Romney Says He’ll Make The Top 1 Percent Pay More While Proposing Plan Giving Them A Massive New Tax Break

From Stephanie Miller Facebook page

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released his first tax reform plan last year, he asserted that he was “proposing no tax cuts for the rich.” The claim wasblatantly false — the vast majority of Romney’s $6.6 trillion in tax cuts went to the wealthy, while it raised taxes on many middle class families. Since then, Romney has continued repeating that he isn’t “concerned about the very rich,” who he says are “doing fine” in America.

Romney revealed his second tax reform plan in Arizona this afternoon, and again he claimed that he wasn’t providing cuts to the wealthiest Americans. In fact, he said, his plan would ask the top 1 percent to pay as much and maybe more than they were currently contributing:

ROMNEY: I’m going to lower rates across the board for all Americans by 20 percent. All right? And in order to limit any impact on the deficit, ’cause I don’t want to add to the deficit, and also to make sure we continue to have progressivity the way we have in the past in our code, I’m going to limit deductions and exemptions particularly for high-income folks. [...] For the high-income folks, we’re going to cut back on that, so that we make sure that the top 1 percent keeps paying the current share they’re paying or more.

Watch it:

According to preliminary analysis of that tax plan, though, Romney’s assertions are as absurd as they were the first time. According to Center for American Progress Tax and Budget Policy Director Michael Linden, Romney’s tax plan contains budget-busting tax breaks for the richest Americans in the form of a permanent 20 percent across-the-board cut to marginal rates and a repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which prohibits the wealthy from artificially lowering their tax rates. “The enormity of these tax cuts is mind-boggling,” Linden said. “Even more unbelievable is how skewed they are to those the very top of the income ladder.”

Romney’s claim that his plan would promote job and economic growth while reducing the deficit is also likely false. The Bush tax cuts were promoted under the same guise, only to blow a $2.5-trillion hole in the federal budget that was accompanied by worst performance of any post-war expansion” for growth in investment, GDP, and job creation. Romney’s tax cuts are even more expensive, clocking in at a cost of more than $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing revenue to a paltry 15 percent of GDP, according to Linden. Balancing the budget on those terms, as Romney claims he will do, would be next to impossible.

Romney has built his presidential campaign on his knowledge of how to create jobs and build economies. His willful ignorance of economic facts, his penchant for distorting the true effects of his proposals, and his desire to repeat the mistakes of the last decade, however, seem to prove otherwise.

Buffett On Why Romney Should Pay Higher Taxes: He’s Just ‘Shoving Around Money,’ Not ‘Straining His Back’

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

Last week, Mitt Romney finally admitted that he pays a tax rate of 15 percent, lower than that of many middle-class families. Romney is taxed at such a low rate because, as he freely admits, all of his income comes from investments, and is thus subject to the top capital gains tax rate of 15 percent, rather than the top income tax rate of 35 percent.

However, Romney has refused to sign on to the Obama administration’s “Buffett rule,” which aims to ensure that millionaires can’t dodge taxes to the extent that they’re paying less than teachers. Today, billionaire investor Warren Buffett himself was asked about Romney’s tax rate, replying that letting millionaire investors like Romney pay such low taxes is “the wrong policy” because he makes his income by just “shoving around money”:

He makes his money the same way I make my money. He makes money by moving around big bucks, not by straining his back and going to work cleaning the toilets or whatever it may be. He makes it shoving around money. I make it shoving around money. If you look at the 400 highest incomes in the United States, they average $220 million. Something like 90 of them are effectively unemployed. They have no earned income, and that number has gone up over the years. [...]

It’s the wrong policy to have. Nothing wrong about [Romney] doing that. He will not pay more than the law requires. I don’t fault him for that in the least, but I do fault the law that allows him and me, earning enormous sums to pay over all federal taxes at a rate that is about half what the average person in my office pays.

Watch it:

Not only does Romney make all of his money from investments, but his company Bain Capital (with which Romney still has a lucrative retirement deal) uses tax havens to boost its profits.

