WaPo editorial: Romney’s ruinous tax plan

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

It appears that not all media villagers were so easily impressed by the ease with which Willard "Mittens" Romney so shamelessly lied during last night's debate. The Washington Post has this editorial opinion today, Romney’s ruinous tax plan:

HERE IS ONE way to distill the confusing charges and countercharges of the first presidential debate:

President Obama has no adequate plan to cope with the frightening level of debt the U.S. government is accumulating.

Republican nominee Mitt Romney has a plan to make it worse.

To
understand that harsh assessment, you have to spend a few minutes with
some facts that Mr. Romney did his best to obscure Wednesday.

“First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” he said.

In
fact, Mr. Romney has proposed lowering income tax rates, abolishing the
estate tax and making other changes that would cost $5 trillion over 10
years. When he says he has no such plan, he means that he intends to
make up for the lost revenue by closing loopholes — what’s benignly
known as “broadening the base.” Moreover, he says he can close so many
loopholes for rich people that the middle class will end up paying less.

But
even if you close every rich person’s loophole, you don’t save enough
money to do everything Mr. Romney wants to do. The Republican cites
studies that he says prove that wrong, but when you look closely, they
prove him wrong. For example, Harvard economist (and Romney adviser) Martin Feldstein
showed that you could pay for Mr. Romney’s tax cut by taking away
deductions — mortgage interest, charitable, state and local tax — from
households making more than $100,000. But then Mr. Romney said he
considers households earning up to $250,000 to be middle class. So the
math collapses again.

Moreover, these deductions are popular —
with the real estate industry, with museums and churches and charities
that rely on donations, and with taxpayers. So Mr. Romney won’t say
which he would trim. He suggested recently that, instead of abolishing
any, he might just cap how much a taxpayer can deduct — a plan similar
to one Mr. Obama has proposed. But then he’s even less likely to make up
for his lost revenue.

If he can’t meet all his goals — rate cut,
revenue-neutrality, no tax hike on the middle class — which would give?
“My number-one principle is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the
deficit,” he said Wednesday night. This directly contradicted the
answer his running mate gave just four days earlier. “Keeping tax rates
down” would be the number-one priority, Paul Ryan said on Fox News.

The
danger is that Mr. Romney and Congress would enact the popular part of
his plan, the tax cut, and then rely on the kind of wishful thinking he
hinted at last night (“we keep taking in the same money when you also
account for growth”). We’ve seen, under Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush, where such wishful thinking gets you. This time, as the
population ages and demands on government grow, the ending could be a
lot scarier.

And here’s the really scary part: Mr. Romney’s plan
is irresponsible, even if he could pay for it. The bipartisan
Simpson-Bowles commission, which he chastised Mr. Obama for not
endorsing, concluded that the country cannot solve its fiscal problem
without raising revenue and cutting spending. Given the political
challenge of raising taxes, it also concluded that the only way to raise
revenue would be with tax reform: doing some of the base-broadening
that Mr. Romney favors and using some of the proceeds to reduce the
debt. By devoting the proceeds of whatever loophole-closing he could
manage instead to additional tax cuts, Mr. Romney would just feed the
nation’s addiction to debt.

You're not fooling everyone, Mittens.