Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images

Migrant farm workers from Mexico a day of harvesting organic vegetables in Wellington, Colorado.

A group of U.S. House members will propose steps to legal status for undocumented immigrants, who shouldn’t be living here permanently without a chance to become “real Americans,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

Bringing many of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants “out of the shadows” and improving the immigration system would be “great” for businesses and the economy, Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Peter Cook for “Capitol Gains” airing April 7. The Florida Republican is a member of a bipartisan House group negotiating a plan.

“Imagine if you legalize folks who are already here,” said Diaz-Balart. “You bring them out of the shadows,” he said, “so that they can become an integral part of the economy.” He added: “For business, this is a win-win.”

Diaz-Balart said the House group won’t allow any “amnesty” for those who are unlawfully in the U.S. “There will be no amnesty in this bill,” he said. “The House is not going to support amnesty for people who are here  undocumented. ”

“It’s not good public policy to have a group of people who are in the United States permanently” that could “never aspire to become real Americans,” he said. “The flip-side of that, however, is you want to make sure that folks who broke the law do not have rights” that others who have done things legally don’t have.

The secretive bipartisan House group has been working on an overhaul of immigration laws for about four years and has “95 percent” of the bill drafted, said Diaz-Balart. A group of senators plans to introduce their own bill next week.

The Republican-led House is taking a slower approach on rewriting the immigration laws than the Democratic-led Senate. The House probably won’t take up a measure until June.

“We’re not in a rush,” Diaz-Balart said. “We don’t have deadlines that we have imposed on ourselves, other than the fact that we want to fix what’s broken.”

“I think we’re very close,” he said. “We’ve had the advantage of having time. We’ve been working on this now for a number of years,”  he said. “Most of the really thorny issues we’ve been able to hammer out and reach agreement on.”

He said: “‘We’re more concerned about getting it right  than doing it quickly.”

The Senate immigration overhaul effort is centered on creating a 13-year path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the U.S. House Republicans may be more open to allowing legal residency rather than citizenship.

Republican opposition to providing a citizenship path, a major stumbling block in past efforts, has lessened since the November election, when President Barack Obama won 71 percent of Hispanic votes cast. Republican leaders have said the party needs to do more to court the fast-growing voter bloc.

Republicans need to resolve the immigration issue because it’s been a “good, successful tool” for Democrats and “political suicide for the Republicans,” Diaz-Balart said.

“Until we can get immigration off the table, we can’t even approach that community,” he said, referring to Hispanic voters. “It’s essential. Until that time, we’re in deep trouble.”

Diaz-Balart said a March 29 agreement between business and  labor leaders on allocating visas to low-skilled foreign workers may not be part of a final plan.

“I don’t think those deals are necessarily going to be the final” part of any legislation, he said, adding that such accords are “guidelines.”

Original post is House Ready to Make Undocumented ‘Real Americans:’ Diaz-Balart by Political Capital.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a 60-year-old Democrat and one of the most prominent Latino politicians, gets asked a lot about his future these days. After eight years of leading the second-largest city, Villaraigosa must leave office at the end of June due to term limits.

So what’s next for Villaraigosa, who was the chairman of the Democratic National Convention last year?

In an interview on Bloomberg Television, Villaraigosa offered no hint of his political ambitions, saying instead that he’s interested in joining a university or a think tank or taking an (unspecified) job in the private sector. He didn’t mention the possibility of running for California governor or U.S. senator.

In any case, Villaraigosa’s options would be limited if Gov. Jerry Brown, a 74-year-old Democrat, opts to run for another term next year, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, a 72-year-old Democrat, runs again in 2016.

After President Barack Obama’s reelection last year, Villaraigosa’s name emerged in news reports as a contender for a Cabinet seat. He quashed the speculation with a Feb. 1 statement saying he was “firmly committed” to staying in Los Angeles and finishing his term.

Original post is Villaraigosa Mum as L.A. Term Closes by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The Capitol is reflected in Washington.

That’s the share of Americans who say that President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress will reach an agreement to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post.

Forty-nine percent said the two sides wouldn’t come to an agreement.

A deadlock would trigger a combination of $607 billion in tax hikes and spending reductions beginning in January, which the Congressional Budget Office and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke say would hurt the economy. It is Bernanke who coined the confluence of baked-in tax increases and spending cuts at year’s end as a fiscal cliff.

Congressional Republicans will bear the brunt of the blame if an agreement isn’t reached, the poll shows. Fifty-three percent of respondents said that Republicans would be more to blame in the absence of an accord, compared with 27 percent who said Obama would bear more responsibility for failure.

