During this week's vice presidential debate, Paul Ryan reprised a line Republicans have used repeatedly in making the case for a Romney presidency.

"Mitt Romney -- his experience, his ideas, his solutions -- is uniquely qualified to get this job done," Ryan said in his closing statement. "At a time when we have a jobs crisis in America, wouldn't it be nice to have a job-creator in the White House?"

The central argument at the heart of Romney's candidacy is that he knows how to create jobs and President Obama doesn't. To buttress that claim, Romney points to his career in the private sector, as a Wall Street buyout specialist and venture capitalist at the firm Bain Capital. Bain Capital, of course, specialized mostly in leveraged buyouts -- debt-financed investments in companies that often resulted in bankruptcy, off-shoring and layoffs.

Since those aspects of Romney's business career are less politically palatable, he focuses instead on the few start-ups he helped provide seed funding for -- brands we all recognize, like Sports Authority and Staples.

The problem, however, with spotlighting those businesses is that their success hinges fundamentally on a premise that is perhaps just as unpalatable as the worst excesses of private equity. Those large retail chains exploit the efficiencies of scale to offer the same goods and services that much smaller businesses do, but at much lower costs.

Large chains like Staples also keep their labor costs low by offering low-wage sales associate jobs that pay, in the case of Staples, an average of $8.54 an hour, according to Glassdoor.com. Retail sales jobs -- among the occupations with the largest projected growth over the next ten years -- pay a median annual salary of just $20,670, which isn't even enough to sustain a family of four above the federal poverty line, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By contrast, the median annual salary of the jobs with the largest growth over the next 10 years is $33,840.

Forty-one percent of the Staples workforce are part-time employees, according to the company's annual report, which describes its workforce this way: "Many of our associates, particularly in retail stores, are in entry-level or part-time positions with historically high rates of turnover." In July, the National Employment Law Project listed Staples as one of the 50 largest low-wage employers in the country.

So the question is this: When Romney champions his success at Staples as one of his main qualifications for the presidency, is he claiming that those kinds of jobs -- part-time, low-wage sales associate jobs that can't even keep a family of four above the poverty line -- are the kinds of jobs he'll create as president?

There is also an inherent tension in the economic prescriptions of Republican candidates like Romney when it comes to small businesses. On the one hand, Republicans contend that small businesses are the engines of our economy. On the other, they believe that whoever can more cheaply and efficiently deliver goods and services to consumers should win in the open market.

In the case of Staples, the number of office-supply stores in the U.S. decreased by about 50 percent in the first ten years after Staples was founded, suggesting that the large retail chain put a lot of smaller mom-and-pop stores out of business. The market share of those smaller and medium-sized stores plunged from 20 percent when Staples was founded in 1986 to just 4 percent in 1998.

:: Sal Gentile (@salgentile) is a segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes ::

Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel came under fire this week for sending an email to his employees demanding that they vote for Mitt Romney and threatening to downsize the company if they don't. But Siegel's email isn't an outlier. It fits a pattern of imperious CEOs attempting to marshal the support of their employees in pursuit of their own political interests.

Up w/ Chris Hayes has exclusively obtained an email sent by the CEO of a Florida-based software firm, ASG Software Solutions, to his over 1,000 employees asking them to vote for Romney for president and suggesting that their jobs may be at stake if Romney doesn't win. The subject line of the email, sent by ASG President and CEO Arthur Allen on Sept. 30, asks: "Will the US Presidential election directly impact your future jobs at ASG? Please read below."

Allen then suggests that the company may have to downsize, or be bought by a larger company, if President Obama is re-elected, and suggests that massive cuts and layoffs would ensue if that occurs.

"We have been able to keep ASG an independent company while still growing our revenues and customers. But I can tell you, if the US re-elects President Obama, our chances of staying independent are slim to none," Allen writes. "If we fail as a nation to make the right choice on November 6th, and we lose our independence as a company, I don't want to hear any complaints regarding the fallout that will most likely come.

Allen adds: "I am asking you to give us one more chance to stay independent by voting in a new President and administration on November 6th. Even then, we still might not be able to remain independent, but it will at least give us a chance. If we don't, that chance goes away."

Up w/ Chris attempted to contact Allen several times via phone and email during business hours on Friday. His outgoing message said he was out of the country, so Up w/ Chris also placed calls and sent emails to several other officials at ASG during business hours on Friday as well. We have not received a response.

Here's the full text of Allen's email:

Subject: Will the US Presidential election directly impact your future jobs at ASG? Please read below.

To all ASG employees,

We have been stuck in an extremely sick global economy, but as we should all know by now, the global economy largely depends on the US economy. This sick global economy has been negatively influencing ASG since December 2008. No one could have ever have dreamed that the US economy would still be sick 4 years later, but it is. We have a chance, as individuals, to help turn the sick US economy into a healthy economy, and positively influence the global economy as well. This chance comes on November 6th, when we elect a new President and administration. The US and the world need to elect individuals who have business experience. Neither the world nor the US can stand to elect politicians any longer. In my view, and in the view of most business leaders, if you give politicians 100 questions, they will give you back 100 wrong answers simply because they have no basis for making those decisions. Would you hire a person with no experience to do brain surgery? Of course not, but that's what the US voters did in 2009. Why does the world keep hiring politicians to run our global economies when they have no experience? It just makes no sense, and yet the world keeps doing it over and over again. Let's take the lead on November 6th and show the world how it should and can be done.

