Brown: No taxes, blah, blah.
Define middle class: Brown – income level and whose side you are on…..I think about hard working men and women, 1,2-3 jobs. Professor Warren is fighting for Travelers insurance….asbestos settlements…..Dow chemical…..pigs in a trough up there……
Warren: My life’s work…..America’s middle class is getting hammered. People who play by the rules and invest in the future. Vision is something that was needed and she brought it up – my edits….really, I was just typing Vision when she started talking about the step-by-step process of investing.
Warren: I want to talk about those issues, Sen. Brown wants to attack.
Brown: Names, “Doug Rubin…you are one of the hired guns” Boooed. Whoa, Boooooed.
Warren: replies with high road for the consumer protection agency. Returned 1/2 billion dollars to consumers.
Brown: I was the deciding vote on financial reform (booed) “I actually made it better.” SNOTTY Brown has spoken.
Warren: After Dodd-Frank passed and he was working in secret……came out in the Globe. Making it clear that he really delivers it to Wall Street.
Eliminate mortgage interest:
Warren: Not support. Gets to continue after stopping….Turns it to Grover Norquist pledge and Browns voting with the billionaires. Oil subsidizes….big 5 137 B in profits. For me, we have to find the right balance in the system. Returns to the theme of who one stands with.
Brown: “I am glad GROVER NORQUIST AGREES with ME!”
Just like Romney, since when??? Give me a break.
A lot of anti-women’s rights Republicans have women in their families. That doesn’t make them good on women’s rights.
How is that possible? He’s the most junior Senator.
This has already been addressed here when he brought it up in the first debate.
Ask the people who really did serve about Scott Brown visiting as a senator but never seeing a day of combat
Somebody send her debate coaches to the White House STAT.
Best Moderator thus far for US Senate or the POTUS debates.
‘Job creators’. UGH. Nobody in the top 2% is taking their tax break and creating jobs with it (that’s how profits can be up in the middle of a recession). There’s a really good reason for this – it’s foolish to expand in a declining market. The demand (that 98%) that needs help. Let things trickle up for a change.
“I’ll never raise taxes on any American.” It’s a point of dogma that taxes are never good nor desirable. Automatic disqualification in my book. He certainly can’t be serious about any debt or deficit reduction with this dogma and I’m glad that challenge was finally stated directly (and clearly – she did great).
We drank every time he said “job creators”. <hick>
have to understand how extreme the Norquist pledge is.
Warren has hammered Brown on keeping the subsidies for Big Oil. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg with Norquist. As we try to figure out how to close the deficit in future years, Norquist’s pledge rejects ANY increase in revenue without offsetting cuts somewhere.
That means Brown has pledged:
(1) never to revert to the (already historically low) Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthiest, who have gotten 93% of the gains since the 2008 crash and have been getting the lion’s share of our economic growth for over 30 years.
(2) never to close any loophole or eliminate any subsidy at all, no matter how misguided, unless it can be offset with cuts somewhere else.
Norquist (and his proxies like Scott Brown) want only to reduce the size of government, which already has been reduced to levels not seen in over 50 years. As Norquist himself put it, shrink it until it’s so small you can drown it in a bathtub. That means getting rid of support for things like teachers and research and safe roads.
eom
… in the face of every GOP Norquist signer whenever tax provisions come up with ‘sunsets’. The only reason the Bush cuts had them was so that on paper they didn’t look outrageously irresponsible.
Taxes with sunsets come up – call them out if the support it. They’re either lying on their pledge to never let a cut sunset or they’re pledge means nothing. Based on the language we always hear about tax cuts (they solve every problem in every context and are therefor always the prescription) I think we know which is likely.
Like he said with the student loan rate extension, something something it was paid for with offsets or something. Fact check that one please.
The thing about the Bush tax cuts is that they were never offset by anything, so if Scott is only for tax cuts that are paid for with spending cuts then we are still waiting on the spending cuts that should go with the temporary Bush tax cuts.