“We have the potential of getting a deal done,” Obama said yesterday on Bloomberg Television in his first interview since he was re-elected on Nov. 6. The president called for a “balanced, responsible approach” requiring an increase in tax rates on the top 2 percent of income-earners.

Republicans including House Speaker John Boehner don’t want to increase tax rates and are pushing for more spending cuts than the White House has been willing to accept.

The survey of 1,003 adults was conducted Nov. 28-Dec. 2.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 40 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Barack Obama in this file photo.

President Barack Obama, voicing optimism about “getting a deal done” with Congress to avert the so-called fiscal cliff looming at year’s end, acknowledged in an interview today that he won’t get “100 percent” of what he wants.

It was the president’s first media interview since winning re-election.

He gave it to Bloomberg Television, in a 19-minute conversation with Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman airing now on Bloomberg TV.

“We have the potential of getting a deal done,” Obama said, insisting on “a balanced approach” of tax increases and spending cuts.

“It’s not a matter of me being stubborn, of me being partisan — it’s just a matter of math,” the president said. “We’re going to have to have higher rates” for “people like me.”

“We’re going to have to see the rates on the top two percent go up, and we’re not going to get a deal without it,” he said. “When you look at how much revenue you can actually raise by closing loopholes and exemptions, it’s probably in the range of 300 to 400 billion dollars. That’s not enough.”

What we need, he said,  “is an acknowledgement that folks like me can afford to pay a little higher rate.”

Asked about the spending cuts that Republicans want, particularly in entitlements such as Medicare, he said: `I am willing to look at anything that strengthens our system” and makes it clear over the long term“that the basic safety net for our seniors is going to be there.”

`I’m prepared to make some tough decisions on these issues.”

At the same time, he said, “We’re not going to be able to come up with a comprehensive tax reform package that gets it all done in the next two weeks.”

“Let’s essentially put a down payment,” he said. “On taxes, let’s let taxes on the upper income folks go up.”

Then, he said, they can follow a process of looking at the bigger picture, pointing toward the next session of Congress. “It’s possible that we may be able to lower some rates” by eliminating exemptions, he said. “I’m happy to be flexible. I realize I’m not going to get 100 percent.”

Original post is Obama: `We Have the Potential of Getting a Deal Done’ by Political Capital.

In the heavily contested swing states, the cost of courting those votes adds up to the price of a small Cezanne. The presidential candidates and their super-PACs are nearing the half-billion dollar mark in TV advertising.

Kantar Media/CMAG provided Bloomberg with the numbers for 13 swing states accounting for 157 electoral votes – 58 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Overall, spending on TV ads in those states has risen 62 percent compared with 2008.

Nevada’s six electoral votes are the most expensive — so far, they’ve drawn $5,621,133 each in TV ad spending for Nevada, more than twice the $2,740,451 spent per Nevada electoral vote in the last presidential election.

See Julianna Goldman’s report on Bloomberg Television, and read it here:

Virginia isn’t far behind. At this point, the presidential candidates or their surrogates are campaigning there weekly to fight for its 13 electoral votes — Mitt Romney is in Virginia today to deliver a foreign policy speech. Virginia’s electoral votes have drawn $5,009,289 each in TV ad spending, up 72 percent since 2008.

A couple of the battlegrounds have lost electoral votes since the last election.

The reapportionment after the 2010 Census cost Iowa one electoral vote, while Ohio lost two.

Iowa’s electoral votes are worth $4.85 million apiece, up 272.8 percent over 2008, the CMAG data show. And Ohio’s loss doesn’t change the often-cited fact that no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio. The TV ad spending suggests that Romney isn’t ready to be the first to try to pull off that feat, even though his campaign is being outspent 3-1 by the Obama campaign there, according to Nielsen. All told, spending in Ohio has reached $4.35 million per electoral vote.

Not every state has seen the cost of its electoral votes rise.

Wisconsin, for instance, has only seen 42 percent of what was spent per vote in 2008.

Nielsen’s numbers have a little more detail. They show the Obama campaign has flooded the nine major battleground states with 230,000 ads, compared  with 87,000 from the Romney campaign. Of those nine, there is only one where the Romney campaign has outspent the p president’s — Wisconsin– where the Romney campaign put up 1,952 ads to the Obama campaign’s 1,391.

In the two elections prior to 2008, Wisconsin was won by the slimmest of margins – - by 0.4 percent in 2004 and 0.2 percent in 2000. Obama won the state in 2008 by 14 points. But there’s still a little time to invest more there — with new excitement among Republicans about the prospects of taking Wisconsin after Romney added a Wisconsinite, Rep. Paul Ryan, to the ticket.

