corporate officers often pay less taxes on that salary than does their lowly corporate employees sweeping the floors of their corporate buildings. And the corporation itself, the legal entity we talked earlier, often gets so many tax breaks from the government that it pays no taxes at all, even though the corporation makes millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in profit every quarter.
So Romney is right, technically. But to your average American struggling to make do every month, he is so very wrong, so wrong as to be funny. The audience, a Republican conservative audience laughed at him, and not with him, when he said “corporations are people.” Corporations are not people to them.
If, somehow, Romney survives this and wins the Republican nomination, the election is over. The ads that would be made from this are just too devastating. This gaffe sticks.
My friend!
Come on, it’s not like he admitted to practicing witchcraft.
If he had just said “Corporations are made up of people” it would have made all the difference. But there is no getting around that sound bite.
Funny how they are never brought down for the things they deserve to be brought down for. Like Al Capone going down for tax evasion instead of murder. Yes, it will stick.
Either:
Obama is the luckiest man alive (because his strongest contender just knocked himself out), or
We are all the unluckiest people (because some Repub even wackier than Romney will float into office on the anti-Obama vote).
Or both.
And that’s not even all of the obnoxious things he said.
Good catch, A1. Yes Virginia, there is class warfare and redistribution of income (upward) in America.
I do not know how can you think this is a gaffe. The ignorance of the questioner obviously extends to left wing bloggers.
And you wonder why we call you delusional. Corporations are not people. The reason I know this is because we have not imprisoned or executed Corporations whenever they kill people. Corporations also do not have sex, although if they could I am sure you would find a way to outlaw it.
Not true DD, I’ve been screwed by plenty of corporations.
Touche, puck. And since David believes corporations are people, and since corporations only screw people up the ass, doesn’t that mean that David is now in favor of gay corporate sex?
It’s a gaffe alright, but not quite on the level of “57 states”.
No, much worse. Because 57 states referred to 57 contests in the Democratic primary. Here, Romney is revealing who he truly is, and how out of touch he is. Even Republicans laughed at him.
“Slavery was the legal fiction that a person was property. Corporate person-hood is the legal fiction that property is a person.”-Joan Edwards + Molly Morgan WILPF
Corporation: from the Latin Corpus, which means “body”. Corporations are bodies that are taxed twice when they are taxable (profitable). Once when they file their returns, and again against the shareholder when he collects his dividend. But for some reason corporations are the villains as far as the Great Unwashed and socialists care.
Corporations are tools to protect people from the negative consequences of their actions while retaining any benefits.
“Once when they file their returns, and again against the shareholder when he collects his dividend. ”
This is exactly the incentive for investment and job creation. The lower the investment tax rate, the more the demand for short-term dividend payments, and the less the incentive for long-term expansion and investment.
We have seen this incentive played out in real life. As the investment taxes were slashed to their historic low of 15% in 2001, job growth has been anemic and eventually reversed.
The tax avoidance incentive for investment has been revoked, and the “job creators” have lost their title.
Corporations are legal “persons,” not citizens; some rights we restrict to citizens, such as the right to vote, while other rights are held more broadly by persons, primarily the right to due process of law.
Former Governor Romney was right: raising taxes on corporations simply raises taxes on individuals, because corporations must pass all of their costs onto their customers in order to make a profit; it is the end consumer of any product who winds up paying all of the taxes imposed on every stage of production. You want to raise taxes on Lehigh Dairy? Fine, but face facts: the taxes imposed on Lehigh Dairy are going to be paid by the customer who buys a gallon of milk.
Not only that, regardless of the actual rate numbers, the Bush tax cuts eliminated the preferential tax treatment of long term capital gains.
It used to be preferable to reinvest your money in the company (jobs and equipment), because the value would grow and when you cashed in your long-term gains, you would be taxed less than if you took your profits immediately as dividends.
It is little known that before Bush, dividends were taxed as regular income at 39%. This provided a healthy differential to encourage business growth and job creation.
But Bush slashed long term capital gains as well as dividends to the same rate, the historic low of 15%, eliminating preferential treatment.
Now there is no reason for investors not to take their dividends immediately, rather than putting the money back into the business and jobs.
“raising taxes on corporations simply raises taxes on individuals”
I agree with Romney on this. I am in favor of eliminating corporate income tax, and replacing the revenue by increasing individual income taxes on the upper brackets.
Now THAT is tax reform I can live with.
Not me, Puck. I’m in favor of reducing corporate taxes by eliminating all the write-offs, though. No more company car. No more depreciation of assets.* No more entertaining clients on the company dime.
As you can see, the “people” who enjoy “special rights” aren’t teh gays asking for equality. They’re corporations.
*This always gets me. If you buy a duplex so you can live in one home while renting out the other, the half you live in appreciates in value for tax purposes, while the rental property depreciates over 19 years, at which point it is theoretically worthless.
Corporations are people, all right — people who have taken advantage of the tax code to dodge paying their fair share.
Geezer wrote:
The write offs are simply part of the costs of doing business, and the company car is a cost of doing business just as much as buying fuel or materials.
However, the company car is taxed; it’s just that the tax falls on the individuals who are assigned the car, in that they must report personal mileage — including to and from work — as income.
