Of course he is just making shit up:
A big mystery of Romney’s tax pledge — to “cut tax rates across the board by 20 percent” and reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent — is what tax loopholes he’ll close to pay for the cost.
Romney’s tax cuts are projected to cost the federal government $5 trillion over 10 years, on top of the $4 trillion 10-year cost of making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Existing deductions and exemptions in the tax code, all together, reduce receipts by about $1 trillion per year, according to estimates.
Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said all the deductions Romney proposed to scrap “would pay for less than 20 percent” of the $5 trillion cost of his tax plan. “The deductions he unveiled would raise less than $1 trillion,” he said.
Romney’s mortgage interest proposal would yield “probably less than 1 percent of the total cost” of his tax cuts, Marr said, while axing the state and local deduction for everyone, which would be very difficult to enact politically, would yield about $800 billion to $900 billion over 10 years. “So that’d be a major step but still pay for a small share of his tax cuts,” Marr said.
It’s unclear whether Romney would eliminate these expenditures entirely or simply cap them, to limit the extent to which they benefit high-income earners.
The deductibility of home mortgage interest and the tax exemption for employer-provided health care eat up a big chunk of the $1 trillion in revenue the government loses annually because of tax expenditures. Both are very popular politically, and they’ve become fundamental to the country’s housing and health care policy. Other perks, like the low capital gains rate and oil and gas subsidies, are backed by powerful constituencies that both parties, but particularly Republicans, are at pains to scale back.
The Romney campaign backed away from the remarks Monday morning, suggesting they’re aware the bad math could become a political liability. “He was just discussing ideas that came up on the campaign trail,” Romney surrogate Jim Talent told reporters on a conference call Monday. “He wasn’t announcing a policy yesterday. We don’t have any plans now to announce new policies.”
It’s not a big mystery at all. He’s lying.
How many more decades do we have to pretend the Republicans are fiscally responsible?
Culture of Truth
A big mystery of Romney’s
According to the latest meme, this language is code for an anti-Mormon slur.
John Cole ‘with ties to the white house’ will cause a ‘firestorm’ and David Gregory will devote his show to ‘Democratic attacks on people of faith’.
Dork
If he messes with this MI deductions, people will crucify him. Of course, he wont care, because it only affects the middle class.
Tonal Crow
Fixed.
Tonal Crow
@Culture of Truth: It’s the Liberals’ War on Brigham Young!
Zandar
Nor will he until 2013. We’ll just have to elect him to find out what his policies actually are.
Violet
However long it takes for our media overlords to stop inking million dollar contracts and make salaries somewhat more in the range of what normal people make.
When that happens they’ll be much less interested in making sure they pay lower taxes and much more interested in making sure the middle class quits getting screwed. And magically, Republicans will suddenly become fiscally irresponsible.
Eric S.
While I understand he’s just making this up has anyone asked Mittens why actual human beings only deserve a 20% decrease and corporations deserve a 29% decrease?
Punchy
Am I reading that bolded part correct? They expect rich-ass Romney to limit interest deductions for rich people? They expect Romney to consider “raising” taxes on the wealthy by limiting their deductions?
Are the media really this fucking obtuse?
BGinCHI
What kind of Master of the Universe gives a shit about debt?
Debt is for little people who pay their bills, cook their own meals, clean their own houses, raise their own kids.
Mitt gives the stupidest among us something to strive for: no labor, no responsibility, no guilt.
Corner Stone
Recent comments.
Satanicpanic
@Culture of Truth: As is referring to him as weird, unnerving, or off-putting. Because his religion is the only reason why people would do that.
BGinCHI
@Eric S.: Because motherfucking corporations are people, my friend.
cathyx
He’s lying? So what. Nobody who could call him out cares if he does.
Mickey
“How many more decades do we have to pretend the Republicans are fiscally responsible?”
You seemed to think so only a couple years ago….oh and it was only a few months ago you were spunking on the ceiling over Greewalds libertarian diatribes.
