According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Romney’s plan — which, after extending the Bush tax cuts, lowers the corporate tax rate, eliminates the estate tax and repeals some high-income tax increases from the Affordable Care Act — amounts to a tax cut of $600 billion in 2015. The International Monetary Fund estimates America’s gross domestic product will be $18 trillion that year, so that’s a tax cut of more than 3 percent of GDP.
In contrast, when Bush’s first tax cut was passed, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated it would cost a shade over 1 percent of GDP. So, by any measure, Romney’s tax cuts are far, far larger.
They are also more regressive. Bush’s tax cut was, in theory, to be paid for out of the surplus. Today there is no surplus. Romney promises to pay for his tax cuts, but he opposes raising new taxes or cutting defense spending. That leaves domestic spending, most of which goes to seniors and low-income Americans. Nor do his tax cuts make up the difference by distributing most of their benefits among low-income taxpayers. The Tax Policy Center estimates that Romney’s plan will mean an average tax cut of $164,000 for those in the top 1 percent and $69 — no, that’s not a typo — for those in the bottom 20 percent.
So, in extending the Bush cuts and adding more of his own, Romney is proposing more than $6 trillion in new tax cuts that will disproportionately help the richest Americans, and he intends to pay for it through spending cuts — such as block-granting Medicaid — that will disproportionately hurt seniors and low-income Americans. That’s not a political attack, by the way. It’s math. And it is math that makes his tax cut far more regressive than Bush’s proposal.
A President Romney would be W. on steroids.
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