Ultimately, this is yet another illustration of how much campaigns are willing to spend on hundreds of thousands of TV ads in a few states for a handful of undecided voters. After Election Day, we’ll see if we can put together how much the campaigns spent on the individual votes, though we don’t know that we’ll be able to say whether or not voters were actually watching.

Mike Callahan contributed to this report.

Original post is Electoral Votes: $5.6 Mln For Nevada’s, Most Expensive of All by Political Capital.

Photograph by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and chief executive officer of Blackstone Group LP.

Could all this madness actually be good for business?

After enduring almost a year of attacks on private equity, one of its chief practitioners seems to think the industry could come out ahead when the November dust settles.

Steve Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group, sees this in all the attention paid to Republican Mitt Romney’s history at Bain Capital — including negative ads that paint his former business as plant-closing, job-slashing mercenaries.

“Ironically, it gave the public and other people a chance to think through these arguments,” Schwarzman said during an interview at the Waldorf-Astoria, the famed New York hotel that Blackstone counts among its vast corporate and real estate holdings totaling almost $200 billion. “I don’t think they come down with a huge negative on private equity despite the attacks.”

Schwarzman, whose interview aired today on Bloomberg Television’s “Money Moves with Deirdre Bolton,” argued his investors are willing to wade through the political noise to focus on the literal bottom line: What private equity funds like make for their backers. That’s more important than ever, as investors like public pensions struggle to reach the thresholds they need to actually keep their promises to retirees.

The election also has helped – or forced – private equity to come further out of the shadows. Blackstone alone has stakes in everything from Motel 6 to SeaWorld and the Weather Channel. Schwarzman’s competitors control Toys “R” Us, Outback Steakhouse and the gaming empire Caesars Entertainment.

A Romney supporter, Schwarzman spoke with the statesman-like sweep he’s adopted in recent years, painting a scenario “where we sentence ourselves to years of below expected growth and keep taking debt on, which ultimately is a drag not just for ourselves, but for future generations.”

He conceded that his firm has been among the beneficiaries of tighter regulation on traditional Wall Street players, as Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule have changed strategies of the likes of Goldman Sachs, one of Blackstone’s closest private-equity rivals during the LBO boom of 2005-2007.

Schwarzman has methodically expanded Blackstone to comprise far more than private equity. Its real estate business accounted for half its 2011 profits. The business of lending to companies and buying distressed debt has blossomed in a troubled global economy. Asked if his firm was, as some have surmised, the new Goldman, he struck a lighter tone.

“Given Goldman’s publicity, I hope that’s not the case,” Schwarzman said. “We’d rather just be the same old Blackstone.”

Original post is Private Equity’s Election Bounce? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT/Getty Images

Rep. Paul Ryan during a rally at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, on September 22, 2012.

Rep. Paul Ryan, who served on the Simpson-Bowles commission and voted against the chairmen’s plan for addressing the deficit, says he’d oppose it again today.

The reason, he says, is it didn’t include reforms in health-care entitlement spending.

“I want to fix this problem once and for all the right way,” Ryan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television today.

Medicare is “The biggest driver of our debt in the future,” Ryan said in the interview with BTV’s Peter Cook.

Asked about the import of tomorrow night’s debate between President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney, Romney’s running mate said: “No one single event is going to settle this thing. Mitt is going to offer a very clear choice. I think that’s what people will get out of this debate.”

Yet Ryan offered no more specifics about the tax plan that Romney proposes — cutting tax rates for all while restricting the tax exemptions that high-earners enjoy — than the presidential nominee has.

The Tax Policy Center has reported that Romney cannot obtain the tax cuts he proposes and keep his plan revenue neutral without reaching into exemptions that benefit many taxpayers.

Ryan today maintained that there is “fiscal space” for the tax deductions for mortgage interest payments and charitable deductions and that Romney does not want to tax capital investment more.

“What we’re saying is, you can lower tax rates by 20 percent across the board, limit some tax expenditures and loopholes and deductions without hitting middle class taxpayers,” Ryan said, pointing to An American Enterprise Institute study supporting this. The Tax Policy Center study, he said, “had faulty assumptions in it. It didn’t even measure the Romney plan. It still had all these revenue assumptions in there assuming we’re keeping Obama-care taxes in place and such things like that. And it doesn’t even assume economic growth, which we don’t when we estimate these things.”

“Our point is,” Ryan added, “with the kind of narrow tax base we have, with the steep tax rates we have, which make us really uncompetitive, you can lower tax rates across the board by 20 percent, primarily limit your deductions from those at the top end, and then get rid of all those different sort of nook-and-cranny special interest tax expenditures.”

Original post is Ryan: Romney Offering `Clear Choice’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Alec Poitevint speaks with former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, right, during the Republican National Convention.

