Kyle Wingfield

The hazards of having a parliamentary system in a bitterly divided country (from Reuters):

Greece abandoned a nine-day hunt for a government on Tuesday and called a new election that may hand victory to leftists who might cut the nation’s financial lifeline, pushing it closer to bankruptcy and out of the euro zone.

After six rounds of fruitless wrangling, party leaders emerged from a final session at the presidential mansion to gloomily declare that deep divisions over a 130-billion-euro foreign bailout package had killed any hope of a coalition deal.

“We shouldn’t have reached this point,” said Socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos, who personally negotiated the rescue package from the European Union and IMF which the hard left says has imposed too harsh an austerity regime. “For God’s sake, let’s move towards something better and not something worse.”

The last elections were held just nine days ago.

In case you’re wondering what’s the difference between the “leftists” …

Continue reading Beware of Greeks who can’t bear to govern themselves »

Opinion polls have value — and limits. The value in the new CBS News/New York Times poll isn’t the headline result showing Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 46-43. The top-line, national result in a poll conducted almost six months before Election Day is pretty worthless.

But there is value in some of the underlying data, and what they tell us about the direction the election may be taking. There’s some good and bad for each candidate.

First, a quick note about why these data mean anything. Because this poll is taken regularly, with consistency in the wording of questions over time, we can get a decent idea of trend lines. Even better, the people surveyed last Friday to Sunday (May 11-13) are the very same people surveyed last month, giving us an idea of how particular people’s opinions are shifting. However, not all of the people from the April poll chose to participate in May; again, there are limits.

Now to the data. We’ll start with the good for Obama because, frankly, it …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Seeking trendlines for Obama and Romney »

Perhaps Warren Buffett and the other members of his Billionaires for Higher Taxes club should go on French television, where they might actually be asked about the kind of high tax rates some people on the left think the U.S. should implement.

Perhaps they’d have the same kind of reaction Will Smith did (Smith’s interview follows a clip of French President-elect Francois Hollande, and the actor is asked about the tax rate after his first answer):

C’est vrai!

(H/t: Ezra Klein, who links Smith’s reaction to Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s recent renunciation of his U.S. citizenship ahead of the company’s forthcoming IPO, after which he will go from being very rich to ultra-rich.)

– By Kyle Wingfield

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Continue reading Will Smith: I’d pay more taxes. Wait, how much more?! (video) »

If you don’t think these statistics will have more of a bearing on this November’s election results than President Obama’s stances on gay marriage, free contraception, etc., then you’re fooling yourself. From a USA Today story:

• “One out of five families owes more on credit cards, medical bills, student loans and other unsecured debt than they have in savings … “
• “[T]he number of families surveyed at the end of 2011 that have no savings at all increased to 23.4 percent, compared with 18.5 percent in 2009.”
• “Among homeowners, 1.7 percent said that they expect to fall behind on their mortgage payments in the near future … slightly less than in 2009, when 1.9 percent expected to run into mortgage problems.”
• “Sixty percent of workers say that the value of their savings and investments is less than $25,000 … retirement confidence is at historically low levels.”
• “[N]early half of families say they have no debt at all from credit cards and other unsecured loans, the same percentage …

Continue reading Economic security still non-existent for many Americans »

What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman. But what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they’re not discriminated against on the job.

OK, confession time: I didn’t create those opening sentences. Then-U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama did, in 2004.

Obama offered a different, “evolved” belief Wednesday, saying he thinks same-sex couples should be able to marry. He had it right the first time.

Well, not the first first time. Before tackling the issue, let’s review Obama’s “evolution.” In 1996, while running for the Illinois Senate, Obama noted on a questionnaire that he “favor[ed] legalizing same-sex marriages.” By 2004, he’d flipped on that position.

