Romney’s Tax Hike

By DAVID FIRESTONE

The Romney campaign’s increasingly desperate attempts to dismiss a new study of its tax plan are a pretty good sign that the study is devastating...It’s been well known for a while that Mr. Romney’s tax plan was a mathematical impossibility. He promised to reduce marginal tax rates by 20 percent, eliminate the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax, and end the capital gains tax for middle-income taxpayers – all while not lowering the amount of revenue coming into the treasury. Mr. Romney said he would offset those losses by ending a series of loopholes, but has yet to cite a single loophole he would delete.

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The Romney campaign called the study “a joke” for not taking into account the explosion of economic growth that tax cuts and a reduction in spending will automatically produce. (No details, of course, on how much growth or what precisely would cause it.) But the study’s authors did consider that possibility. Even when they added an unrealistic amount of economic growth to their model, they still couldn’t find a way for the tax cuts to pay for themselves.

Mr. Romney managed to skate through the primaries with an empty grab-bag of tax giveaways, and may have thought that anti-Obama anger would let him get away with it in the general election, too. A definitive study like this one makes it clear his hollowness will have a heavy price.

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/romneys-tax-hike/