Romney: Lower taxes for me, higher taxes for the rest of you
The Tax Trap Springs Shut on Romney
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
It’s all too easy to hyperventilate about the importance of this or that campaign development in an electorate where swing voters are few and pay little attention to the news, but Mitt Romney appears to have blundered his way into a bona fide political disaster with his tax plan. Republican policy elites and fund-raisers fervently believe, for both moral and economic reasons, in the paramount necessity of cutting taxes for the rich. This position is, however, a political trap; the vast majority of Americans want taxes on the rich to be higher, not lower, and the commitment to cutting taxes on the rich further requires larger entitlement cuts or higher middle class taxes, both of which are more unpopular still.
At the outset of his campaign, Romney tried to avoid committing himself, but by February, with GOP rivals outflanking him and facing steady pressure from Republican elites, he declared himself in favor of a 20 percent tax cut, a move greeted with joy from anti-tax activists. But he still attempted to hide the ball. Romney promised that his rate cut would be matched by closing tax deductions and some unspecified allowance for economic growth, and thus would not decrease the level (or the share) of taxes paid by the rich. Romney’s boast that his plan could not be scored revealed the essential calculation. But the campaign miscalculated. Yesterday’s study by the Brookings Institution and the Tax Policy Center showed that, even allowing for the faster growth predicted by Romney’s own economist, there aren’t enough tax deductions to account for the cost of the lower rates for the rich — raising taxes for the middle class would be the only way to make Romney’s promises add up. Romney didn’t hide the ball well enough.
Obama has already unleashed an ad making the simple and devastating point that Romney is proposing to cut taxes of people like himself and raise them on the vast majority of the public.
(More here.)
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine It’s all too easy to hyperventilate about the importance of this or that campaign development in an electorate where swing voters are few and pay little attention to the news, but Mitt Romney appears to have blundered his way into a bona fide political disaster with his tax plan. Republican policy elites and fund-raisers fervently believe, for both moral and economic reasons, in the paramount necessity of cutting taxes for the rich. This position is, however, a political trap; the vast majority of Americans want taxes on the rich to be higher, not lower, and the commitment to cutting taxes on the rich further requires larger entitlement cuts or higher middle class taxes, both of which are more unpopular still.
At the outset of his campaign, Romney tried to avoid committing himself, but by February, with GOP rivals outflanking him and facing steady pressure from Republican elites, he declared himself in favor of a 20 percent tax cut, a move greeted with joy from anti-tax activists. But he still attempted to hide the ball. Romney promised that his rate cut would be matched by closing tax deductions and some unspecified allowance for economic growth, and thus would not decrease the level (or the share) of taxes paid by the rich. Romney’s boast that his plan could not be scored revealed the essential calculation. But the campaign miscalculated. Yesterday’s study by the Brookings Institution and the Tax Policy Center showed that, even allowing for the faster growth predicted by Romney’s own economist, there aren’t enough tax deductions to account for the cost of the lower rates for the rich — raising taxes for the middle class would be the only way to make Romney’s promises add up. Romney didn’t hide the ball well enough.
Obama has already unleashed an ad making the simple and devastating point that Romney is proposing to cut taxes of people like himself and raise them on the vast majority of the public.
(More here.)
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