Howard Gleckman Nails Romney's Tax Plan

     First of all, the Romney playbook on taxes is like all his other policies. He's vague but he'll tell you the longer version after you elect him.

     He has at times gone so far as say 'I'm not going to tell you now, I'll tell you after the election.' We see this yet again on the immigration question. He won't tell us whether he would continue with Obama's Executive Order on immigration or not. He says he'll put in his "own, permanent plan" but with no hint about whether his permanent plan would continue and add to Obama's temporary plan-which Obama was shrewd enough to maybe make permanent-or not.

    Same thing with women's rights. He is for pay equity between the sexes that much he'll divulge but is coy as to whether that means he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Act or not. He's playing the same game on taxes.

    "When Mitt Romney talks about his plan for tax reform, he is very careful to say two things: He wants to cut tax rates, and he wants high-income households to pay the same share of taxes they do today. He said it again on Face the Nation last Sunday—a rare in-depth broadcast interview on a network not named Fox."

      "The first promise is easy to understand. But the second is more subtle. Romney is saying the rich should pay the same share of total tax revenue as they do now. But he is not saying they should pay the same effective tax rate they pay today or that he’d exempt them from his rate cuts. Quite the opposite: His tax plan would make the 2001/2003 tax cuts permanent and further reduce rates, including for those at the top, by an additional 20 percent (bringing the top rate down to 28 percent)."

      "While Romney says he’d offset those additional rate cuts by scaling back deductions and other preferences for high-income households, he has not said how. Thus, based on what we know, his tax proposal implies that high-income households would pay much less tax than today."

     "This is what he said on Face the Nation: “One– one of the absolute requirements of any tax reform that I have in mind is that people who are at the high end, whether you call them the one percent or two percent or half a percent, that people at the high end will still pay the same share of the tax burden they’re paying now.”

     "In other words, if you put both pieces of Romney’s tax platform together, he could cut taxes across-the-board, including for the rich, while not reducing the current tax share paid by those at the very top of the economic food chain."

     Of course the fact is that Romney is most likely to do it seems to me is as Gleckman suggests cut taxes on the very rich. What this implies is a cut in public spending-quite possibly another premise to argue for "fixing" Medicare-that is defund it.  As those of modest income are the ones who count on government spending, cuts imply tax hikes on them. So it is that as usual GOP tax plans always mean two things-tax cuts for the rich but raises for everyone else.