So long, and thanks for all the tax (inequity)

[the_archfiend]

People are probably all too familiar with Mitten's recent international foot-in-the-mouth parade, but such things tend to distract from slightly more relevant questions such as what his proposed tax policy would amount to if he were elected President. At least one study says "not very good things":

The report, by researchers at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, looked at Romney’s call for a 20% income tax cut for everyone, that he says he would finance by ending existing (and as-yet-unnamed) tax deductions. They assumed for their analysis that Romney would try to eliminate tax breaks favoring the rich as much as possible to pay for his plan, before turning to popular middle-class deductions on health care and mortgage payments to make up the remaining gap. But even allowing for that highly generous baseline, the average American family making less than $200,000 would still have to pay $2,000 more of their income in taxes while the richest .1% would see an average net tax cut close to $250,000.

The report itself (available here) is perhaps a bit less sparing in their analysis even if they use slightly more academic language:

Our major conclusion is that a revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney has proposed – including reducing marginal tax rates substantially, eliminating the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) and maintaining all tax breaks for saving and investment – would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers. This is true even when we bias our assumptions about which and whose tax expenditures are reduced to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible. For instance, even when we assume that tax breaks – like the charitable deduction, mortgage interest deduction, and the exclusion for health insurance – are completely eliminated for higher-income households first, and only then reduced as necessary for other households to achieve overall revenue-neutrality– the net effect of the plan would be a tax cut for high-income households coupled with a tax increase for middle-income households.

Unsurprisingly, the Romney camp chalked all of this up to the usual bugbears concerning "bias" and "a meanie from the Obama administration co-wrote it!" and other spin-friendly sound bites, the problem there is that the person they're apparently excoriating - Adam Looney - is just one author of the report. William Gale was actually on the board of George H. W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers back in the day, The success of this rhetoric also turns on the benefits of a hypothetical Romney boom that is problematic in that it's, well, hypothetical.  And there's also a little problem concerning Romney's rather tacit approach in offering up details concerning his overall economic policies - which is a nice way of saying that he's not offering up too many of them, period.