Many of you have been with ASG for over 5, 10, 15, and even 20 years. As you know, together, we have been able to keep ASG an independent company while still growing our revenues and customers. But I can tell you, if the US re-elects President Obama, our chances of staying independent are slim to none. I am already heavily involved in considering options that make our independence go away, and with that all of our lives would change forever. I believe that a new President and administration would give US citizens and the world the renewed confidence and optimism we all need to get the global economies started again, and give ASG a chance to stay independent. If we fail as a nation to make the right choice on November 6th, and we lose our independence as a company, I don't want to hear any complaints regarding the fallout that will most likely come. Remember, in the world of business, companies are consolidators or they get consolidated; so far ASG has been a consolidator, completing over 60 acquisitions in our 26 year history. When we buy a company, we eliminate about 60 percent of the salaries of the employees of that company. If we lose our independence and get consolidated, the same thing would happen to ASG's employees.

I am asking you to give us one more chance to stay independent by voting in a new President and administration on November 6th. Even then, we still might not be able to remain independent, but it will at least give us a chance. If we don't, that chance goes away.

I apologize for writing such a blunt email, but for those of you who have known me for years and years, you know that this must be serious, and it is. I am going to follow this email with an email to All Sales, offering all of our help to assist them in making Q4 the best quarter in ASG history. Business is hard to find, but it is out there if Sales just goes and gets it.

Mr. Allen

:: Sal Gentile (@salgentile) is a segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes ::

Koch Industries, the multi-billion-dollar company owned by conservative brothers Charles and David Koch, sent a mailing to its 50,000 employees earlier this month offering guidance on how to vote in this year's presidential election. The documents were obtained by In These Times magazine and provided to Up w/ Chris before publishing their report.

The packet sent to employees includes a letter, dated October 1st, from Koch Industries president and Chief Operating Officer David Robertson. Robertson writes:

Dear co-worker,

While we are typically told before each Presidential election that it is important and historic, I believe the upcoming election will determine what kind of America future generations will inherit. If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences. ... It is essential that we are all informed and educated voters. Our future depends on it.

The packet includes editorials blasting the Obama administration, written by Charles and David Koch for newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. And then there's the flier it includes, containing information on early voting options and voter registration deadlines. The flier contains this passage:

The following candidates in your state are among the candidates who have received support from a Koch company or KOCHPAC, the employee political action committee of Koch companies.

Just beneath that passage, the document lists the Koch brothers' favored candidates for president and vice president: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

Rob Tappan, Koch Companies director of external relations, sent Up w/ Chris the following statement:

To encourage employees to be informed about and engaged in the political process, Koch mailed a letter in early October to its 50,000 U.S.-based employees. It is also important to note that many companies, as well as organizations such as labor unions, also provide similar information to their members and fellow employees. Indeed, unions and newspapers go further than this and actually endorse candidates to their readers and members.

The communication to our employees makes clear that decisions about which political candidates to support are up to each employee and should be based on factors most important to him or her. In addition to the letter, employees were given information they often request – voter registration deadlines, early voting options for various states, and a list of candidates supported by Koch companies and KOCHPAC, Koch’s employee political action committee.

Because inaccurate and false stories were written about a similar letter we sent to Koch employees in 2010, we are posting the complete text of the letter below so that readers can see for themselves the true intent of the mailing:

And here is the full text of the letter from Robertson to Koch Industries employees:

Dear co-worker,

While we are typically told before each Presidential election that it is important and historic, I believe the upcoming election will determine what kind of America future generations will inherit.

If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation and other ills. This is true regardless of what your political affiliation might be.

To help you engage in the political process, we have enclosed several items in this packet. For most of you, this includes information about voter registration deadlines and early voting options for your state. At the request of many employees, we have also provided a list of candidates in your state that have been supported by Koch companies or by KOCHPAC, our employee political action committee.

I want to emphasize two things about these lists. First, and most important, we believe any decision about which candidates to support is – as always – yours and yours alone, based on the factors that are most important to you. Second, we do not support candidates based on their political affiliation. We evaluate them based on who is the most market-based and willing to support economic freedom for the benefit of society as a whole.

If you are concerned about our economy, our future and enhancing the quality of life for all Americans, then I encourage you to consider the principles of your candidates and not just their party affiliation. It is essential that we are all informed and educated voters. Our future depends on it.

Also included in this mailing are wallet cards to use as you shop for some of the most popular brands made by your co-workers, information about our newly updated MBM® Guiding Principles and some thoughtful editorials by Charles Koch, David Koch and others.

Sincerely,

Dave Robertson
President and COO
Koch Industries, Inc.

:: Sal Gentile (@salgentile) is a segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes ::

Tomorrow on Up w/ Chris, we'll examine Mitt Romney's crowning achievement when it comes to job creation: Staples.  We'll talk with Staples founder Tom Stemberg about Romney's Staples record, and take a close look at the types of jobs big retail chains like Staples offer. We'll also discuss the trend of CEOs ordering their employees to support particular candidates, and share some breaking news about the Koch brothers. And we'll dive into the polling industry with Nate Silver of The New York Times, who will provide us with the latest news on what the polling says about the presidential election.

Joining Chris at 8 AM ET on MSNBC will be:

Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight), Founder of FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver’s Political Calculus and author of “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t.”

Thomas Stemberg, founder of Staples, Managing General Partner of the Highland Consumer Fund.

Sarita Gupta (@saritasgupta), Executive Director of Jobs with Justice and Executive Director of American Rights at Work.

Josh Barro (@jbarro), Lead Writer for Bloomberg View's "The Ticker."

David W. Moore, Senior Fellow at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, Policy Critic at iMediaEthics.org and Former Managing Editor and Senior Editor of the Gallup Poll.

Maya Wiley, Founder and President of the Center for Social Inclusion.

Zephyr Teachout, Professor at the Fordham University School of Law.

Monica Youn, Brennan Center constitutional fellow at the New York University school of law where she focuses on election law and First Amendment issues.

Alec MacGillis, senior editor for "The New Republic" and currently serving as the magazine's correspondent for the 2012 campaign.

:: Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant Up w/ Chris Hayes ::

by Chris Hayes Story of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes

ABC's Martha Raddatz did, I thought, on the whole, a pretty good job moderating Thursday night's vice presidential debate, particularly when asking questions on her area of expertise, foreign policy. But her final question of the night, about the negativity and sordidness of electoral politics, really bothered me.

Here's what she asked: 

I recently spoke to a highly decorated soldier who said that this presidential campaign has left him dismayed. He told me, quote, "the ads are so negative and they are all tearing down each other rather than building up the country." What would you say to that American hero about this campaign? And at the end of the day, are you ever embarrassed by the tone? 

 That soldier, of course, isn't alone: Lots of Americans feel the same way. I've heard the same thing from random voters I've interviewed in every campaign I've covered. And it's a recurring theme among the political press paid to cover politics to bemoan the nastiness and negativity of the thrust and parry of electoral politics. But it's an impulse we should collectively resist, because it contains the kernel of an insidious view of the value of democracy and diplomacy and bureaucracy and the manifold ways that we as human beings channel and resolve conflict in a non-violent fashion.

 The same distaste for the plodding, clunky, at times flat-out ugliness of process in Raddatz's question was also on display in Paul Ryan's repeated attacks on the administration's UN-based diplomacy on Iran.

It's true that the UN can be maddeningly dysfunctional, that the constitution of the security council is an accident of history and that Russia's objections to any and all US proposals can seem to Americans truculent and spiteful, but what, exactly is the alternative? The answer is violence, war, death, bloodshed. 

Gretchen Carlson: The Nobel committee praised the EU for its six decades of efforts to promote peace and democracy in Europe.

Brian Kilmeade: Really? 

Carlson: …and those are Kilmeade: fantastic. [crosstalk] we should have the sportswriters do it, theyre better at picking the cy young

Steve Doocy: The EU can only hope there's a cash reward with that they could use some money right now

 And it's true that the Europe isn't in the best of shape right now. The limitations of its governing structure are causing institutional dysfunction, widespread misery and threatening to terminate the entire project. Greece, submerged in the misery of austerity, is seeing fascists gain traction, administering brutally violent beatings to political enemies in a fashion horrifyingly reminiscent of Weimar Germany.

 But to mock the EU is to lose sight of what a tremendous accomplishment it has been on a small patch of earth that was the site of some of the most horrifying war, violence, brutality, sadism and genocide in the history of the planet. In a span of 6 years, at least 40 million perished on Europe's soil, and the EU was constructed as a means of bringing peace and stability to a continent that had more or less known only war. The European Union doesn't have a whole lot of defenders at this moment in its history, but mockery of the EU rests on the same impulse we see in the laments of the nastiness of our presidential campaign and the huffing and puffing at the inadequacy of Iran diplomacy.

In each case, the process may be messy and ugly and torturous, but it's almost always better than the alternative. Conflict is part of the human condition: there are limited resources, there are differing interests and cultures and tribes and value systems, with different conceptions of the good, vastly different priorities and first principles. Democracy is the system we've come up with to resolve those inevitable conflicts, but there is no such thing as a placid equilibrium in which those conflicts somehow disappear, or are only articulated in the gentlest fashion. That's the point. Conflict is the underlying constant of human society. The question is what we do with it. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that either we have people killing each other in the streets like dogs, or we have people running attack ads against each other.  Bureaucracy, parliamentary procedure, extended multi-lateral talks, the back and forth of campaign ads, are largely glory-less enterprises, in the grand sweep of history, they are beautiful, sublime achievements, they represent nearly unthinkable progress and point the way towards a future of full human flourishing. 

On Sunday's Up w/ Chris Hayes, we'll examine the praise political leaders shower on "small business" as the engine of economic growth, and we'll investigate what really qualifies as a "small business." Also: According to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll, the most important issue for voters in this election is the economy. The second most important? Social issues, which were glaringly absent from Wednesday's presidential debate. The candidates failed to address gun control, climate change, immigration and women's rights, among other topics. We'll discuss the topics that were left out of the debate. And: During the Republican primaries, Romney shifted right on immigration, advocating policies he claimed would cause "illegal aliens" to "self-deport." Now he has tacked to the center in order to appeal to undecided, independent voters. Amid all this, The New York Times has announced that it will continue to use the terms "illegal immigrants" and "illegal immigration."

Joining Chris tomorrow at 8 AM ET on MSNBC will be:

Democratic Rep. Peter Welch, who holds Vermont's only House seat and serves as chief deputy whip in the Democratic caucus.

Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead), comedian and co-creator of "The Daily Show."

Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting), Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and founder of the Define American campaign.

Rebecca Traister (@rtraister), contributor to to the New York Times Magazine and Salon.com. Author of "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women."

Brooke Gladstone (@OTMbrooke), co-host and managing editor of WNYC's "On the Media."

JJ Ramberg (@jjramberg), host of MSNBC's "Your Business" and co-author of "It's Your Business: 183 Essential Tips that Will Transform Your Small Business."

Ro Khanna, former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce and author of "Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future."

Chris Rabb,(@chrisrabb) adjunct professor for the Fox School of Business at Temple University and author of "Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity."

Maria Hinojosa (@maria_hinojosa) rotating anchor for PBS' "Need to Know," executive producer for "America by the Numbers with Maria HInajosa," anchor and executive producer of NPR's "Latino USA," winner of 2012 John Chancellor award for Excellence in Journalism.

John McWhorter, professor of linguistics and American studies at Columbia University, contributing editor at the "New Republic" and "Daily News" columnist.

:: Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant for Up w/ Chris Hayes ::

During Wednesday night's presidential debate, Mitt Romney sought to cast himself as a crusader for financial reform, championing tough new Wall Street regulations and sparring with President Obama over delays in the implementation of several key provisions at the heart of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Romney also sought to paint the president as an ally of Wall Street banks, charging that Dodd-Frank enshrined the status of the "Too Big To Fail" financial institutions, thus guaranteeing future taxpayer bailouts. Dodd-Frank, Romney claimed, "designates a number of banks as 'too big to fail,' and they're effectively guaranteed by the federal government. This is the biggest kiss that's been given to New York banks I've ever seen. This is an enormous boon for them."