Last week — after an endorsement of gay marriage by Vice President Joe Biden and a report that …

Continue reading Obama got it right about gay marriage . . . in 2004 »

A day after President Obama endorsed the concept of same-sex marriage (but, notably, no policies to legalize it), the Washington Post reported that, as a teenager in boarding school, Mitt Romney once forcibly cut the longish hair of a fellow classmate who was “presumed” to be gay. The story has since been found to have a number of problems: Two sisters of the alleged victim (who died several years ago) claim the depiction of him is “factually incorrect,” and one says she had never heard of the incident (which, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen); one of the Romney classmates quoted about the incident now says he didn’t actually witness it.

As if to confirm that juvenile behavior by juveniles is not a partisan issue, a blogger soon posted an excerpt from Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” in which he describes behaving rudely toward an unpopular female classmate. (The posted excerpts don’t refer to his age at the time, but the reference by Obama to her being in …

Continue reading Poll Position: How much of a candidate’s life is fair game? »

Before spending a few hundred million taxpayer dollars — for example, on a new stadium for the Falcons — it is worth mulling worst-case scenarios. The worst of the worst cases for the stadium is that, within a few decades, football as we know it is extinct.

Get this straight: I’m not predicting football’s death. The NFL and college football have never been bigger. Projecting the sport’s demise would seem to put one in the company of Harold Camping, the nonagenarian preacher who (twice!) last year forecast Doomsday, not among UGA football’s season-ticket holders.

That said, there are some dark clouds on the sport’s horizon. What better time to pause and consider those clouds than before a deal is signed and the bonds — for which Atlanta’s hotel tax revenues would be committed until 2050 — are sold.

The place to start is with the dominant story this NFL offseason, which concerns player safety. The NFL faces 70 lawsuits covering more than 1,800 ex-players who claim …

Continue reading Falcons stadium proposal begs a look at football’s future »

On a day when the political sob stories ought to focus on Dick Lugar, whom Indiana Republicans voted out after 36 years in the U.S. Senate, the bulk of the bad news from yesterday’s primaries instead concerns President Obama:

1. North Carolina is a swing state. Four years ago, Obama won the state by 14,177 votes out of more than 4.2 million cast. Last night, almost 200,000 voters in the state’s Democratic primary voted against him, even though no one else was even on the ballot. A constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, publicly opposed by Obama despite the mixed signals from his administration on the issue, passed easily, 61 percent to 39 percent.

2. Wisconsin is generally not considered a swing state — it’s typically been safe territory for Democrats. But 2010 saw the election of Republicans to a majority of the state’s legislative seats and the governor’s mansion. That GOP governor, Scott Walker, currently faces a recall election fueled by labor unions still steamed …

Continue reading Obama steals Lugar’s bad-news thunder »

For all the talk of how America is following in the footsteps of debt-riddled Greece, here is one way our politics is charting a very different course: We are not waiting to reach the very edge of the abyss before moving our parties away from the center.

One of the big stories from today’s primaries, which for the most part have been rendered less than front-page news outside the states holding them any given day, will be whether longtime Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar survives a challenge from tea-party favorite and State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. A recent poll (there haven’t been many of them) suggests Lugar’s time is up.

The headlines will be about the tea party throwing out a respected member of the D.C. establishment in a fit of ideologically pure pique. Yet, increasingly this kind of result is dog-bites-man news — for both parties.

Last month, Pennsylvania Democrats threw out a pair of “Blue Dog Democrats” from the U.S. House. The Blue Dogs, who tried to push laws such as …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Should we worry about the primary losses of moderates? »

The austerity debate is back, with American liberals pointing to shrinking European economies as evidence against the wisdom of cutting government spending here.

Typical is this argument from a column by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman last month: “Europe has had several years of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs push depressed economies even deeper into depression.”

Indeed, nine of the European Union’s 27 member-countries were in technical recession by the end of 2011 or the first quarter of 2012 (not all countries report first-quarter data at the same time).

There’s just one problem: There have been no such austerity programs, at least not of the type Krugman and other liberals warn against.

In five of the nine recessionary countries, governments cut spending in 2011. In four, they didn’t. There were another three European countries in which public spending fell …

Continue reading There’s austerity in Europe, all right — of the taxing sort »