Mr. Romney's 'Garbage' (WaPost Editorial)
FORMER GOVERNOR Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican nominee for president, promises to lower everyone’s income tax rate without reducing revenue. This sounds terrific. Why didn’t we think of it sooner?
Mr. Romney says that he can achieve this seemingly magical result by “broadening the base” for income tax collection. This, too, sounds great. In principle, everyone favors “broadening the base,” also known as closing loopholes. But everyone favors closing someone else’s loopholes: those of oil companies, say, or of plutocrats who park their money in the Cayman Islands.
His tax cut promises don’t add up . . .
Recently the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, showed that Mr. Romney’s plan would by necessity help the rich and hurt the middle class. In an interview with Fortune magazine last week, Mr. Romney took strong issue with this conclusion. “They made garbage assumptions and they reached a garbage conclusion,” he said. Contrary to the center’s assumption, he said, he would not take away middle-class tax breaks for “homeownership, charitable giving and health care.”
Trimming those breaks for the wealthy, as Mr. Romney implies he would do, is a good idea. President Obama has been proposing to do so, by capping total deductions allowed in top brackets, through most of his term, and the idea has gone nowhere in Congress. But here’s the catch demonstrated by the center (and confirmed in an update last week, responding to criticisms from some conservative economists): Even if you take away every dollar of tax breaks the wealthy enjoy, you won’t get as much back as Mr. Romney proposes to give in tax cuts. So you would either have to go after the middle class or abandon the promise of revenue neutrality.
If these are “garbage assumptions,” why doesn’t Mr. Romney let us in on his own? If he can be specific about how much he would lower the tax rate, why not be as specific about how he would pay for that?
read: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mr-romneys-garbage/2012/08/18/d109ac74-e883-11e1-8487-64e4b2a79ba8_print.html
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