There is, perhaps, a legitimate critique to make of the President's signature financial reform bill -- specifically, that it didn't go far enough in constraining the power of the nation's biggest banks, and that it should have broken up banks deemed "too big to fail."

Nonetheless, Romney's argument is disingenuous. For one thing, Dodd-Frank actually subjects those "too big to fail" banks to much stricter regulatory scrutiny and capital requirements. And it doesn't guarantee that they'll be propped up taxpayers (in fact, it gives federal authorities the power to wind down those banks if they are ever in danger of collapsing).

So Romney's claim is wrong on policy. But it's also politically disingenuous, because the very agencies responsible for writing and enforcing the rules at the heart of Dodd-Frank -- such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- have been under relentless attack from Republicans seeking to neuter or eliminate them since the day Dodd-Frank was passed in July 2010. And for their efforts, Republicans have been handsomely rewarded by their patrons on Wall Street.

The graph above represents the total number of donations given to the top 20 recipients of campaign cash from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Of the nearly $73.6 million given to those 20 candidates, including President Obama and Mitt Romney, more than 70 percent, or $52 million, has gone to Republicans.

Romney has received the most, by far. Donors in the finance, insurance and real estate industries have given him more than $28 million as of September. President Obam has received just over $12 million from those sources.

After the presidential candidates, the top recipients of donations from finance, insurance and real estate sources are Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and House Speaker John Boehner. The top Democratic recipient of finance, industry and real estate cash is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Of those top 20 recipients, seven are Democrats, and 13 are Republicans.

:: Sal Gentile (@salgentile) is a segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes :: 

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, responded Saturday to baseless allegations that the Obama administration may have manipulated the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly jobs report to make it look better than it actually was, calling those allegations "literally absurd."

In an interview on Up w/ Chris Hayes Saturday, Stiglitz said the accusations leveled by Republicans and their supporters on Wall Street -- including Rep. Allen West of Florida, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch and former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes -- were outlandish and contradicted a broad consensus among economists of all party affiliations that the jobs numbers are not influenced by political calculations.

"No president, maybe except Nixon, would actually try to change what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does," Stiglitz said. "These are really independent statistical agencies, and the idea that they would do that is, I say, literally absurd."

Stiglitz recalled his time working in the Clinton White House, explaining that there was a long history of insulating the economic metrics from political pressure. "The history and the culture of these independent agencies is extraordinarily strong," Stiglitz said. "We felt absolutely very strongly, and I think this is bipartisan, that you don’t monkey with the numbers, because they would destroy your credibility. And the one thing that we still have is credibility in the numbers."

When, for example, the Bureau of Economic Affairs adopted a new methodology for calculating the Gross Domestic Product that resulted in lower GDP growth, the agency resisted considerable pushback from then-President Clinton, who was concerned about the potential impact on his re-election campaign. "The president was furious, because everyone wants a good growth number. They were coming up with a number that was lower," Stiglitz said. President Clinton, he added, "said, 'Can’t you stop this? Can’t you tell them to wait until after the election? We said 'No, they’re independent agencies, we can’t touch them.'"

Nonetheless, a number of prominent conservatives have continued to insist that the new jobs numbers, which show the unemployment rate has dipped below eight percent for the first time during Obama's presidency, must be skewed. Some have even gone so far as to offer alternative metrics, just as they have with national polls, which Republicans insist must be wrong because they show President Obama leading Mitt Romney.

Stiglitz said those efforts were symptomatic of a broader trend among Republicans.

"There’s this old debate about, 'we can’t choose our facts, we can choose our interpretation of the facts,'" Stiglitz said. "And what they’re trying to move to is the direction where we get to choose our facts."

:: Sal Gentile (@salgentile) is a segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes ::

by Chris Hayes Story of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes

The contemporary Republican party faces a fundamental political problem and it is this: the policy position to which the party is most committed is very unpopular. Over the last decade the single most urgent, durable domestic priority of the Republican Party is reducing taxes on wealthy Americans. If there is one thing you can bank on when the Republicans are in power, it's that.

 It happened twice during George W. Bush's terms, in which he pushed through tax cuts that totaled a combined $2.74 trillion. When those tax cuts were set to expire in 2010, Republicans announced they would happily let taxes rise for everyone, and let unemployment benefits expire—an unprecedented move under such dire conditions—rather than raise taxes for the top 1%.

They won that standoff and got their way, leading to at least $225 billion in tax cuts for the top 1% over the last two years. Once Republicans took the House, they moved quickly to vote for the Ryan budget, which passed the House the first time on a vote of 235-193. All but four Republicans voted for it, and it would have cut taxes for those at the top even further. The Ryan budget died in the Senate, but undeterred, earlier this year Ryan unveiled a second version of his budget, this one would have cut more than $1.76 trillion from the taxes of the top one half of the top 1% over ten years.

Which brings us to the current campaign. During the Republican primary every candidate in the field offered tax cuts that, it turned out, would most benefit the wealthy. A number of the plans proposed - Cain's, Gingrich's - came right out and said explicitly that they lowered taxes for the wealthiest. I suppose it's to Mitt Romney's credit that he did not have the most cruelly regressive tax plan in the primary. But it's under-appreciated that he is currently proposing at least three major separate tax cuts, all of which would disproportionately benefit the rich.

