Tax Policy Center: Understanding Romney Tax Debate

     William G. Gale a co-director of the Tax Policy Center wrote a piece by the name of Mitt Romney's Tax Proposals: Understanding the Debate.

      He deserves a lot of credit for just the title, as few in the media have shown any interest in understanding anything about the first Presidential debate other than reiterating ad nausea um that Romney won the debate in a landslide according to the American people. What they never ask themselves is how much they drive this perception themselves.

      Certainly no one in the MSM has shown any interest in going beyond declaring Romney the winner and the President the loser to actually looking at the substance of what was said. Indeed, when Krugman this last Sunday went out and called the media for not doing any fact checking on Romney's performance their attitude seems to come down to the idea that since the President didn't question him on the night of the debate, there's no reason for them to do subsequent to it.

       http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-medias-dereliction-of-duty-after.html

      That doing so would be doing their jobs for the public their supposed to service apparently isn't very persuasive for them. The TPC paper looks at the problem with Romney's proposals:

      "In a recent paper I wrote with two colleagues, we showed that a revenue-neutral plan that met five specific goals that Governor Romney had put forth (reducing income tax rates by 20 percent, repealing the estate tax, the alternative minimum tax, and capital income taxes for middle class households, and enhancing saving and investment) would cut taxes for households with income above $200,000, and—as a result of revenue-neutrality—would therefore necessarily have to raise taxes on taxpayers below $200,000."

      "This was true even when we bent over backwards to make the plan as favorable to Romney as possible. We considered an unrealistically progressive way of financing the specified tax reductions. We accounted for revenue feedback coming from potential economic growth estimates as estimated by Romney advisor Greg Mankiw. We even ignored the need to finance about a trillion dollars in Romney's proposed corporate cuts."

       "Our conclusion was not a prediction about Governor Romney would do as President, it was an arithmetic calculation: all of the promises couldn't be met simultaneously without resorting to tax increases on households with income below $200,000."

     http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2012/10/08-romney-tax-debate-gale

     He makes this analogy:

     "Suppose Governor Romney said that he wants to drive a car from Boston to Los Angeles in 15 hours. And suppose some analysts employed tools of arithmetic to conclude that "If Governor Romney wants to drive from Boston to LA in 15 hours, it is mathematically impossible to avoid speeding." After all, the drive from LA to Boston is about 3,000 miles, so to take only 15 hours would require an average of 200 miles per hour. Certainly other road trips are possible -- but the particular one proposed here is not."

      Romney continued to claim he could make LA in 15 hours without speeding. Yet who in the media is picking this up, rather than admiring his "masterful" debate performance even though it was shot full of obfuscations and distortions. It was a masterful spin job.