Romney’s Tax Cut For Millionaires Would Be Nearly Twice The Size Of George Bush’s

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

As we’ve been noting, Mitt Romney’s economic plan calls for a massive tax cut for the rich, even while the plan would likely result in a tax increase on millions ofmiddle class families. And as it turns out, Romney’s tax cuts for the rich would dwarf even those put in place by George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden noted:

Republican presidential candidate Romney’s plan for federal taxation begins with a hefty portion of Bush-era tax policy: Permanently extend all the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003, including those that mainly benefit the extremely wealthy.Then Romney layers on a heaping batch of new tax cuts for the rich, including a full repeal of the estate tax—which is currently paid by only the richest 0.14 percent of estates—and a massive corporate tax cut.

The result is a tax code that asks even less of the rich than George W. Bush’s did.

Romney’s plan also gives nearly 60 percent of its benefit to the richest 1 percent of Americans, while preserving the loopholes that let the wealthy pay less than middle class families.

Romney’s constantly claims that he’s “not worried about rich people,” and that his tax plan is “focused” on the middle class. In fact, he’s absurdly claimed that he’s not proposing any tax cuts for the wealthy at all. But as it turns out, he would lavish even more tax breaks onto the rich than did George Bush, even after Bush’s tax cuts were a significant factor leading to today’s large budget deficits.

Super Committee Republicans’ ‘Deficit Reduction’ Plan Includes $800 Billion In Tax Cuts

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

The congressional fiscal super committee that is tasked with crafting a deficit reduction package of at least $1.5 trillion met today with the architects of the Bowles-Simpson and Rivlin-Domenici deficit reduction plans. Both Democrats and Republicans have recently released their initial offers to the super committee, which seems no nearer to cutting a final deal than it did when it was first formed.

As Igor Volsky noted earlier this week, the plan that the Democratic members of the super committee released is well to the right of bipartisan plans like Bowles-Simpson or the plan crafted by the Senate’s Gang of Six (both of which included unnecessary cuts to vital programs). In fact, the Democrats’ plan has about six dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in new revenue (while Bowles-Simpson had a two to one ratio).

The Republicans, meanwhile, released a “deficit reduction” plan that, depending on the revenue baseline assumed by both Bowles-Simpson and the Gang of Six, would cut taxes to the tune of more than $800 billion over 10 years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The new Republican plan provides for slightly more than $3 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years, relative to a current-policy baseline that assumes extension of all the 2001-2003 tax cuts. (See Table 1.) Of that amount, only about 1 percent of the deficit reduction ($40 billion) stems from revenue increases. And, compared to the “plausible baseline” that the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission and the Senate’s Gang of Six used, which assumes expiration of the upper-income tax cuts, the latest Republican plan actually provides for tax cuts of more than $800 billion over ten years.

Overall, “the Republican plan would produce $1 trillion less deficit reduction than the Democratic offer, relative to any baseline.” The Republicans, in their zeal to indiscriminately reduce taxes regardless of the country’s ability to afford it, evidently believe that no deficit reduction plan is complete without blowing a new hole in the federal budget.

ANALYSIS: Cain’s ’999′ Plan Would Cause Largest Deficits Since WWII, While Increasing Taxes For Most Americans

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain — who has seen a recent surge in the polls — has been trumpeting the supposed benefits of his “999″ economic plan, which would implement a 9 percent flat-tax on personal income and corporate income, along with a 9 percent national sales tax, while scrapping the rest of the tax code (including all of the deductions and all of the taxes on investment income such as capital gains).

Cain claims that his plan would not be “regressive on the poor,” but economists disagree due to the imposition of a national sales tax that would wallop the poor significantly harder than the rich. Cain also claims the plan will be revenue-neutral, in that it would raise as much revenue as the current tax code. I had Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden run the numbers on Cain’s plan, and it turns out that it wouldn’t be deficit-neutral — not even close (all calculations are based on 2007 tax data, the last year before the Great Recession):

– For the income tax portion: In 2007, total Adjusted Gross Income on all income tax returns was $8.7 trillion. Since Cain’s plan would exempt investment income, but would have no other deductions, that brings taxable income down to $7.4 trillion. A flat 9 percent tax would therefore have yielded about $665 billion in income tax revenue.