First, he's proposing that all of the Bush tax cuts be made permanent, which would mean a tax cut of $3 trillion for the wealthiest over just the next ten years. Second, he's proposing to cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%. The Tax Policy Center estimates that just over half of the corporate tax burden ultimately falls on the top 1%, so Romney's plan amounts to a cut of $43-thousand for each household in the top 1%. And then there's the now famous $5 trillion tax cut Mitt Romney is, or at least was proposing, which he says isn't a tax cut because he'll close unspecified loopholes and deductions.

We all know inequality has grown, that the 1% have pulled away from everyone else, and perversely, the recovery has only made that trend worse.  So it violates voters' basic and appropriate sense of fairness to further skew the tax code towards those who are doing the best, in fact some doing much better year after year than anyone else. Why, they ask, should Mitt Romney, who makes more than $20 million a year and sits on a fortune of $230 million only pay 14% in taxes?  The polling on this is remarkably robust and incredibly consistent. Heck, even a majority of Republican support higher taxes for the wealthy, as several polls have found.

So if you're a Republican seeking the highest office in the land, you've got a real problem. On the one hand you absolutely have to advocate for and push through tax cuts for the wealthy, knowing full well the electorate as a whole does not like or want them. So what do you do?  Well, up until this point, Mitt Romney has floundered a bit, but Wednesday at the debate, he fully embraced the very effective strategy used by the last man to successfully pull off this particular bait and switch: George W. Bush. The centerpiece of Bush's campaign was a large tax cut, skewed heavily to the wealthy. But rather than defend this principle of tax cuts for the wealthy, he simply obfuscated and hand waved and misled about his tax cuts' effects.

Bush: Everybody who pays taxes ought to get tax relief. After my plan is in place, the wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes then they do today, and the poorest of Americans, six million families, seven million people won't pay any tax at all.

Notice the sleight of hand. The wealthiest Americans will pay a higher percentage of taxes than they do today. Not a higher percentage of their income in taxes, since that would be an outright lie. This is a very common bit of conservative misdirection used to hide the distributional unfairness of their tax cuts. 

Even in Herman Cain's regressive world of a 9-9-9 flat tax, you can imagine that with enough concetration of income at the top, the wealthiest households would still pay the majority of total income-tax revenue. That doesn't reflect how progressive or fair the taxation system is, it reflects just how unequal incomes are. Bush did it again in the next debate, too.

Under my plan, if you make -- the top -- the wealthy people pay 62% of the taxes today. Afterwards they pay 64%. This is a fair plan. You know why? Because the tax code is unfair for people at the bottom end of the economic ladder. If you're a single mother making $22,000 a year today and you're trying to raise two children, for every additional dollar you earn you pay a higher marginal rate on that dollar than someone making $200,000, and that's not right. 

At the time, this drove observers to distraction. Bush was running on a huge tax cut for the wealthy and refusing to admit he was running on a huge tax cut for the wealthy. Paul Krugman nearly broke his keyboard writing column after column pointing this simple fact out. "The big lesson of this year's campaign," he wrote, "a lesson that we can be sure politicians will take to heart -- is that a candidate can get away with saying things that are demonstrably untrue, as long as the untruths involve big numbers."

Romney has already embraced much of the substance of Bush's domestic policy, and now he's come around to fully embracing Bush's style to sell it. Confronted with his 5-trillion dollar tax cut, which would skew towards the wealthy, Romney simply refused to own the consequences of his own proposal. And he used exactly the same "share of taxes" sleight-of-hand Bush got away with: "I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high- income people."

But Romney has an even more sophisticated game of three card monte than Bush had, with three principles that are impossible to satisfy together--lower tax rates for everyone, revenue neutral, and taxes won't be lowered for high-income people.  But if you point towards one of those cards, he waves at the other two. We've seen this before and a lot of folks got fooled the first time. So it's all the more true that those reporting on this campaign have a duty to make sure voters are not fooled again. We can start by listening to Romney himself:

We're going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20%, including the top 1%.

That was Romney before he found his inner Bush. But hear me now: if Mitt Romney is elected president, taxes for the top 1% will be reduced.  If I had Romney's money, I'd even bet $10,000 on it.

Tomorrow on Up w/ Chris Hayes we'll be dissecting Wednesday night's presidential debate. We'll examine the "Obama brand," look back at the president's past debate performances and discuss the similarities between Mitt Romney's sudden tack to the left and President George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism." We'll also examine the return of "fuzzy math" when it comes to Romney's and Ryan's tax plans. And we'll look at one of the most galling moments of the entire debate: Romney casting himself as a crusader for financial reform, despite fierce Republican opposition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill.

Joining Chris at 8 AM ET on MSNBC will be:

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), currently serving her 11th term in Congress, senior member of the House Committee on Financial Services, ranking member of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets & Government Sponsored Enterprises, chief deputy whip.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, a professor at Columbia University, and author of the book "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future."

Karen Hunter, (@karenhunter) MSNBC Contributor, distinguished Lecturer at the Film and Media department at Hunter College, formerly of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Daily News editorial board.

Dedrick Muhammad,Senior Economic Director at the NAACP

Joy Reid, (@TheReidReport) MSNBC contributor and managing editor of TheGrio.com, a division of NBC News.

Avik Roy, (@aviksaroy) a member of Mitt Romney's Health Care Policy Advisory Group, Senior Fellow at The Manhattan Institute and author of "The Apothecary", the Forbes blog on health care and social insurance reform.

Alexis Goldstein, (@alexisgoldstein) a former vice president at Merill Lynch and now an Occupy Wall Street activist.

:: Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant for Up w/ Chris Hayes ::

On tomorrow's Up w/ Chris Hayes, we'll be discussing the Supreme Court's return to Washington -- and its absence from the presidential campaign. We'll look ahead to some of the landmark cases on the docket in the next term, gleaning clues to possible outcomes from the justices' past decisions. We'll also examine President Obama's speech to the United Nations General Assembly this week, where he offered a vigorous defense of free speech in the same city where "anti-jihad" ads have been making news.

