If you've been following the news about the analysis of the Romney Tax Plan, you know the Romney campaign is in a panic because it pretty much reveals Romney is pushing a plan for outright theft by the rich from the rest of the country. (No surprise there.)
Paul Krugman has dug into the Tax Policy Center analysis and put up a post on his NY Times blog with an evaluation. (He's also put out the handy label "Dooh Nibor" to describe it: Robin Hood in reverse.) Read the whole thing, but here's the takeaway:
"...we have lots of empirical work on the effects of tax changes at the top — and none of it supports the Romney camp’s claims. What we’ve just learned is that they were faking it all along. There is no plan to offset the tax cuts; Romney is just intending to blow up the deficit to lavish favors on the wealthy, then use it as an excuse to savage Social Security and Medicare."
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That in a nutshell is the Republican plan they've been carrying out for decades. Romney's just the latest front man in the long con. Not that that makes him any less despicable.
Kevin Drum has also dug into the plan with another must read. The title of his piece says it all: Mitt Romney's Plan to Screw the Middle Class.
"...You can see it in the chart on the right. When you combine the decrease in rates and the increase from credits and deductions, millionaires would get a tax cut of 4.1%. Everyone under $200,000 would get a tax increase of 1.2%."
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Drum points out the biggest problem with the Romney plan -
It might be, in Jon Chait's words, cartoonishly evil to think that any politician would actually propose such a plan, but Romney has done exactly that. The only question is whether anyone can make the voters believe it.
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The insanity of this, that people refuse to believe how bad this really is because they just can't credit the idea that someone would be so blatant is matched only by the numbers of people who will vote for Romney because they've believe every apocalyptic lie about what Obama is doing to the country.
Too many in the press are confused - they conclude if both sides are warning of disaster, it must be politics as usual, just partisan noise. They can't or won't make any distinction between the two because of some vision of journalism as being nonjudgmental - yet thirty plus years of blood and disaster ought to provide some indication as to who is telling the truth and who is just making noise.
The Republican Party has jumped the shark.
The truly scary thing is how many people are STILL ready to follow them. This is leaving the bounds of political belief systems and descending into pathological dysfunction.