The Tax Policy Center, after assessing Mitt Romney's tax reform proposal this week, saidflatly that the plan "would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers."
An independent study slammed Mitt Romney's tax plan this week, reporting that 95 percent of Americans would see a tax increase under Romney's plan.Paul Krugman, who noted that Obama's plan was "inadequate" because it raised only $80 billion in additional revenue in an economy that demands increased revenueand government spending, compared it to a Romney plan which he called "intensely, screamingly irresponsible" and said it would generate lost revenue close to $450 billion.
The Economic Policy Insitute's Ethan Pollack called the plan "not serious" because its stated goal -- to lower the deficit by cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans -- "isn't mathematically possible."
Challenging Romney's statement that unlike President Obama, he would put his tax plan "on the table," the Washington Post's Ezra Klein says the Romney has does exactly the opposite with his proposal:
The truth is that Romney is afraid to put his plan on the table. He has promised to reduce the deficit, but has refused to identify the spending he would cut. He has promised to reform the tax code, but has refused to identify the deductions and loopholes he would eliminate. The only thing he has put on the table is dessert: a promise to cut marginal tax rates by 20 percent across the board and to do so without raising the deficit or reducing the taxes paid by the top 1 percent.
And Klein concludes with the same two words as Pollack when it comes to his overall assessment of Romney's plan: "mathematically impossible."
The main component of Romney's plan is to lower the rate for the nation's wealthiest from 35% to 28% percent, but the critics argue there is simply no way he can make up that revenue with limiting or eliminating "unspecified tax expenditures" as he proposes.
"Romney is scamming voters," says Krugman,"claiming not only that he can make up the lost revenue by closing unspecified loopholes, but that he can do so in a way that doesn't shift the tax burden away from the rich onto the middle class. He can't, as a matter of sheer arithmetic — which is the point of that Tax Policy Center study."
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