Joining Chris tomorrow at 8 AM ET on MSNBC will be:

Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy), activist and award-winning columnisr. Eltahawy was arrested on Tuesday night after spray-painting over one of the controversial "anti-jihad" ads appearing in New York City subway stations.

Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin),  author of "The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court," senior legal analyst at CNN and staff writer at "The New Yorker."

Nan Aron, president of Alliance for Justice, which she founded in 1979.

Barbara Arnwine, President and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and Equal Justice Works.

Akhil Amar, Sterling Professor of law and political science at Yale University where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School, author of "America's Unwritten Constitution: the Precedents and Principles We Live By."

Elise Boddie, director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

:: Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant for Up w/ Chris Hayes, and Sal Gentile (@salgentile), segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes. ::

Jamilah King of Colorlines.com, Mike Pesca of National Public Radio, and Bill Fletcher of the Center for Labor Renewal join Up w/ Chris Hayes to talk about the NFL referee lockout.

Ro Khanna, author of "Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future," joins Up w/ Chris Hayes to discuss examples of how President Obama's uptick in the polls could be related to a more robust economy.

By Sal Gentile and Madeleine Martino Fox

A key component of the success of Up w/ Chris's first year has been our incredible online community. Each week, thousands of smart, dedicated fans gather on Twitter to join our on-air discussion. They call themselves #uppers, and the growth of the hashtag has been nothing less than a phenomenon.

Mentions of the #uppers hashtag on Twitter have skyrocketed from just 11 the first time the hashtag was used in October 2011 to over 7,000 when Paul Ryan was announced as Mitt Romney's running mate in August. And the hashtag trends nationally for virtually the entirety of every episode of Up w/ Chris. As The New York Times put it in a profile of the show in June, "Like Deadheads or Trekkies, fans of the program cluster under a common nickname: Uppers."

To celebrate our one-year anniversary last weekend, we flew Wyeth Ruthven, the creator of the #uppers hashtag, to New York to watch the program -- and to tabulate his well-known hourly counts of #uppers mentions -- from the Up w/ Chris studio. While he was here, we talked to Wyeth about the birth and stunning growth of the #uppers hashtag, the milestones in the growth of the #uppers community and how the weekly #uppers conversation has changed the way viewers interact with the show. As Wyeth put it: "Up with Chris Hayes is like a conversation with footnotes."

:: Sal Gentile (@salgentile) is a segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes, and Madeleine Martino Fox is a video producer. ::

by Chris Hayes Story of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes

If you follow politics, you probably noticed that polling of the presidential election has swung quite decidedly in the president's favor over the last few weeks. The Real Clear Politics polling average now has Obama up 4.1 points over Mitt Romney in national polls and Nate Silver's prediction model at his FiveThirtyEight blog put Barack Obama's odds of winning the election above 80% for the first time ever. Swing state polling out just this week seems to confirm the trend. 

 A new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS poll of swing states of Ohio and Florida, show surprisingly strong leads for Obama. And the Gallup tracking poll, which has showed a near dead heat for almost the entirety of the campaign now shows Obama up 6 points. It's pretty hard to survey the polling data and not come to the conclusion that Barack Obama is beating Mitt Romney, that if the election were held today Barack Obama would win, and that Romney has a relatively steep, though certainly not insurmountable, uphill climb to victory. That is, of course, unless you operate in the alternate epistemic universe of right-wing media.

Bill O'Reilly: That begs the question, are these polls dishonest?
Karl Rove: No we endow them with a false scientific precision they simply don't have.
John Kasich: These polls I don't even pay attention to them...
Dick Morris: Polling is very good at saying how you're gonna vote, its very bad at who's gonna vote, and the models these folks are using are crazy.
Rush Limbaugh: These two polls today are designed to convince everybody this election is over.

We should note that Fox News's own polls have been pretty much in line with everyone else's, but it's not just commentators making the claim that the polls are rigged, the Romney campaign itself is now getting in on the act.

Eric Fehrnstrom: Some of these polls have been called into question because they assume a higher Democratic turnout in 2012 than we experienced in 2008.

For the record that's not true. But that doesn't really matter! Conservatives are spending hundreds, maybe thousands of man-hours (or maybe more appropriately bro-hours) writing long, tortured, pseudo-statistical take downs of every new poll, from a wide variety of outlets.

"I've been hearing from people inside the Tea Party movement and Republican movement calling to say that they support what I'm doing," said Chambers. "It's given them a boost of confidence. They're glad to see that someone's questioning the credibility of national polls." 

Now, to the conservatives and Republicans watching out there right now, I know what you're thinking: "It's not just people on the right who fall victim to this way of thinking."  And you're right. In fact, I can recall with somewhat pathetic acuity spending hours on the internet in the waning days of the 2004 election searching out any and all articles or blog posts about why the lack of cell phones in the call lists of the major polls led to under-reporting John Kerry's strength. We all, as humans, are subject to confirmation bias, the urge to find information that reaffirms our ideological priors.  But the problem is that the institutional structure of the American right slavishly caters to this disposition. The institutional and market incentives on the right all push towards feeding the audience what they want to hear and make a good buck while doing it, at the expense of actually giving them a handle on some basic aspects of reality. 

Glenn Beck left Fox News to create his own hermetically sealed media environment, where he has his own website, radio show and TV network, where the latter routinely runs stories first reported by the former. While his audience has shrunk dramatically, NPR recently reported that business for Beck has never been better. His company The Blaze is expected to rake in more than $40 million this year. His radio contract just doubled - to $100 million over the next five years. 

The increasingly claustrophobic parallel conservative universe isn't just something that lefties like myself have noted. Julian Sanchez, a CATO libertarian who moves in social circles of both liberals and conservative, coined the term "epistemic closure" to describe the alternate reality found in, as he put it, the "multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News" where "whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they're liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile."