While Mitt Romney still can defeat Barack Obama, he must shift the focus of the last six weeks of the race to the president’s “policies, the failures of those policies, and what Romney would do to get the country back on the right track,” former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour says.

“As long as the campaign coverage is about process, about polling, any time it’s not about jobs and the economy, and about serious policy and the results of policy, that’s bad for Romney,” says Barbour, who is helping raise money for American Crossroads, the super-political action committee co-founded by Karl Rove, the former chief political adviser to President George W. Bush.

Romney has “got to get the campaign back on the real issues that Americans talk about at the dinner table — jobs, the economy,” Barbour said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” airing this weekend.

The Republican presidential nominee is trying to get his campaign back on track after his comment that 47 percent of Americans are government-dependent and see themselves as “victims,” secretly recorded at a Florida fundraiser in May, was published this week. His remarks take the focus off Obama, Barbour said.

“It is not correct that 47 percent of Americans are on means-tested entitlements, on welfare,” he said. “Many, many of those people are retired military” or recipients of Social Security benefits. Romney, Barbour said, should have said, “I made a mistake on that number” and moved on.

“That’s the real state of play,” he said. “Why? Not because people love Mitt Romney. They don’t know very much good about Mitt Romney. But they know Obama’s policies don’t deserve to be re-elected.”

Original post is Barbour: Romney’s `Mistake’ — Should Acknowledge, Move On by Political Capital.

Photograph by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Elizabeth Warren at a campaign event in Scituate, Massachusetts.

“The nation’s hottest Senate race is in Massachusetts.”

So notes Bloomberg Television’s Peter Cook, who has interviewed both Republican Sen. Scott Brown and challenger Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor and consumer advocate, in “a heavyweight fight that could determine control of the Senate.”

“Wall Street is watching every move,” BTV’s chief Washington correspondent adds.

“I want to go to Washington to fight for working families,” Warren is shown telling voters — “She’s a hero to the left, and Wall Street’s worst nightmare,” Cook reports.

Then a woman hugging Brown and saying: “I’m so proud of you” — “a popular Republican in a Democratic state,” Cook says.

Now Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren are locked in the most closely watched Senate race in the country, and at nearly $48 million dollars and counting — it’s also the most expensive.

In 2010 Brown took the political world by storm when he won Ted Kennedy’s senate seat with Tea Party support. Now he’s trying to keep his job by portraying the consumer advocate, TARP watchdog and Harvard professor as too liberal even for this state.

“Professor Warren is the founder of the radical occupy protest movement. She’s also the one who pushed the you didn’t build it mentality, demonizing job creators,” Brown says.

“Washington is wired to work for those who can hire an army of lobbyists and an army of lawyers,” Warren says. “I just reached a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore and threw myself into this fight.”

Warren has raised more than$28 million,  much of it from liberal groups outside Massachusetts. After a high profile speech at the Democratic convention — in which she spoke of Wall Street lurking in Washington — she’s now leading in polls and pushing a middle class message.

“The Republicans have made it clear. They cut taxes for the richest slice at the top and you let everybody else pick up the ticket,” Warren says.

“Listen,” Brown says, “I’m a Republican from Massachusetts in the middle of a presidential year. I get that and so do the people of Massachusetts. They also understand they want a check and balance.”

Original post is Brown vs. Warren: $48M and Counting by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Rep. Paul Ryan at a campaign event at Walsh University on August 16, 2012 in North Canton, Ohio.

Paul Ryan could be to economics and tax policy what Dick Cheney was to national security — should Republican Mitt Romney win election as president.

That’s how Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, sees it.

“I think that he would certainly have a large footprint,” Norquist said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” airing this weekend.

Norquist, known for a no-new-taxes pledge signed by many Republicans — including Ryan — predicted that as president Romney would push through a comprehensive tax-code overhaul based on elements of Ryan’s budget plan “with the rough edges taken off and changes here and there.”

Norquist said such a measure would be similar to the tax-cut package enacted in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan based on a proposal put forth by then-Representative Jack Kemp of New York and then-Senator William Roth of Delaware, both Republicans. Reagan endorsed the Kemp-Roth plan during his 1980 presidential campaign.

If Romney ousts President Barack Obama in the Nov. 6 election, his administration and Congress early in 2013 will strike a long-term deficit reduction deal that doesn’t include a net revenue increase, Norquist predicted.

“It’ll look like the Ryan plan,” he said. “It will not have a tax increase in it.”

See the full report on Al Hunt’s interview with Norquist at Bloomberg News. 

Original post is Romney’s Cheney: Norquist’s View by Political Capital.