Ann Romney is busy…
The wannabe First Lady is guest-hosting “Good Morning America” today, less than 24 hours after penning a piece entitled “The Man I Know” for BlogHer and taking to Fox News Channel to defend her husband against attacks from the Obama campaign that he repeatedly lied in last week’s presidential debate. “I mean, lied about what?” Ann Romney told FNC host Martha MacCallum. “This is something he’s been saying all along.”
…but she asked a question that she shouldn’t have asked. If you look at the transcript of the first debate, you will see that Romney lied almost immediately. Once he was done thanking the hosts and congratulating the president on his wedding anniversary, Romney said the following, “And the answer is yes, we can help, but it’s going to take a different path, not the one we’ve been on, not the one the president describes as a top-down, cut taxes for the rich. That’s not what I’m going to do.” But that is exactly what he has proposed doing throughout his entire campaign. He has proposed a variety of tax cuts that collectively would cost the government approximately $5 trillion over the next decade, and the overwhelming majority of those dollars would go back in the pockets of America’s richest people.
But Romney decided to simply lie about this. “First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. 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.” If you cut people’s taxes across the board by 20%, then the “share” people pay stays the same. Of course, twenty percent of $50,000 is $10,000. Twenty percent of Romney’s 21 million dollar income is $4,200,000. So, when he says that he’s not going to reduce the share of rich people’s taxes, he means that he’s going to pay $4.2 million less in taxes per annum.
Of course, that’s not quite true because Romney is unemployed and makes almost all of his money off investments. That’s why he only paid an effective tax rate of 14.1% even though the highest marginal tax rate is 35 percent. Romney has also proposed eliminating the Estate Tax which, by definition, only impacts the very wealthiest Americans. Romney wants you to believe that these policies don’t amount to cutting taxes for the rich.
He offers a variety of ridiculous rationales for this belief. For example, in the debate he said this:
“The second area: taxation. We agree; we ought to bring the tax rates down, and I do, both for corporations and for individuals. But in order for us not to lose revenue, have the government run out of money, I also lower deductions and credits and exemptions so that we keep taking in the same money when you also account for growth.”
“When you account for growth” is code for trickle-down economics, which was tried under both Reagan and Bush the Younger, leaving us with massive deficits both times. But that is ideological blindness, not a lie. The lie is that his elimination of deductions and credits will not hurt the middle class and that his overall tax reform proposal will not benefit the wealthy. But let me quote him some more.
“And finally, with regards to that tax cut, look, I’m not looking to cut massive taxes and to reduce the — the revenues going to the government. My — my number one principle is there’ll be no tax cut that adds to the deficit.
“I want to underline that — no tax cut that adds to the deficit. But I do want to reduce the burden being paid by middle-income Americans. And I — and to do that that also means that I cannot reduce the burden paid by high-income Americans. So any — any language to the contrary is simply not accurate.”
Now, remember, he told us that he doesn’t have a five trillion dollar tax plan, but he does. He says he will pay for it by eliminating Obamacare (even though the Congressional Budget Office says that eliminating Obamacare would cost the government $109 billion over ten years) and destroying PBS and NPR (whose total budget is consumed in six hours by the Pentagon). Those are the only cuts Romney has specified and, combined, they’d actually add to the deficit. Everything else, the full five trillion dollars, must be found by eliminating deductions and credits without any of it adding to middle-income people’s overall tax burden. Making matters worse, Romney has proposed increasing Pentagon spending by $2 trillion dollars. So, he really has to find seven trillion dollars without raising taxes on anyone. If he doesn’t, he will violate his “Number One principle” not to increase the deficit.
Romney denied that his proposal would blow a $5 trillion dollar hole in the budget several more times, but his only effort to explain how he’d pay for it was this:
“My plan is not like anything that’s been tried before. My plan is to bring down rates but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time so the revenue stays in, but that we bring down rates to get more people working.”
In theory, Romney’s kind of tax reform has been tried before. In 1986, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) crafted a tax reform bill that brought down marginal tax rates and paid for it by closing loopholes and eliminating credits. Reagan signed it. But the problem isn’t the theory. The problem is that Romney can’t keep all the promises he’s made. He can’t create a revenue-neutral tax plan that reduces everyone’s rates by 20%, eliminates the Estate Tax, sharply cuts corporate taxes, repeals the alternative minimum tax (AMT), does away with capital gains and dividend taxes on 97% of Americans, and repeals the taxes in ObamaCare while increasing military spending by $2 trillion dollars by simply doing away with deductions and credits that only effect rich people.
To suggest that he can is simply a gigantic and ridiculous lie.
And, to answer Ann Romney’s question a little more fully, Mitt Romney didn’t restrict himself to lying about his tax plan. In fact, almost nothing Romney said in the debate was true in the strictest sense. But I’ll leave you with a whopper:
“The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it. Trillion-dollar deficits for the last four years. The president’s put it in place as much public debt — almost as much debt held by by the public as all prior presidents combined.”
The national debt was $10.626 trillion when Obama took office. It is now over $16 trillion. So, the deficit debt didn’t double over the last four years. It went up fifty percent. And it should be obvious if prior presidents racked up $10.6 billion in debt, that Obama’s $4.4 trillion doesn’t come close to that.
Also, too, preexisting conditions are not covered in his plan and only three of twenty-six subsidized green energy companies have gone broke, which is less than “about half.”