I think we are seeing right now, just how prophetic Sanchez was. The political problems the Republican party are now facing -- losing ground not only in the general election but a wide swath of congressional races, is due, I think to the fact that the elites of that party have become so used to operating within the confines of conservatism they've forgotten how to persuade people that don't already agree with them. 

The "We Built This" theme for the Republican Convention was a tone deaf, inside-joke that played off an intentionally misconstrued supposed gaffe that didn't really seem to resonate with the general electorate.  Or look at the difference between the reaction to Clint Eastwood's speech inside the hall, where it was met with raucous laughter and enthusiastic applause... to outside the hall where it was met with something more like confused amusement. And the ultimate example of the costs of the conservative bubble are Mitt Romney's 47% comments, versions of which have become commonplace to the point of cliche in right-wing circles, and ones which Romney offered inside the safety and comfort of the conservative bubble, but have now leaked out to general populace where they are rightly found noxious.

In the song "Ten Crack Commandments," Biggie Smalls offered a set of rules for drug dealers who wanted to avoid the perils of the trade and one of them was a piece of old advice:"Never get high on your own supply." Same goes for political strategists: never confuse your own talking points for the truth, don't start believing that everyone out there in the voting booths are seeing the world the way you do. The GOP has, I think lost sight of this simple wisdom. They're smoking what they're dealing. It's a big part of why those polls numbers look the way they do... and good a reminder of the dysfunction and incompetence that happen when the people in charge only listen to themselves.

Katherine Guthrie and Sal Gentile

Tomorrow on Up w/ Chris Hayes, we'll be discussing the Republican bubble trap, highlighted by the recent spate of GOP politicians dismissing national polls showing President Obama ahead of Mitt Romney. We'll also dive into what's behind those poll numbers, and look at evidence that the Obama recovery may be much stronger than the political establishment has realized. And we'll examine the NFL referees debacle in the larger context of the state of organized labor in America.

Joining Chris tomorrow at 8 AM ET on MSNBC will be:

Jamilah King (@jamilahking), news editor for colorlines.com

Mike Pesca (@pescami), sports correspondent for National Public Radio.

Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (@sherrodbrown), who's currently locked in a closely watched re-election battle.

Joy Reid (@thereidreport), MSNBC contributor and managing editor of TheGrio.com

Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal and author of "They're Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths about Unions."

Ro Khanna, author of "Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future," former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce, former member of the White House Business Council.

Josh Barro (@jbarro), lead writer for Bloomberg View's "The Ticker."

Sheila Bair, author of "Bull by Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself," former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (2006-2011), former assistant secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury Department (2001-2002), and former senior vice president for government relations of the New York Stock Exchange.

Joe Weisenthal (@thestalwart), deputy business editor at BusinessInsider.com.

::Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant for Up w/ Chris Hayes, and Sal Gentile (@salgentile), segment & digital producer. ::

On a recent trip to Nevada, Up host Chris Hayes sat down with Rep. Shelley Berkley, the Democratic candidate for Senate there. Berkley is challenging Republican Sen. Dean Heller. Chris asked Berkley about the unemployment rate in Nevada -- the highest in the nation -- Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's proposed cuts to Medicare, and Berkley's vote in Congress for the Affordable Care Act.

:: Blogged by Sal Gentile (@salgentile), segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes. ::

In an interview Sunday on Up w/ Chris, Romney economic adviser and fundraiser Emil Henry accused President Obama of favoring redistribution of wealth but refused to say whether the Romney campaign would change the tax code to make it less redistributive.

In an interview on Up w/ Chris Hayes Sunday, Emil Henry, an economic adviser and fundraiser for Mitt Romney - and a former assistant treasury secretary during the Bush administration - defended Mitt Romney's secretly recorded comments about the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay income taxes, and said he would "triple down" on Romney's controversial remarks. In those remarks, Romney notoriously said Americans who don't pay income taxes are "dependent" on government and consider themselves "victims."

For a few months after the launch of Up w/ Chris one year ago, it became something of a tradition for Chris to boot the ending to the show every week. To mark our one-year anniversary, our very talented video producer Madeleine Martino Fox put together this fun little blooper reel from the early days of Up. Enjoy, and thanks again for an amazing first year.

by Chris Hayes Story of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes

COMMENTARY

The video of Mitt Romney talking to donors that Mother Jones posted last week is an incredible artifact from an entire culture and civilization that exists in our midst, but which we hardly ever get to see: the world of the high-end donor. And, whoo boy it is not pretty. The first thing that jumps out is that a lot of the questions are really inane. 

 In fact, I almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney having to sit there and politely smile and nod as donors pick through their salad and tell him that what he really needs to do to win is "take the gloves off" or "show your face more on tv"—something he's been doing more or less non-stop. 

 The folks in the room all but advise Romney to simply tour around the country reading passages of Ayn Rand novels out loud at his campaign rallies and hectoring the idiotic masses to bow before their obvious superior. Romney, who is many things, but not a total fool, gently explains that that probably is not the best way to go about attempting to win over the Obama voters he needs to be elected. Almost none of the advice Romney gets during the tape is very good, some of it's terrible.

 That's not novel, of course, everyone who watches politics closely thinks they have the secret insight that will win the election. Unlike the millions of other political junkies and backseat drivers, this small coterie of folks, by sole virtue of their wealth, gets to impose their invaluable insights on the actual candidate. It would be like the head coach of the Giants, Tom Coughlin, having to spend most of the week between games meeting with the opinionated fans who call into sports talk radio with their theories about how the Giants should be blitzing on every down, or lining up two quarterbacks under center. 

 This is the power of money not just in politics, but in society more broadly: the power to make people listen to your ideas no matter how dumb or uninformed. The other thing that stood out to me was just how under siege, persecuted, and victimized these extremely wealthy people appear to feel. 

