Thomas Edsall, a Columbia University professor of journalism, in a New York Times piece worries that Mitt Romney has been able to ‘wait out’ the press regarding the lack of information in his campaign, ranging from Mitt’s tax returns to data in support of the candidate’s policy and budget proposals.

With the presidential election just two weeks away, Romney’s gamble may be paying off. He has failed to specify where he would wield the budget knife, and he has defied, with a striking degree of success, the relatively quiet group of people who have called for him to honor a host of traditional disclosure and campaign practices….

Romney’s evasions of traditional disclosure have been ongoing and almost insolent.

In July, when Romney refused to release more than two years of tax returns — in contrast to previous candidates of both parties, among them his father — there was a huge uproar. National Journal published a list of 17 prominent Republicans, including four sitting senators, who called on him to release 10 or more years. Editorials in papers across the country denounced Romney’s secrecy. The conservative columnist George Will declared that Romney “must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” Will warned Romney that he was losing the argument “in a big way.”

But it is Romney who appears to have won the argument. His tax returns are a dead issue, except on the left and liberal fringe.

Romney has repeatedly left unaddressed and unresolved a fundamental contradiction between his proposal to cut tax rates across the board by 20 percent and his claim that his fiscal policies will put the nation on a path toward a balanced budget. His proposal to pay for (technically, to keep “revenue neutral”) the rate cuts by capping deductions does not add up. The Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization, has calculated that limiting individuals to $17,000 dollars in deductions would only increase revenues by $1 trillion, less than a quarter of the $4.6 trillion cost of a 20 percent rate cut.

thirdway.org

At the second presidential debate at Hofstra on Oct.16, Romney was asked about this arithmetical impossibility. He gave a murky 576-word answer. With some abbreviation, it went:

Now, how about deductions? ‘Cause I’m going to bring rates down across the board for everybody, but I’m going to limit deductions and exemptions and credits, particularly for people at the high end, because I am not going to have people at the high end pay less than they’re paying.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers will continue to pay 60 percent of the income tax the nation collects. So that’ll stay the same. Middle-income people are going to get a tax break. And so, in terms of bringing down deductions, one way of doing that would be say everybody gets — I’ll pick a number — $25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use. Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.

Romney concluded with the following declaration: “I want to get us on track to a balanced budget, and I’m going to reduce the tax burden on middle income families.” In the face of reason, he simply asserts that there is no conflict between the achievement of two welcome goals: a balanced budget and reduced tax burdens.

Romney runs into a parallel dilemma on the spending side of his proposals. He has called for a $2 trillion increase in military expenditures – which would then rise to 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product — while putting a cap on total federal spending of 20 percent of G.D.P. The highly reputable, if liberal, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, contends that doing the math on Romney’s budget outline produces some jarring consequences that the candidate does not address:

By 2022, the cuts under Governor Romney’s budget proposals would shrink nondefense discretionary spending — which, over the past 50 years, has averaged 3.9 percent of G.D.P. and never fallen below 3.2 percent — to 1.8 percent of G.D.P. if Medicare shares in the cuts, and to 1.3 percent of G.D.P. if it does not. These cuts would be noticeably deeper than those required under the austere House-passed budget plan authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).  (Romney’s nondefense cuts are deeper because his proposal increases core defense spending — the defense budget other than war costs and some relatively small items such as military family housing — to 4 percent of G.D.P., while the Ryan budget does not.)  Over the coming decade, Romney would require cuts in programs other than core defense of $6.1 trillion, compared with $5.0 trillion in cuts under the House-passed budget plan.

Even accepting the tough cuts Ryan has called for in programs serving the poor and the out-of-work – Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits – Romney will have to cut programs popular with the middle class, many of them swing voters and independents. But, as Romney noted in his Weekly Standard interview, he is “not going to give” us “a list right now.”

Instead, Romney is going in the opposite direction.