Short version: Brown twice voted with his party to block closing a payroll tax loophole to maintain lower interest rates on student loans. He proposed his own solution but the numbers didn’t work. He then supported a GOP-dictated “compromise” that shifted much of the cost to the students themselves.
It eliminated the six-month grace period on interest payment after graduation for undergrads, and eliminated interest subsidies altogether for grad students, even while they are still in school.
The details:
Democratic proposal: hold the rates at 3.4%, cover the $6 billion cost by eliminating a payroll tax loophole. That loophole allowed certain private businesses (including lawyers, doctors, and accountants) to avoid paying payroll tax by classifying their income not as wages but as S-corp profits, which are exempt from Medicare withholding.
The GOP, who had blocked this in 2010 as well, immediately blasted this as raising taxes on job creators, but the exemption was most famous for being used by Sen. John Edwards (remember him?) to avoid paying any payroll tax at all on millions in law practice income.
Brown joined his party in opposing this change. He voted no twice, saying “I voted against it, because I didn’t want to see our small business owners pay $6 billion to pay for low interest rates.”
Brown loves to talk about S-corps, as you might have seen in the debates. But many of them are not that small. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “businesses with gross receipts of more than $10 million accounted for about two thirds of the gross receipts of all partnerships and S corporations.”
Brown proposed his own idea: eliminate improper spending. The CBO said that wouldn’t raise nearly enough revenue to cover the $6 billion cost.
Ultimately Brown supported the compromise because it’s not the S-corp folks who pay. So who does pay? The students. Under this compromise, interest begins to accrue for undergraduates immediately upon graduation; the six-month grace period has been eliminated. For graduate students, it’s even worse. It’s not just the six-month grace period after graduation that has been eliminated. All subsidized loans — government paying the interest while the students are in school — has been eliminated altogether. At a time when grad school costs are rising and many professions require a graduate degree for entry. All this will cost students some $20 billion in extra interest.
This ‘bipartisan compromise” was like every other in the past couple of years. The Democrats propose something reasonable. The Republicans hold their breath, stamp their feet, and filibuster. The Democrats agree to a GOP-dictated “compromise” that protects tax breaks for the wealthy and powerful and screws the average person.
And the moderator is competent.
Nice.
NICE to have a debate without 20 minutes on heritage!
Second impression: Warren really nailed it. She had some really good lines.
“It wouldn’t have passed if I wasn’t the deciding vote…” arrogantly delivered, and really reacted to by the crowd as such. Also, it brought to my mind, “I’m the Decider.”
and a moderator who didn’t let himself be steamrolled by people talking over him.
What I’d find equally refreshing is if we see a woman moderate the last debate. More than half the electorate is women, we’ve got a female candidate, and there is a yawning chasm of a gender gap in this race. I think this clearly calls for a little gender balance. There are two women moderating the presidential debates, can’t Massachusetts come up with one for our Senate debates?
I felt that there was a CLEAR difference in vision highlighted here. Any undecided voter watching saw Brown get nailed on Grover Norquist, REALLY nailed since he repeated his own support for him! and Warren, investments and balance and rich people need to pay their fair share, which feeds into the disgust we have at the uberrich like Romney paying 14%, or less.
But I don’t see this as a game changer. The job creator line was priceless. It might make good advertising fodder.
Brown looks stiff and rehearsed, par for the course for him. EW is articulate, forceful, and impassioned. It’s clear why she’s captured the women’s vote. She’s a great representative of a successful, effective woman. None of the stridency Hillary was accused of.
In spite of what I’d like to have seen, I’m very proud to be supporting her.
… but that’s just because most voters aren’t paying attention. In a world where debates matter, this would have been a game changer. To the extent that debates matter, this performance matters.
I wish that Elizabeth Warren didn’t let Scott Brown get away with defining a tax increase as “taking money out of the economy” but then allowing him to champion for spending cuts which also take money out of the economy.
