Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Mitt Romney has Good Listening Skills



While McCain, the soon to be departed Giuliani, and Huckabee have always been easy to dismiss as serious contenders for my vote for various reasons (too statist, too crooked, too much of a nanny stater, respectively). Mitt Romney, like Fred Thompson, got a second look from me a while back. Mainly because I wasn't too familiar with him and he did have a trackrecord of turning around enterprises that were failures (the SLC Olympics comes to mind).

I did have a little bit of sympathy for Mitt for the attacks that he had to endure because of his religion. However, this is the second high visibility time that Mitt has done the bob and weave when asked a direct question that you could tell he was unprepared for and it shows. The first time was here.

At issue this time is the income tax. Talk radio show host Mark Larson out of Tampa interviews Mitt and asks him to consider the "one tax" which is a value added tax on M1, so transactions at all levels whether it's a company that purchases huge volumes like say Walmart or Staples, or it's individuals who are at the 7-11 buying those nasty hot dogs that have been sitting all day under the heat lamps, the transaction is charged at 1 percent. It's an interesting concept and would definitely be an improvement over the current income tax. But an even better proposal would be to scrap the income tax and really shrink the size of the federal government. It's OK if the government at the state level expanded, if that happened, you could always move to another state while staying in the US.

Anyway, I get the feeling upon listening to the interview a second time, that Mitt didn't hear the part about "transactions at all levels" maybe the interviewer could have hit that point harder but I doubt it. You can listen to the whole Mitt interview here. However, I like the youtube version because Larson talks a little more about the interview during his next segment.

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