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

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.

Flip. Flop. And lastly, flip.

Mittens just can't be sure of why those Palestinians aren't nearly as wealthy as those Israelis: first it was because of "culture" and the invisible hand of God. Then it wasn't. Then it was again.

Anybody got a abacus handy to keep track of these rapid changes of mind of his? A really big one, that is?

Louisiana continues to slide into the muck

Bobby Jindal continues to offer up reasons why he should never, ever be elected to anything ever again:

Louisiana is about to spend almost twelve million dollars to fund the teaching of creationism, charges Zack Kopplin, famous for organizing the effort to repeal the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act. In Kopplin's sights now is a controversial new voucher program in the state that uses public school funds to pay for tuition and certain fees at private schools for students who attend low-performing public schools and whose family income is below 250% of the federal poverty level. When the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education considered a set of accountability guidelines for such private schools at its July 24, 2012, meeting, Kopplin testified that of the roughly 6600 spaces available for students under the program, 1350 will be filled, as the Lafayette Independent Weekly (July 26, 2012) described it, "at private Christian schools that teach creationism and peg evolution as 'false science.'”

There's more, but don't bother to read the link if you're depressed about the state of science education in the US. It won't help.

(Also on Lurker)