TPM
At the first presidential debate in Colorado Wednesday night, former
Gov. Mitt Romney disputed a central criticism of his tax reform plan —
and appeared to disavow one of its central features.
Responding to President Obama’s description of Romney’s proposal,
Romney claimed: “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax
cut of the scale you’re talking about. I think we ought to provide tax
relief to people in the middle class. But I won’t reduce the share of
tax paid by high-income people. … I’m not looking to cut massive taxes
and to reduce revenues going to the government. My number one principal
is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to
underline that no tax cut that will add to the deficit.”
So who’s right?
Romney has run for months on a plan to lower everyone’s tax rates by
20 percent — an amount that independent analysts have concluded will
reduce revenues by $5 trillion over 10 years.
Romney has also insisted that his plan will be deficit neutral and
that it won’t increase taxes on the middle class. But according to the
non-partisan Tax Policy Center and other analysts, Romney won’t be able
to make good on both of those latter promises.
According to TPC, even if Romney closes all loopholes and deductions
for high-income earners, that alone will not account for all the revenue
he loses because of the rate cut. Thus, to make the overall plan
deficit neutral he’d have to raise the tax burden on middle income
Americans.
Faced with this basic description, Romney said, “If the tax plan he
described were a tax plan I was asked to support, I would say absolutely
not.”
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