I got the following over at Benen’s place:
President Obama will be in Mansfield, Ohio, today, and according to remarks prepared for delivery, he’s going to take full advantage of the new revelations:
“[T]he centerpiece of my opponent’s entire economic plan is a new, $5 trillion tax cut. A lot of this tax cut would go to the wealthiest 1% of all households. Folks making more than $3 million a year — the top one-tenth of one percent — would get a tax cut worth almost a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars.
“But it gets worse. Under my opponent’s plan, guess who gets the bill for these $250,000 tax cuts? You do. And you don’t have to take my word for it.
“Just today, an independent, non-partisan organization ran all the numbers. And they found that if Governor Romney wants to keep his word and pay for his plan, he’d have to cut tax breaks that middle-class families depend on to pay for your home, or your health care, or send your kids to college. That means the average middle-class family with children would be hit with a tax increase of more than $2,000.
“But here’s the thing – he’s not asking you to contribute more to pay down the deficit, or to invest in our kids’ education. He’s asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a tax cut.”
The simple way of looking at this is that Romney proposes to create a very large tax break for super rich people, and he promises that this won’t increase the deficit. So, the only way to make that happen is to eliminate tax credits used by middle class people. Or, I should say that the only way to try to do it is to go after middle class tax credits. It turns out that it’s not possible to accomplish what Romney is suggesting:
Mitt Romney’s plan to overhaul the tax code would produce cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans — and bigger bills for everybody else, according to an independent analysis set for release Wednesday.
The study was conducted by researchers at the Brookings Institution and the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, who seem to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate. To cover the cost of his plan — which would reduce tax rates by 20 percent, repeal the estate tax and eliminate taxes on investment income for middle-class taxpayers — the researchers assume that Romney would go after breaks for the richest taxpayers first.
They even look at what would happen if Republicans’ dreams for tax reform came true and the proposal generated significant revenue through economic growth.
None of it helped Romney. His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.
“It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers,” the study concludes.
Even if tax breaks “are eliminated in a way designed to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible, there would still be a shift in the tax burden of roughly $86 billion [a year] from those making over $200,000 to those making less” than that.
What you are seeing here is the con-game exposed. Cutting taxes is easy. Cutting tax credits for the middle class is hard. Romney could conceivably get his tax cuts passed through Congress, but he could never attack the middle class with this kind of ferocity. The end result would be very similar to what happened when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush slashed taxes on the rich. We wound up with enormous deficits, the rich got richer, and everyone else saw their wages stagnate.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me three times, shame on you.