So….you were saying Cole?
Mickey
“How many more decades do we have to pretend the Republicans are fiscally responsible?”
You seemed to think so only a couple years ago….oh and it was only a few months ago you were spunking on the ceiling over Greenwalds libertarian diatribes.
So….you were saying Cole?
Culture of Truth
@Eric S.: Some people are more equal than others.
Eric S.
@BGinCHI: While I know the case law, make Mittens say that. Make him say it again and again and again…
Culture of Truth
@Eric S.: Corporations are people, but have more people than regular people, so they deserve a bigger tax cut.
danimal
Until the writers in the mainstream press begin to understand very basic, very simple mathematical equations along with rudimentary budgeting terminology.
IOW, many, many decades. Idiots. It’s truly disgraceful.
Cris (without an H)
Why is he talking of closing loopholes at all? I thought the GOP article of faith was that if you decrease corporate taxes, the economy improves, thus increasing tax revenue.
Kind of an underpants gnome thing.
pragmatism
@Tonal Crow: you know who actually waged war on brigham young? honest abe lincoln. he placed the gun batteries which face SLC.
Culture of Truth
Cause it sounds good. ‘loopholes’ are by definition a bad thing, so it’s like saying ‘i’m against bad stuff and for good stuff’
which is kind of the GOP platform anyway.
bemused
It’s a given that he’s lying every time he opens his mouth. I don’t know how these churchy people, no matter what religion they follow, square this with their God(s). Make it up, even their religions, as they go along is the only explanation.
gbear
It wasn’t meant to be a factual statement.
burnspbesq
The entire discussion about tax policy, from both sides, is fundamentally silly. Unless you’re willing to talk about rates, you’re not serious about deficit reduction. It simply can’t be done by dicking around with the base. And unless you’re willing to invade and annex Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands, forget about the corporate income tax as a source of any significant revenue increases.
There was a recent study by a couple of academic economists, the math of which made sense to me, that posited that the revenue-optimizing top marginal individual income tax rate is around 70 percent.
If we’re serious about closing the budget gap, we need a much more steeply progressive individual income tax, both for the revenue it raises directly and to offset the regressivity of the VAT that we’re going to have to have.
jwb
@Culture of Truth: ” John Cole ‘with ties to the white house’ will cause a ‘firestorm’ and David Gregory will devote his show to ‘Democratic attacks on people of faith’.”
Cole will be promoted: “close White House advisor John Cole…”
Heliopause
It doesn’t matter, because the minute you flatten the tax rate and close loopholes Romney’s buddies will commence introducing new loopholes into the tax code. This is an absolute certainty. Death is less certain than this.
The only hope for this country is to push up the marginal rates as far as can be managed and make the oligarchs whittle them down from there. A flatter tax only makes sense in the quantum universe where the U.S. political system is not a wholly owned subsidiary of wealthy interests.
Five. The Empire will collapse at that point.
danimal
@burnspbesq:
It’s about damned time we invade some nice vacation spots. Much better list than Baghdad, Kuwait City and Tehran, if you ask me.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq:
Shit. Unless you’re seriously willing to put the army of fucking leeches like you out of business then nothing will ever happen with actual tax reform.
Keith
Is it me or did it sound like Team Meh tried to blame his supporters for coming up with his not-plan? “Hey, we’re just discussing what these nutjobs throw at us!”
Amir Khalid
@danimal:
Maybe it’s me just being a Malaysian, but since when is Singapore a nice vacation spot? It’s all city, aside from a few fancy tourist-trap resorts. Singaporeans come north of the Causeway when they want to see countryside and
shitstuff.burnspbesq
@Corner Stone:
Be careful what you wish for. I’ll take your job and be better at it on my first day than you’ve ever been.
