Even more mathematically impossible tax promises: Budget Analyst Andrew Fieldhouse on why Mitt Romney's myriad of tax promises don’t add up.
Even more mathematically impossible tax promises: Budget Analyst Andrew Fieldhouse on why Mitt Romney's myriad of tax promises don’t add up.
Fieldhouse writes that last night, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made news by substantially “etch-a-sketching” the tax policy he had been running on since the GOP primaries began.
In making up policy on the fly, he promised that his tax cuts would be entirely revenue-neutral, that he would cut taxes on the middle class, and that he would not cut taxes on high-incomes. Taken together, these pledges violate basic rules of arithmetic.
Early on in the debate, Romney disputed President Obama’s claim that the former governor’s central economic plan was a $ 5 trillion tax cut on top of extending the Bush-era tax cuts:
“First of all, I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don't have a tax cut of a scale that you're talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.”
I’ve gone over these numbers before, but it’s worth a quick refresher about the broad thrust of what’s wrong with this claim: Romney is hugely specific about just how he’ll cut taxes (mostly for high-income earners) but refuses to specify any real-world offset though the “base-broadening” that he’s promising.
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