The media he attacked during it has more or less unanimously declared Marco Rubio the winner of Wednesday night's debate. So now it's time to take a closer look at some of those winning things he said.
Take his tax plan:
[Harwood:] The Tax Foundation, which was alluded to earlier, scored your tax plan and concluded that you give nearly twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top 1 percent as to people in the middle of the income scale.
Since you’re the champion of Americans living paycheck-to- paycheck, don’t you have that backward?
RUBIO: No, that’s — you’re wrong. In fact, the largest after- tax gains is for the people at the lower end of the tax spectrum under my plan. And there’s a bunch of things my tax plan does to help them.
Rubio then went on, after some crosstalk, to claim that "the greatest gains, percentage-wise, for people, are gonna be at the lower end of our plan." While it's true that people
at the very bottom of the income scale will gain a larger percentage from Rubio's plan than others, the middle—the group Harwood was asking about,
won't do so well:
Rubio's plan gives the rich more percentage-wise than the middle class. The Tax Foundation did indeed say this, right here. The median taxpayer gets 15 percent more. Rich taxpayers get 28 percent more. Hell, Harwood even gave Rubio a break by quoting the extremely dubious dynamic estimates instead of the more conventional static estimates.
So basically Rubio gives a big cut, percentage-wise, at the bottom, which looks nice on a graph and makes it look like he's not favoring the wealthy ... but meanwhile he's giving the wealthy nearly twice as big a cut, percentage-wise, as he's giving the middle class. Which of course breaks down to much much bigger numbers, because any percent of $1 million is larger than the equivalent percent of $50,000, to say nothing of 28 percent of $1 million vs. 15 percent of $50,000.
And of course it's not the rich who would be screwed by the cuts to government services this kind of tax plan would require. The promise is that after a decade or so, Rubio's plan would have caused so much economic growth that everything would be fine and dandy, but we've heard those promises from Republicans before. Never quite works out that way.