Culture of Truth
I suggest the Romney 2012 Campaign be renamed “Operation Slippery Weasel”
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
I remember being in the lobby of a hotel in New York a few years ago when a busload of Singapore Airlines flight attendants came in. If they’re all from Singapore, I can imagine Singapore being pretty scenic.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
I’ve been saying for a while that if the Neocons are right and we need to throw some pissant country against the wall once a decade to show the world who’s boss, we could to a lot worse than choosing one of the off-shore tax havens. The Cayman Islands are a hell of a lot less likely to turn into a never-ending quagmire than Iraq, and knocking them off might actually help our economy.
Zach
Someone needs to write up Romney’s proposals and yell really loudly that he’s proposing to raise taxes for job creators and whatnot. Axing the state and local deduction would hit most small businesses much more than a new upper bracket for folks with taxable income over $1M/year.
The story shouldn’t be that Romney didn’t propose raising taxes enough to offset his cuts. It should be that he proposed raising taxes on everyone else to pay for some of his massive tax cuts for the rich. How did someone at CBPP get quoted without pointing out who Romney’s tax cuts are actually going to?
Mickey
@Roger Moore: How about Barbados. It’s got lost of blahs so it would be a twofer.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
It’s great if you want to visit The Tackiest Place on Earth. And it ought to be a real destination for serious foodies.
Phoenix_rising
Yeah, that’s torches and pitchforks’ talk.
I pay for better roads in frickin’ Wyoming than Wyoming can afford thanks to my gas taxes going into a federal highways pool. Even though the state has negligible property taxes, and NO income tax which is a hallmark of States That Are Free Ridin’ On The Rest of Us, Wyoming owns more transportation infrastructure to inform drivers (signs that can upload traffic info over the freeway) than New Mexico. With 30% of the population and less area.
Now we’re seriously suggesting that I should pay income tax in the state where I live, and then pay federal income tax on that very same $3500 to transfer more of my hard earned information worker dollars to the yahoos in Missabama to use on faith based sex ed?
Nah, that’s a non-starter. The ignorant states are already fleecing the rest of us.
TooManyJens
@burnspbesq:
Do you eat what you kill, too?
Martin
@burnspbesq:
I don’t agree. I posted the other day that our effective rate on nearly $100K of income for last year is a teahadist-crushing 0.98%. The rate we pay is effectively zero, so talking about rate seems fairly pointless.
We got to 0.98% by reducing our AGI by ⅔ through mortgage interest deductions, deductions for taxes, deductions for children, and for everything else under the sun. Our AGI was then so low that we got the 0% cap gains rate on the $30K+ of cap gains that we took. I don’t know if we talk about that as a rate exemption or a rate, but even if we paid 15% on that long-term gain, it’d only have brought our effective rate to 5%.
It’s absurd that in addition to the property tax deduction that I get to reduce my income by a third simply because I pay mortgage interest while the guy across the street who rents the same model home as me doesn’t get that benefit. And because of those deductions, it doesn’t matter what the rate is because apparently I can avoid damn near any rate that I don’t want to pay. And that’s the problem with corporate taxation as well. 35% or 39% makes no difference when the only people that pay that rate are athletes and entertainers.
LanceThruster
I want the Mormon prophet to weigh in on whether Mittens can be an LDS in “good standing” while at the same time spewing lie after brazen lie.
(sadly – my guess is “yes”).
Martin
@Phoenix_rising:
I thought about that too, but I’m starting to change my mind. In general I don’t like compounding taxation because it has pretty awful outcomes – not the least of which being the possibility that you have more than 100% of your income being taxed, at least in theory. I prefer systems that don’t allow that sort of thing by design.
But we all get a pretty hefty standard deduction, and I’d advocate for an even heftier one in exchange for losing all of the other deductions. Doesn’t that standard deduction already cover your state and local taxes and then some? In spite of states like Wyoming with no income or sales tax, I don’t see a lot of people flocking there. Clearly there’s some benefit being delivered with the higher taxation in the other states. And the deduction doesn’t level the playing field as it can only recoup at most 35% of what you pay to the state/locality, and generally closer to 15%. And yet people still live in high tax areas like NY and CA.