Beezer here.  This has been Romney’s game plan all along.  Promise whatever but refuse to offer supporting data and then wait it out until the press gives up on finding any anwers.  If a question comes up that specifies expenditures, like veteran benefits, Romney simply takes it off the table and promises he won’t cut those benefits.  The same with education support.  Or Medicare or Medicaid.  Or pre-existing conditions.  The tactic is always the same.  Promise something and then ignore questions for supporting information.  Tough it out and just keep promising.  The media and the public will tire of getting no responses.  Meanwhile, hammer the President with accusations based on what appears to be fantasy statistics, and then simply ignore questions about those statistics.  The media and the public will tire of getting no responses.  Edsall’s larger point is that this new level of non-responsiveness could become the norm if Romney succeeds.  And that’s not good for the nation.

It’s interesting how some themes come and go, pretty much unchanged over generations.  Social Darwinism is one of those themes.  Herbert Spencer is the author of Social Darwinism theories and he coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ usually attributed to Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of evolution.

Spencer’s ideas are having something of a comeback in the Republican Party budget, which one supposes is a reflection of the popularity of Spencer’s concepts in the GOP even if most Republicans didn’t know who Spencer was until President Obama reminded them in a speech last week.    Philip Kitcher, a Columbia University philosophy professor, writes in today’s New York Times:

Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” thought about natural selection on a grand scale. Conceiving selection in pre-Darwinian terms — as a ruthless process, “red in tooth and claw” — he viewed human culture and human societies as progressing through fierce competition. Provided that policymakers do not take foolish steps to protect the weak, those people and those human achievements that are fittest — most beautiful, noble, wise, creative, virtuous, and so forth — will succeed in a fierce competition, so that, over time, humanity and its accomplishments will continually improve. Late 19th-century dynastic capitalists, especially the American “robber barons,” found this vision profoundly congenial. Their contemporary successors like it for much the same reasons, just as some adolescents discover an inspiring reinforcement of their self-image in the writings of Ayn Rand …

When the President and Democrats in general consider the GOP budget proposals, all tax cuts for the wealthy matched by spending cuts on programs for  the public, they see the ideas of Spencer writ large across the land.  It’s an open question as to whether or not these ideas will return to power.

The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all. It is not entirely implausible to think that doctrines like these stand behind a vast swath of Republican proposals, including the recent budget, with its emphasis on providing greater economic benefits to the rich, transferring the burden to the middle-classes and poor, and especially in its proposals for reducing public services. Fuzzier versions of the theses have pervaded Republican rhetoric for the past decade (and even longer)….

The strenuous struggle social Darwinism envisages might select for something, but the most likely traits are a tendency to take whatever steps are necessary to achieve a foreseeable end, a sharp focus on narrowly individual goals and a corresponding disregard for others. We might reasonably expect that a world run on social Darwinist lines would generate a cadre of plutocrats, each resolutely concerned to establish a dynasty and to secure his favored branch of industry against future competition. In practical terms it would almost certainly yield a world in which the gap between rich and poor was even larger than it is now.

Rather than the beauty, wisdom, virtue and nobility Spencer envisioned arising from fierce competition, the likely products would be laws repealing inheritance taxes and deregulating profitable activities, and a vast population of people whose lives were even further diminished…

To quote a much-cited book, we do not “live by bread alone.” If the vast majority of citizens (or, globally, of people) are to enjoy any opportunities to develop the talents they have, they need the social structures social Darwinism perceives as pampering and counter-productive. Human well-being is profoundly affected by public goods, a concept that is entirely antithetical to social Darwinism or to contemporary Republican ideology, with their mythical citizens who can fulfill their potential without rich systems of social support. It is a callous fiction to suppose that what is needed is less investment in education, health care, public transportation and affordable public housing.

Beezer here.  So this attitude is not new.  In fact it’s been there for more than a century and, in a time of economic stress, its popped up again because of its austere moral underpinnings:  We’ve been bad, so we must be punished.  That this is precisely the opposite of what needs doing is irrelevant.  That it is impractical is ignored.   One can only hope the practical side of America wins out and we start employing millions of people re-building a sustainable economy.  This is the only way we can recover and insure the social welfare.