OK. We knew this already, right? Plutocrat Mitt Romney is determined to make the ultra-rich the mega-rich at the expense of everybody else. But it's always good to know the details. And there's nothing like a chart to drive home the point. This particular one was put together by the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities from data compiled by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. In case, you're wondering, they aren't radical socialists.
Here's what his plans look like: make President Bush's tax cuts permanent while renewing President Obama's expansion of refundable tax credits for low- and middle-income families; cut individual income tax rates 20 percent from Bush's 35 percent to a new top rate of 28 percent; repeal the estate tax; repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax; cut the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent; reduce some unspecified "tax expenditures" for high-income people; keep the 15 percent tax rate on capital gains and dividends for people with incomes above $200,000 and eliminate it for people with incomes below that level.
Romney claims all this would be "revenue neutral." Far from it. The Tax Policy Center concludes it would generate a $4.9 trillion deficit over a decade and no "base broadeners" could come close to matching the proposed cuts with revenue boosts from those broadeners.
But it's the inequality enhancement that really stands out. CBPP's Robert Greenstein, Chye-Ching Huang and Chuck Marr write:
Finally, the Romney plan would significantly exacerbate the already serious problem of income inequality in America, conferring extraordinarily large tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans while raising taxes on people making less than $30,000 a year. TPC estimates that people who make over $1 million a year would get an average tax cut of $250,000 in 2015 (increasing their after-tax income by an average of almost 12 percent), while people making between $40,000 and $50,000 would get an average tax cut of $512 (increasing their after-tax income by an average of less than 1 percent), and people making between $10,000 and $20,000 would pay an average $174 more in taxes (decreasing their after-tax income by an average of 1.1 percent).
"I think it's dangerous, this class warfare," Romney said last fall, speaking of the Occupy movement. Indeed, it is. Dangerous and harmful to people who don't own multiple Home Depot-sized houses or have
Cadillac dispensers in their garages. For those seeking to nudge the one percent into an even more rarified stratum, it's just business as usual, as usual, as usual.