Ken
@Roger Moore: we could to a lot worse than choosing one of the off-shore tax havens. The Cayman Islands…
If it weren’t for the non-corporation people who live there, I might wish for a hurricane to wipe the islands out of existence. It would be instructive to see how much of that “offshore” money survived.
(The whole idea of offshore accounts seems based on a child’s image of banks as giant Scrooge McDuck vaults filled with bills and coins.)
Svensker
If not now, when? The guy’s only been running for president since 2006 — don’t you think he’d have had time to come up with some “policies” on the most important items he’d have to deal with if he were presidentin’? Jayzus.
gaz
Basically, a few decades ago the republicans decided to start schlepping bad fiscal ideas into the public sphere in order to drum up support for tanking the economy. The reason for this is quite simple. It’s a good way to dupe the rubes when a D-prez is in the whitehouse. Let congress screw everything up, and then next cycle, the duped electorate throws the “bum” out and replaces them with one of the vandals that was responsible for the mess in the first place.
Unfortunately for them (not to mention the rest of us!) – now they have all drank their own kool-aid and they actually believe this economic magical thinking works. See the “Chicago School” of economics, Friedman, Laffer, et al. Bunch friggin loons.
Suffern ACE
Wait. I thought it was fraud that was going to get us there. Not the two tax loopholes I have, plus the third if you count the tax deduction my employer takes because I get medical care. Next they’ll be telling me that I’ll be taxed on my 401K contributions. Unreasonable I tell you.
Suffern ACE
@Svensker: What they mean is “unpopular policies” won’t be announced. Not in this context.
PurpleGirl
@Martin: Standard deduction vs. itemizing deductions. For 30-odd years I’ve not actually filed with itemized deductions. I’ve often calculated them and then not filed that way. Even living in a Co-op now, my real estate taxes and my state/local taxes and everything else combined wouldn’t equal what the standard deduction is. I’ve had friends tell me I’m wrong not to itemize but I don’t see it in my numbers.
PurpleGirl
@Suffern ACE: You’re not taxed on the 401(K) contributions when you make them but you will be when you take the money out. Theoretically when you are retired your income tax rate will be lower and the tax won’t be as much as now, but you will be taxed on the 402(K) money you take out. (And those of us who had to take out the 401(K) money to live on when unemployed… depending on you age you might not have to pay a penalty but we did have to pay income taxes.
Shari
@LanceThruster:
Mix “lying for the Lord” with the “white horse prophesy” and, yeah, I have no trouble believing the Mormon prophet thinks it is ok for Romney to lie to us.
pluege
How many more decades do we have to pretend the Republicans are fiscally responsible?
how many years do we have to pretend republicans aren’t congenital liars that lie with their every breath?
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@Dork:
You’re assuming MSM would report actual “facts” to the “voters”.
The Ryan plan cancels the mortgage interest deduction as well, but no crucifixions have been forthcoming. Because nobody of importance has mentioned it.
MikeBoyScout
The first step, any which way and every which way you look at it, is the elimination and liquidation of the Republican party.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq: Do you also not take a piss when you’re in a position? Know how to mow lawns? Wash the silver for other patrons?
Shit. You couldn’t carry enough towels to keep me dry you silly motherfucker.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq: You’re a leech. A mooch. You haven’t produced a god damned thing for society. In fact, you’ve stolen from your community and your country at large. You hide behind the “loopholes as is” because that’s easy for you. All the while never acknowledging those loopholes and exceptions and rules exist for a reason. They were paid for!
The people stealing their fair share out of the community pot took their profits and they paid for those loopholes! And fecking remora like you told them how to construct it.
Don’t kid yourself homeboy.
LanceThruster
@Shari:
Wow. Thanks for that, Shari —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Horse_Prophecy
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Have we mentioned Ann Romney is a hard working mother of five in this thread?
Tonal Crow
I had thought that Mormon doctrine considers lying — especially reprobate lying to gain power — to be a serious sin requiring confession, repentance, atonement, and a rigorous, continuous effort to refrain from further sin.
