President Romney vs. President Obama: The Cage Match

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Karl Smith doesn’t care if Mitt Romney is a liar, a cad, or a prick. He just wants to know what concrete things would be different under a Romney presidency compared to an Obama Presidency. My list is so conventional that I’m afraid it’s pretty boring, but here goes. All of this is based on the assumption that if the electorate is pro-Republican enough to elect Romney, it will also be pro-Republican enough to give Republicans control of the Senate.

  • Obamacare gets repealed via reconciliation. And even if that turns out not to be possible, it will be gutted enough to make it all but dead in practice.
  • The judicial system gets packed with a lot more conservative, business-friendly judges.
  • The Bush tax cuts are made permanent.
  • Corporate tax rates are cut substantially. There’s a slim chance that this would be done via a 1986-style tax reform bill that’s a net positive, but since Republicans wouldn’t need any Democratic help to pass it, probably not.
  • The estate tax might very well be eliminated.
  • Overall, for reasons of basic arithmetic, spending cuts will be much smaller than Romney and the GOP are promising, and the deficit will be substantially higher than it would be under Obama.
  • We might stay in Afghanistan significantly longer than we would otherwise — though I’m not sure about this.
  • Tightening of environmental regs would come to a halt. (Though it’s unclear how much of the existing regulatory infrastructure would get rolled back. Probably not that much.)
  • If another financial crisis hits, Romney would be very constrained in how he could deal with it. (So would Obama, but probably somewhat less so.)
  • Although congressional Republicans will be less successful than they’d like at slashing social welfare programs, they’ll still make some cuts. Life will get tougher for the poor.
  • The NLRB would become toothless once again.

For the record, there are also several things I think won’t happen. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann argue in the Washington Monthly that Republicans would eliminate the filibuster, but I doubt it. (And I’d count it as a long-term benefit in any case.) Romney has talked tough on China, but that’s just campaign bushwa. He’d quickly find out that his options are extremely limited on this score. On foreign policy more generally, Obama is actually fairly tenacious, despite Romney’s bluster to the contrary, and I doubt that Romney would be able to move much further to his right. Dodd-Frank is a question mark. I suspect some would get repealed (or effectively repealed) but not all of it. This couldn’t be done by reconciliation, after all. Social Security privatization is a nonstarter no matter who’s president. Substantial cuts to Medicare are probably unlikely too. Ditto for comprehensive immigration reform. And Romney’s appointments to the Fed probably wouldn’t be a lot different that Obama’s.

Among big ticket items, what have I missed?

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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