John Cassidy on the Total Incoherence That Is Mitt Romney...
John Cassidy:
Rational Irrationality: Romney’s New Tax Plan: Big, Bold, and Desperate: This is the first rule of Republican politics: If you are in trouble, promise to cut taxes. The second rule is similar: If you are in trouble and you have already promised to cut taxes, say you will cut them even more. Speaking to what may have been the smallest crowd in the history of Ford Field… Mitt Romney today followed the second rule…. [T]he Mittster promised to slash income-tax rates by a fifth. Under his new proposal, the top rate of thirty-five per cent would be lowered to twenty-eight per cent; the second top rate of thirty-three percent would be cut to twenty-six percent; and so on down to the bottom rate of ten per cent, which would be reduced to eight per cent…. Romney didn’t completely junk his old plan…. All [of its] costly giveaways hold over to his new plan, where they have been supplemented with an across-the-board proposal to slash income taxes.
If you recall some of your grade-school arithmetic classes, where adding two negative numbers together gave you a larger negative number, you might suspect that cutting taxes for workers, businesses, investors, and dead people would produce a bigger gap between revenues and spending…. “These changes will not add to the deficits,” he said with an impressively straight face. “Stronger economic growth, spending cuts, and base broadening will offset the reductions.”…
Romney’s economic team, which includes Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard and Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, knows [budget arithmetic] perfectly well…. At this stage in a Presidential campaign, however, politics trumps economics…. Taken overall, though, his new plan goes well beyond tactical positioning. In promising yet another big round of tax cuts while simultaneously trying to depict the President as a feckless fiscal degenerate, someone who couldn’t balance his own checkbook, let alone the federal budget, Romney doesn’t merely come across as irresponsible. He looks desperate.
Nobody has any business working for this [CENSORED], or contributing to this [CENSORED], or voting for this [CENSORED]. No business at all.