Depreciation covers the fact that equipment wears out. If I buy a brand new concrete plant, regardless of how well I do my maintenance, in thirty years it will be mostly worn out, and will not be worth anywhere close to what I paid for it.
One of the biggest problems I see is the mindset amongst my friends on the left that corporations are somehow the enemy of Teh People. Four out of every five Americans who have jobs work for private businesses; the greatest friend the working man has is the employer who provides him a job, and pays his wages.
They are enemies of the people when they seek to take away raises, health benefits, and retirement benefits all the while they rank in millions in profit every quarter, and all the while they are the receipients of tax breaks and credits, and all the whiel they give huge bonuses to their CEOs and corporate officers.
If corporations would only stop screwing the people whenever they have the chance, then perhaps they would not be the enemy.
Shorter Dana: your minimum wage job is all you get, and you should be happy.
Corporations are not going to stop trying to screw the people, and they shouldn’t. That is where they get their energy – greed.
Greed is like fire. It can burn down your house, or power your automobile. It is the people’s job to make laws to harness the energy of greed and use it for good, not evil. The people have failed, because they have not yet felt enough heat.
Corporations and the wealthy have an adversarial relationship with the rest of society, and it is the people’s job to be a strong opposition, so corporations can be harnessed for the benefit of society. Which is perhaps a roundabout way of arriving at a definition of progressivism.
Guy Smiley is done, agreed.
Luv the 57 states comeback. Lamer than a dead, wet cat.
“the greatest friend the working man has is the employer who provides him a job, and pays his wages.”
Don’t be such a dolt. Your employer is not your friend. Your employer is a person, working at the behest of the corporate entity, who has decided that he can make money on the fruits of your labor. Simple as that. YOU are the one who is coloring that by calling an employer your “friend.” It’s business, sporto, not friendship.
I should say he was done before it was started soley due to the fact that he’s in a cult. Well, actually, every single one in the whole GOP lot are avowed cultists.
Dana: I know why the write-offs exist. You don’t get it: Why should the costs of running a business be deductable when real people don’t get to write off the costs of living? If they’re people, then treat them like people.
The point being, they’re not people. They are groups of people banding together as a single entity, usually for the purpose of making money, and are chartered by another group of banded-together people — the you hate, government.one They exist because we allow them to. Or, to put it in terms anti-gay conservatives can understand, they CHOSE to form their corporations — why should they get special treatment?
“real people don’t get to write off the costs of living?”
Actually they do. Child deductions, child care, mortgage interest, costs of job hunting, professional certifications (I think) and more are all available to families. It’s probably not enough to account for all the costs of living, considering the median family spends everything on non-optional essentials (not luxuries) and has no disposable income remaining, but the concept exists. I’d like a deduction for food, clothing, energy, water, and education too.
It’s nowhere near the same thing. The deductions for children don’t come close to covering the costs. Mortgage interest is a remnant of a policy that used to cover all interest payments; of course, a business could write off the entire amount, not just the interest. And so on.
“I think the Romney Campaign just ended”, by Delaware Dem.
Are you kidding. I am 53 years old. Last year I was at my Brother in Laws house, and my nephew said there was a good movie on called fight club, and I would really like it. Of course after the movie was over I explained to him that as much as I like many sports, I am not a fan of mixed martial arts, and I told him that I he should know that because I had told him that numerous times before.
I then further explained to him that after he graduates from school and gets out in the real world, A great deal of his success or failure is going to be related to the fact of whether or not people can trust what he says. And if he always says things that are in correct, or inaccurate, then he will struggle getting people to trust him, and do business with him at any level. So he should be careful not to make statements such as he made to me that I would like the movie fight club.
I have the same message for Delaware Dem. Saying the Mitt Romney campaign just ended is about as far fetched as saying the world is going to end tomorrow. There is nothing to back it up. It seems to me that this Delaware Liberal is a serious, Non fiction Blog. Maybe Delaware Dem should be writing articles on some sort of fiction blog somewhere.
First of all, he is missing the big picture, This Iowa stop is one of the reasons Mitt Romney is going to be the next President. In addition to being more experienced in business than all the other republican candidates, and President Obama by an order of magnitude, he is out working much harder than anyone is for the nomination. He knows he is going to get hecklers, just like a comedian knows he is going to get hecklers. But he is out there anyway telling his message. Lower Taxes, Smaller Government.
As far as The audience laughing when Romney said corporations are people, the only people laughing where the 4 or 5 hecklers down in front. Another thing that you guys missed reading through the lines, is that Romney said these people down in front here came early, I think I can interpret that as they sound a little bit drunk.
At least the older gentleman on social security.
What I heard the crowd doing was cheering when Romney talked about not raising taxes, I also heard the crowd cheer when he said the people down in front probably were not going to vote for him, but the rest of them would be voting for him, the next president of the U.S. I guess that is the difference between Delaware Dem and me, a liberal vs a conservative. Delaware Dem heard 4 or 5 people laughing, I heard hundreds of people cheering for Romney. Seems like Delaware Dem has a bad disease called selective hearing.
And finally, I will simplify something else for you. You can’t say something that is correct, and have it be a gaffe.
I look forward to your verbose reaction come next fall, when Mitt Romney is not the nominee of your party.