Keep in mind we're talking about a fundraiser that cost $50,000 a plate. Fifty thousand dollars also happens to be the median household income in the U.S. So the kind of wealth you need to have to be in the room with Romney is the kind of wealth that means you can just pony up as much money as many Americans make in a year to listen to Mitt Romney trash talk the very people who make in a year the same amount you just ponied up for dinner. 

And what you hear from them is the same kind of whining that was the central theme of the Republican Convention: we're away from our families five days a week. I'm away from my four girls five days a week and my wife. Which made me think of this from Reservoir Dogs:

Steve Buscemi: You know what this is? It's the world's smallest violin playing just for the waitresses.

Except, you know, instead of waitresses insert busy plutocrats. Because these same plutocrats are enjoying possibly their best run ever since the financial crisis, nay since, perhaps, the roaring twenties! The Dow is way up, corporate profits are near record highs, taxes are near record lows, wages are stagnating, unions are fighting for survival and 8% unemployment means that employers have a constant ready supply of excess labor, which keeps wages and demands down. More or less a capitalist paradise.

The Koch brothers, to choose just one example, have seen their own net worth nearly DOUBLE, from $32 billion to $62 billion under the tyrannical, socialist, re-distributive regime of Barack Hussein Obama.

And yet despite the fact that Obama has managed a recovery that has been exceptionally good to them, Wall Street is incensed that anyone would call them fat cats or sign new financial regulation. In almost every way conceivable they inhabit an alternate universe. And everyone's pretty frank about that.

For instance, they ask him several questions about foreign policy, and Romney complains that voters in general don't care about foreign policy, so he doesn't get to talk about it that much on the campaign trail. This is probably because middle class voters are so concerned about economic security it crowds out nearly everything else.

But that's the point. Extremely wealthy people are not a very good representation of the voting population at large. They have very different politics, positions and priorities than the mass of voters. This cashes out in a very concrete way that profoundly affects our politics. 

Political Scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright have been studying the divergence between public opinion in general and the opinions of the wealthiest 1% and found that—surprise—they diverge on most issues. For instance, on this statement: "The federal government should spend whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to"... 87% of the general public agrees, while only 35% of the wealthy do. "Our government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich." 52% of the general public agrees, only 17% of the wealthy do. "Favor cuts in spending on domestic programs like Medicare, education, and highways in order to cut federal budget deficits." 27% of the general public does, while 58% of the wealthy do. 

And this gets us to what I've become convinced is the most pernicious effect of big money on our politics. It's not that lots of money can buy elections, though sometimes that's true. It's not that campaign contributions function as a quid pro quo, chits to be cashed in when legislation is being considered, though that's also often true. It's that every single person running for high office in America is forced to spend the vast majority of their time around one group of people and one group only: wealthy people. That's who they talk to, and listen to all day long, day in and day out, every day for months and years and decades. It's an incredibly warping effect. 

Imagine a world in which every minimum wage worker in America is given a golden ticket, like the ones in Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory. And imagine a law that required TV stations to only take those golden tickets as payment for campaign advertising time. A world in which candidates would have to spend all the time they now spend with the folks on that video with the people who work at drive-throughs and clean bathrooms. And imagine the kinds of questions they would get, the stories and jokes they would hear. Many hours a day, day in and day out. The world that the candidate would be forced to inhabit. Imagine what our politics would look like as a result. Maybe things would be radically different, maybe they'd be more similar to the status quo than I'd like to admit. But one thing is for sure. 

Mitt Romney sure as hell wouldn't get up in front of a room of home healthcare workers, people who are, in many states, making minimum wage or just a little more to change bed pans and clean up blood and vomit—and tell the people in front of him that they're a bunch of indolent, shiftless moochers who won't take responsibility for their lives becuase they don't pay income taxes. I don't think even Mitt Romney is that politically inept.

Up host Chris Hayes outlines the status of heavily contested U.S. House and Senate races across the country, and the polls that show a potential uptick for Democrats. Hayes and his panelists talk about possible explanations of what has changed in the 2012 cycle.

After a rough week on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney decided to release his 2011 tax returns, showing that he paid more in taxes than was legally necessary. John Nichols of The Nation magazine, syndicated radio host L. Joy Williams, The National Review editor Kevin Williamson, and The Guardian's Ana Marie Cox join Up w/ Chris Hayes to discuss why the Romney campaign opted for the move.

Saturday on Up w/ Chris, we'll be discussing what is looking more and more like Mitt Romney's worst week ever in his presidential campaign. The latest national poll shows him seven points behind President Obama. His comments on the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay income taxes have become infamous. And his 2011 tax returns show that he and his wife, Ann, purposely limited their charitable deductions in order to bring their effective tax rate up to 14.1 percent. Plus, we'll move from the national political scene into the down-ballot races and discuss the latest polls suggesting a dramatic turn to Democratic congressional candidates across the country.

Joining Chris at 8am ET Saturday on MSNBC are:

John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of Wisconsin's Capital Times.

L. Joy Williams, (@ljoywilliams) political strategist and founder LJW Political Stategies, co-host of radio show "This Week in Blackness."

Ana Marie Cox, (@anamariecox) columnist for The Guardian and founder of the political blog Wonkette.

Kevin Williamson, deputy managing editor of The National Review.

Charlies Pierce, contributing writer for Esquire, lead writer for the magazine's politics blog. 

Democratic congressional candidate for Iowa's 4th district Christie Vilsack, former teacher and First Lady of Iowa.

Correction: Kevin Williams no longer works for the Institute for Humane Studies.

:: Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant for UP w/ Chris Hayes ::

Mitt Romney this week told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he viewed middle income as $200,000 to $250,000 or less. The Up w/ Chris Hayes panelists talk about how if political focus is centered on the middle class, then what about the very poor?