‘Obama Will Raise Taxes on the Middle Class!’ Wait, WTF? National Review DARVO Spectacular!
Obama’s Middle-Class Tax Hike - the Editors - National Review Online
Democrats have been saying — or, in the case of Joe Biden, trying to say — that Mitt Romney plans to raise taxes on the middle class. This claim is flatly untrue. The word ‘lie’ probably is thrown around too casually in our politics, but this qualifies. Romney has no such plan, has forsworn taking such a course of action, and has in fact proposed to cut tax rates for the middle class — and everybody else who pays the federal income tax — by reducing all brackets by 20 percent.
Romney’s plan would be revenue-neutral, making up for forgone tax revenue by eliminating certain exemptions and deductions. How many and which of those deductions would need to be reduced or eliminated would be determined by the economic facts on the ground come January: If the economy is growing more quickly than expected, then fewer offsets will be required to keep tax revenue level. Romney has been nothing if not consistent in his guiding principles for tax reform: lower rates and fewer deductions, producing a system that is fairer and flatter.
Analysts at the Tax Policy Center estimated that Romney could not both cut rates and maintain revenue neutrality, and published an estimate that this would necessitate an $86 billion tax increase on the middle class. Many of the center’s assumptions were either tendentious or incorrect, as we argued in an earlier editorial, and as has been amply demonstrated by budget scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and elsewhere. The center later cut its $86 billion estimate by more than half. And even that doesn’t quite get the story: For example, Romney proposes to ‘pay for’ repealing the taxes associated with Obamacare by (this is a subtle point) repealing Obamacare, and no further offset is required. According to AEI’s Alex Brill, the Romney plan could produce anything from a $14 billion shortfall that would need to be made up elsewhere to a $1 billion surplus, depending upon how the plan is implemented and how fast the economy grows. An extra one-tenth of 1 percent in annual economic growth substantially changes the federal fiscal picture for the better. That fact, of course, is the animating idea behind Romney’s tax-reform agenda, the point of which is not to lower federal revenue but to increase economic growth by simplifying tax law, lowering compliance costs, and reducing economic distortions.