– For the corporate tax portion: In 2007, there was a total of $1.3 trillion in reported corporate income subject to tax. A flat 9 percent would have yielded $112 billion in revenue.

– For the sales tax portion: I used generally accepted estimates of the revenue generated from a value-added-tax (see here and here, for example). Those estimates suggest that a broad-based 5 percent tax on goods and services would generate about 2 percent of GDP in revenue. That implies that a 9 percent tax in 2007 would have generated about $500 billion.

– Together, then, the 9-9-9 plan would have generated a bit less than $1.3 trillion in total federal tax revenue. That may sound like a lot, but it’s only 9.2 percent of GDP. In 2007, we actually collected 18.5 percent of GDP in tax revenue. In other words, the 9-9-9 plan would cut federal revenue in half!

“Even if we reduced federal spending to the ‘historical average’ (when the population was younger and health care cost much less) it would still leave us with deficits over 11 percent of GDP (bigger than any deficit since WWII, including the deficits of the past three years),” Linden noted.

Linden also found that someone in the bottom quintile of earners — who currently pays about 2 percent of his or her income in federal taxes — would pay about 18 percent under Cain’s plan (9 percent on every dollar they make, plus 9 percent on every dollar they spent, which would likely be close to all of them). A middle-class individual would see his or her taxes go from about 14 percent to about 18 percent. But someone in the richest one percent of Americans would see his or her tax rate fall from about 28 percent to about 11 percent.

So Cain’s plan — which has earned accolades from the likes of supply-side guru Art Laffer — would explode the deficit, while increasing taxes on the poor to pay for a giant tax cut for the rich. As Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger put it, the plan “would be the biggest tax shift from the wealthy to the middle-class in the history of taxation, ever, anywhere, and it would bankrupt the country.”

Asked If Untaxed Corporations Like Exxon Are Taxed Too Much, Tea Party Leaders Say Yes

By Lee Fang

This morning at the National Press Club, leaders from the Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group that helps coordinate Tea Party chapters around the country, held a press conference to celebrate the results of the election last night. During the press conference, Tea Party Patriots officers Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin announced a “40 year plan” to shift America’s educational system, fiscal priorities, culture, and values.

ThinkProgress attended the presser and asked the Tea Party leaders about some of their top priorities, namely taxes and repealing President Obama’s reforms. Presented with the fact that some of the most profitable American corporations in the world, like ExxonMobil and Bank of America, paid essentially zero corporate income taxes in 2009, we asked Meckler if he believed corporations are indeed “taxed enough already?” Meckler responded that he still believed in a tax-cutting agenda, and suggested that corporations even deserve a tax holiday. Similarly, we asked Martin about Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) pledge last night to defund the historic financial regulatory reform passed by President Obama to shore up Wall Street. She said she had “no idea” what to think about that, and said her 280,000 strong membership had never substantially commented to her about Obama’s Wall Street reforms:

TP: I know they say the “tea” stands for “taxed enough already.” Last year in 2009, ExxonMobil paid nothing in corporate income taxes. Some of the most profitable corporations like Bank of America also paid nothing, Googled paid I believe 2%. Do you believe those are appropriate tax rates?

MECKLER: You know I can’t address tax rates, but what I can tell you is that the American people will respond to things like that. [...] We’ve been suggesting a corporate tax holiday to allow these companies to come in and create jobs. [...]

TP: Last night, Congressman Eric Cantor — possibly incoming Majority Leader — said that one of the first things Republicans should do with their new Tea Party-backed majority is to defund financial regulatory reform. What do you think about that?

MARTIN: I have no idea. [...] I can’t speak personally about how I feel about it. My job is to reflect the grassroots. [...]

TP: Have you heard a lot of feedback about Wall Street reform? How do your members feel about that?

MARTIN: We’ve had a little bit of feedback on that, we haven’t had a lot. We’re bringing in policy experts to come in to talk to them about various positions. I have heard, and have had people ask about having someone come in and talk about Wall Street reform. I believe that’s one of the things we’re going to add to our list of topics.

