Think Progress identified 27 “myths” that Mitt Romney told during last week’s debate in Denver. Steve Benen identified 50 examples of Romney’s mendacity from last week. His list includes the debate but also speeches and media appearances. Some of these lies are big, brassy and brazen. Others are minor distortions. Collectively, they paint a portrait of an extraordinarily dishonest man.
We can start with something straightforward. During the debate, Mitt Romney denied that he has proposed tax cuts that would cost $5 trillion dollars over the next decade. “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about.” This is not very complicated to resolve. The Tax Policy Center simply looked at the tax cuts that Romney has proposed and calculated what they would do to the 2015 budget. The tax cuts would reduce revenue by $480 billion. If you multiply that by ten years, and you adjust for inflation, that comes out to an average of about $500 billion a year, of five trillion dollars. That doesn’t mean that Romney would blow a $5 trillion hole in the budget. But it does mean that he would have to do some combination of tax hikes and spending cuts to make up for the loss of $5 trillion in revenue his policies would create.
Romney says he will pay for this loss of revenue by closing tax loopholes, but he won’t specify which tax loopholes. It is possible to pay for Romney’s $5 trillion in tax cuts by closing loopholes, but not by closing loopholes that only are used by upper income people. To close the gap, Romney would have to go after tax credits for people’s home mortgage interest payments or the child tax credit. Which makes the following claim impossible. “I will not under any circumstances raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families.” To keep his promise to cut taxes without increasing the deficit, Romney would actually be cutting the middle class’s overall rate, but in many cases that cut would be overwhelmed by the loss of tax credits, thereby raising millions of middle class people’s overall tax burden.
Another problem arises from this claim: “My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.” The way Romney tries to explain this is that rich people will pay 20% less overall, but that gain will be exactly wiped out by the loss of loopholes and deductions. For example, there could be a cap on how much money could be deducted for charitable donations. The most obvious problem with this is that Romney can’t implement this kind of tax reform without both raising the tax burden on some high-income people and reducing it on others, both of which Romney completely denies that he will do. Someone who claims relatively little in charitable deductions would see a sharp reduction in their taxes. Someone who claims a lot in charitable deductions would possibly see their tax burden go up, disincentivizing charitable giving from the uber-wealthy.
This is just one small part of the dishonest game Romney was playing during the debate. If we are to take him at his word that he will not increase the deficit or add to the tax burden on anyone, there is only one possible answer. He won’t be proposing his tax reforms at all. What he has proposed is impossible and contradictory. But he did propose those reforms, repeatedly, for eighteen months. And he says those proposals are still in effect.
He’s just a con man.