Am I misinformed?
Tonal Crow
@Corner Stone:
Don’t overgeneralize. Some lawyers do awesome good work, for example these folks. Also too, if the police knock on your door, you’re going to run to a
fucking leechlawyer like a rabbit on speed.Corner Stone
@Tonal Crow: Reading comprehension. Try it sometime.
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
People like to talk about itemizing deductions, but it’s mostly important for people who are pretty well off. At the national median household income of about $45K, it would take a combination of a relatively high state and local tax rate and tithing to get a meaningful itemized deduction. You’re only likely to get there with some combination of those and the mortgage interest deduction or an income well above the median.
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
People like to talk about itemizing deductions, but it’s mostly important for people who are pretty well off. At the national median household income of about $45K, it would take a combination of a relatively high state and local tax rate and tithing to get a meaningful itemized deduction. You’re only likely to get there with some combination of those and the mortgage interest deduction or an income well above the median.
PurpleGirl
@Roger Moore: Yup. For most of my working life I didn’t make that kind of money and when I compared the totals of what I could itemize with the standards, hands down I did better to take the standard.
rikyrah
they are frauds, yet, you still have delusional ones like Sully pretending that there’s anything to Willard’s proposal.
then again, he called the Zombie-eyed Granny Killer (thanks Charles Pierce) ‘ a serious thinker’.
burnspbesq
@Corner Stone:
Bullshit, with a large side order of you have no fucking clue.
I help people comply with the most fiendishly and unnecessarily complex law ever devised by man. All my clients want is to pay the right amount of tax (i.e., everything they are legally obligated to pay and not one dime more), to the right countries, at the right time.
My clients pretty much don’t get audited, because there are no real issues on their returns. The ones that do get audited, get no-change letters at the end, because they were in compliance.
And yes, I do add value. Because of me, you can rely on the accuracy of the tax provision in my public clients’ financial statements when deciding whether to invest in their stock.
You really should just shut up. You’re embarrassing yourself.
tybee
@burnspbesq:
so corner stone is right. you’re a leech.
additionally, you support child rapists with your financial “success”.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq: The net worth of your clients, on average, is?
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq: I know everything there is to know about you counselor. From your days at the IRS until you leveraged them up for a place at BigLaw and now on your own.
You’re the exact reason the twisted and “fiendish” laws exist as they are. Does the irony escape you in some way?
You don’t help Mama figure out how to get $500 extra back without raising the flag.
You help a bunch of overly wealthy pimps like yourself determine how to shield their whorehouse money from coming into the hands of the plebes they despise. The plebes who don’t have the time, experience or money to navigate the twisted and “fiendish” layers people like you have lobbied to put in place. Because those “fiendish” rules benefit you and others. Just like you.
You’re no mystery.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq:
Bwah ha ha ha ha.
I’ve seen that trick before. Public reporting is the gold standard!
Oh, wait…
gaz
@burnspbesq: Actually, Microsoft has some people that do what you do on staff, and because of that, they’ve ripped off WA state for years by routing all boxed windows sales through a 4 person office in Nevada. Yes, the same office that got targeted in the post 9/11 “anthrax” scare.
Even while WA was really hurting after the .com bust, MS was doing this – and then they’d turn around and bray about how they donated some money to a local school district (probably the one on Mercer Island heh)
I contracted at MS on and off for years. I wrote part of XP (we called it Whistler at the time).
And I won’t buy their software. As far as I am concerned it’s my civic duty to help every WA state resident rip off their products.
Fuck them. They followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit. And they’d have a hard time closing that particular tax loophole anyway since it’d most likely interfere with corporations that legitimately operate in several states.
Guys like you help make this happen.
The reason I wasn’t perm there is I only worked there as a last resort. When it came between supporting my family or standing on principle. And I wasn’t very popular when any kind of lawsuit was brought up at the water cooler – or heaven forbid – a team meeting.