Tax Policy Center Reaffirms Findings on Romney Tax Plan

Mitt Romney had no problem relying upon the findings of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center during the GOP primary battles and approvingly cited the center's analysis of his opponents' tax proposals.  However, when the Tax Policy Center later slammed Romney's own plan, suddenly Romney is seeking to paint the center's analysis as flawed and unreliable.  Well, the center re-reviewed everything and guess what: it stands by its conclusion that Romney would cut taxes for the wealthy while everyone else would pay more.  It's all in keeping with the Romney/Ryan reverse Robin Hood approach to society.  The hypocrisy of Romney and Ryan is only worsened by the fact that both pretend to be deeply religious yet ignore the Gospel teachings.  Indeed, their true God seems to be money and how much they can amass (Ryan recently amend his financial disclosures to include a trust from which he and his wife have received significant income claiming he had "forgotten about it").  Here are excerpts from the New York Times on the Tax Policy Center response to Romney's whining:

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, after considering conservative critiques of its recent, much-publicized analysis of Mitt Romney’s tax agenda, said on Thursday that its conclusion stands: His proposals would mean big tax cuts for the highest-income taxpayers and increases for everyone else.

“A reform proposal that meets the five goals” that Mr. Romney has outlined for overhauling the tax code “would have to raise burdens on middle-class households,” the three authors of the analysis wrote in a nine-page response to the criticism.

That is inevitable, they said, mainly as a consequence of two of Mr. Romney’s five goals: His insistence that any tax overhaul should be revenue-neutral, neither reducing nor increasing annual budget deficits, and that it should protect or even sweeten existing tax breaks for savings and investment like those for dividends and capital gains income.

If Mr. Romney were willing to either increase deficits or reduce the tax breaks for investors, the authors said, then taxes would not necessarily have to go up for lower- and middle-income Americans.


As his other three goals, Mr. Romney would cut income tax rates by 20 percent, eliminate the estate tax and end the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to ensure that the richest taxpayers did not escape liability due to various tax breaks but which increasingly threatens moderate-income households.

The authors also rebutted criticisms that their initial report did not sufficiently account for the potential benefits of Mr. Romney’s separate proposals to lower the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, reduce other business taxes and cut domestic spending deeply.

The authors said they initially had assumed that Mr. Romney would offset the cost of his proposed cut in the corporate tax rate by scaling back other business tax breaks, but Romney advisers said that would not be the case. Yet that would mean “an even larger tax cut on high-income individuals, requiring even larger cuts to tax expenditures” – that is, tax breaks like those for mortgage interest – “and correspondingly larger increases in taxes on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.”

Deep cuts in spending would have a similar impact, the authors added, hurting mostly low- and middle-income households because they disproportionately benefit from government programs and benefits.

I will give Romney one thing: he and his allies like the Koch brothers have done a masterful job in duping the cretins in the Tea Party crowd into supporting policies that are strongly against their own best interests.  I'm sure Romney and the Koch brothers must be laughing their asses off behind closed doors.