Both take money from the economy – it’s just a matter of who they take from and which economy they effect. Tax increases on upper income brackets take money out of the Wall Street economy; upper income people will have less to speculate with in the stock market.
Spending cuts take money out of the main street economy – middle and lower income people will lose jobs, they will cut back on local spending, and they will go without valuable services.
It’s a matter of which vision you support and believe. She hit on that a lot, but in my opinion didn’t quite nail the linkage between tax cuts and spending reductions.
Send your taxes to your local school board, and you get teachers who educate children and spend their salaries in the local economy.
Cut taxes for the wealthy and the money is taken out of the economy and sent to the Cayman Islands.
School committee members are the true job creators.
Brown voted against Paycheck Fairness twice — 2010 and 2012.
In 2010 he was the 41st vote against it, keeping it from coming to a vote on the floor of the Senate and becoming law.
Did anybody notice that Elizabeth Warren said she would absolutely not allow the mortgage interest deduction to expire, while Scott Brown said that, along with everything else, it “would have to be on the table” in order to balance the budget. That means he would go after this important middle class tax break. This would hit many middle class taxpayers hard, and we should hit him hard with it.
Brown had a pretty good night but seemed flustered and rushed. Warren was in control, on point and devastating.
Brown more with every debate. I take issue with one thing though. If she is going to talk about cutting agriculture subsidies, she needs to be more specific about why, how and what impact it will have in the main stream economy.
That. Right there. That is why we need Elizabeth Warren to represent Massachusetts.
But I think the answer to attacks on ObamaCare should be short and sweet:
PPACA has two goals: make sure every american has health insurance and control escalating health care costs.
PPACA is not a federal takeover or a “one size fits all” solution. It sets minimum requirements for private insurers, based on Masshealth, for the several states to meet or exceed if they choose to fashion their own health coverage for their residents.
I thought Warren was excellent throughout, but especially that last portion where she talked about women’s rights. And I really liked how she kept nailing him on different points — wow is she good on her feet. In contrast he was just a lot of word salad, incoherent at times. He sounded like he was running for city council or state rep. She sounded like she was running for federal office. Here’s hoping lots of folks were watching and that this gets replayed a lot tomorrow — I think it could really connect with folks. And three cheers for the moderator and basing questions on public input!!
on CSPAN’s site.
My first impression: Wow, a whole bevy of issues, no focus on meaningless tripe, substantive discussion and a great moderator, who was more serious about his job than, say, his hair.
In terms of who won, Liz certainly got off the best points and was in command of the issues. She didn’t really miss any opportunities. Brown looked annoyed throughout (I think his nice-guy image must be destroyed by now, right?) and had slip ups, but otherwise I don’t think he belly flopped. The people who were going to vote for him are still going to vote for him; Liz may have picked up some undecided voters yet, and certainly shored up some of her leaners.
… for looking less annoyed than the first debate.
One thing looked kinda weird though – Brown looked like he just came from St. Thomas. What was with the tan,… getting ready for his new modeling gig?
‘job creators’ phrase, after working so hard throughout the campaign to pretend he’s not a Republican. As mr-lynne noted above, the wealthy are not taking their tax cuts and creating jobs with them — that was amply demonstrated under George W Bush.
But it’s more than that. How is it some crushing tax burden for the very wealthy to pay the same tax rate as they did under the Clinton administration? Or, for that matter, the same rate as I’m paying now? How is it a problem to tax oil companies on their huge profits — if he thinks they’ll just pass the burden along to customers and that’s why their taxes shouldn’t be raised, does that mean he opposes any taxes on oil companies at all?
How can he be serious about cutting the deficit when he won’t raise taxes on anyone, anywhere at all yet the only program he says he’ll cut is the Affordable Healthcare Act (which obviously isn’t responsible for the deficit we have)? To coin a phrase: Clearly, he’s not.