The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur weighs in on Romney's tax plan -- what would happen if we're unfortunate enough actually find ourselves with him as president after the upcoming election. It isn't pretty: Mitt Romney wants the middle class to pay $500 more in taxes so the rich can get richer:
President Obama has claimed that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would give benefits to the rich at the expense of the middle class. “Is it true?” Cenk asks. “Absolutely.” Under Mitt Romney’s plan, US citizens makes less that $200 thousand a year would pay about $500 more in income tax. Cenk says, “This is redistributing the wealth from the bottom to the top.”
Here's more from Think Progress: New Analysis Shows Romney Tax Plan Would Raise Taxes On Middle Class Families By More Than $2,000:
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has been promising that he will cut taxes “across the board,” while also instituting tax reform that will not add to the nation’s deficit. But a new report from the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution shows that this is much easier said than done.
In fact, if Romney were to actually implement his plan to reduce tax rates by 20 percent while eliminating tax deductions in order to pay for it, taxpayers with more than $200,000 would certainly see a tax cut. But everyone else — 95 percent of Americans — will see their taxes increase. And this result occurs even assuming that Romney would eliminate tax deductions so as to make the tax as progressive as possible:
To estimate how average household tax burdens among different income groups would change as a result of this shift, we assume that the available tax expenditures are curtailed “from the top down” in order to make the tax plan as progressive as possible…Even after eliminating all available tax expenditures for households earning more than $200,000, this group still faces a net tax break. Americans making over $1 million would see an increase in after-tax income of 4.1 percent (an $87,000 tax cut), those making between $500,000 and $1 million would see an increase of 3.2 percent (a $17,000 tax cut), and those making between $200,000 and $500,000 would see an increase of 0.8 percent (a $1,800 tax cut).
Because taxpayers above $200,000 as a group have received a net tax cut, revenue neutrality requires that taxpayers below $200,000—about 95 percent of the population—experience a tax increase.
[...] Again, this analysis assumes that deductions are eliminated in a way that would make the tax code as progressive as possible, so its likely that, in practice, Romney’s plan would look even worse. To this point, Romney has refused to specify which deductions he would limit or eliminate.
On several occasions, Romney has denied that his tax plan would provide a big tax break to the wealthy. But as this analysis shows, even giving him all of the benefit of the doubt when it comes to eliminating deductions, the plan is still a massive tax break for the rich.
And here's more from TPM on Romney trying to pretend that the study was biased and just ignoring how wonderfully those trickle-down economics he's advocating for are going to work if recent history is any guide: Romney Aide: ‘Biased’ Tax Study Ignores The Coming Romney Boom.