Watch it:

The “Tea Party” leaders’ lack of concrete ideas on financial reform, and their defense of untaxed international corporations, might seem to violate the ideals of the actual Boston Tea Party, which was a protest against the East India Trading company and its use of the British government to retain a monopolistic, undemocratic control over the American colonies.

However, considering the true political drivers of the Tea Party Patriots, their support of the wealthy elite makes perfect sense. For instance, the Tea Party Patriots listserv, which helped orchestrate many of the anti-health reform protests last year, is managed by staffers from FreedomWorks — the corporate front group run by longtime business lobbyist Dick Armey. Many of the talking points and speakers used by the Tea Party Patriots are provided by corporate front groups like Americans for Prosperity, a front for oil and hedge fund billionaires David and Charles Koch. Free training seminars and online tutorials for grassroots organizing were provided to the Tea Party Patriots by the Leadership Institute, which is funded by the Koch family as well as by other corporate interests, like the DeVos family of the pyramid-scheme company Amway. A mysterious donor even granted Tea Party Patriots with an additional $1 million for increased election-season outreach.

In fact, much of the Tea Party Patriot’s press conference was eclipsed by an announcement by Colin Hanna, leader of the front group “Let Freedom Ring” (funded by John Templeton Jr., an heir to a large Wall Street fortune). Hanna announced that his group had secretly worked with the Tea Party Patriots to place an unprecedented number of “poll watchers” in key precincts around the country to guard against voter fraud (view the handout here).

Pelosi says tax cut vote possible before election

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, under pressure to send Democrats home to campaign with the strongest possible closing argument, said Friday she is considering calling a vote on extending middle-class tax cuts next week

Democrats, however, are divided on whether forcing a recorded vote on the issue before congressional elections in November would be politically helpful as they fight to maintain control of Congress.

"We will retain the right to proceed as we choose," Pelosi told reporters. "We'll take it one day at a time."

The most sweeping tax cuts in a generation, enacted in 2001 and 2003, are due to expire in January. Republicans want to extend all the tax cuts. President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress want to extend them for individuals making less than $200,000 and married couples making less than $250,000.

If Congress does not act, taxpayers at every income level face significant tax increases.

Obama has been pushing for a vote by year's end to extend middle-class tax cuts. But House Democrats — much like their Senate counterparts — are divided. Republicans and a few Democrats want to extend the tax cuts for everyone, even the wealthiest Americans.

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid chose to postpone consideration of the tax cut extension until a lame duck session scheduled to convene Nov. 15.

House Democrats had hoped the Senate would act first, before the election, to narrow the question of which tax cuts to preserve. Sensing the impasse and wary of being branded tax hikers before Election Day, more than 30 rank-and-file House Democrats urged Pelosi to extend all tax cuts, at least temporarily.

The question for Democratic leaders is whether holding a tax cut debate, a debate and a vote, or joining the Senate in a bicameral punt would be least damaging before Election Day.

Some Democrats are wary of supporting Obama's plan to let taxes rise for the wealthiest Americans, fearing they would be accused of supporting a tax hike. Other Democrats believe they have a winning message of fiscal responsibility while making the rich pay more after years of relative prosperity.

Pelosi downplayed the political dilemma Friday.

"There isn't a person in our caucus that isn't for tax cuts for the middle class," Pelosi said. "It's not about the election. It's about the policy and we're all very strong on that, and members, with a vote or without a vote, can go home and talk about their commitment to that."

House Republican Leader John Boehner has seized on the indecision, saying that not securing a tax cut extension before the election risks a tax hike in 2011.

"Congress should not go home without stopping the tax hike on American families and small businesses," Boehner said. "Doing so would wallop every taxpayer with a tax hike in a struggling economy — and that's simply irresponsible."

House Republicans have said they are confident that their tax proposal would win a majority of votes in the House, if Pelosi allows it to come up for a vote.

Time is running short for the House to act before it breaks for the election. The House is only in session for two days next week, and Pelosi said her goal is to send lawmakers home by next Thursday.

Regardless of when the House votes, Pelosi vowed to extend the middle-class tax cuts by the end of the year.

"America's middle class will have a tax cut," Pelosi said. "It will be done in this Congress. There is no question about that."