The truth

[Vance2335]

Princeton Economist: Obama Campaign Is Misrepresenting My Study on Romney's Tax Plan
8:45 AM, Oct 8, 2012 • By JOHN MCCORMACKSingle Page
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    Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney's tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. "Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes," said the Obama campaign press release. "In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000."

But that's not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney's tax plan:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/princeton-economist-obama-campaign-misrepresenting-my-study-romneys-tax-plan_653917.html

I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work.  It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal.  The main conclusion of my study is that  under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same.  That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.

You can check the math that shows Romney's plan is mathematically possible here.

[orphanedhawk]

"It's a general rule of politics, dating back to at least Cicero, that politicians promise all things to all people and never promise pain unless their back is to a wall," Bartlett says.

Kind of hits the nail on the head doesn't it ?
Politicians have acted like used car salesmen since long before there were cars, maybe we should say, used horse salesmen.
Nothing new.

[mikesimon]

"...The authors said anything else is "not mathematically possible."

"To an economist, those are very strong words," says Princeton economist Harvey Rosen.

Rosen, a former adviser to George W. Bush, set out to prove Romney's critics wrong.

"Obviously, I'm a Republican," Rosen says, "[and] it kind of raised my hackles slightly to see the proposal being characterized as 'mathematically impossible.' "

Rosen's study was similar to the Tax Policy Center's. He first looked at how much money the government would lose by lowering tax rates on the wealthy, then tried to figure out how much it could recoup by closing loopholes. Rosen came to the opposite conclusion: that you can cut tax rates for wealthy Americans without shifting costs onto the middle class.

"So it's not mathematically impossible," he says.

Why the difference? Partly because the two studies make different assumptions about what tax loopholes might be on the chopping block. The Tax Policy Center assumes Romney would not want to eliminate tax breaks designed to encourage savings and investment, like IRAs and tax-exempt government bonds. Rosen, however, assumes some of those breaks could be phased out.

Of course, Rosen says Romney could easily settle this debate, simply by spelling out which tax loopholes he'd do away with.
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"We wouldn't have to be guessing," he says. "But the kind of specificity that an academic might think is very cool might not make sense for a politician."

In fact, Romney is following a well-worn political path. Bruce Bartlett, author of The Benefit and the Burden, a book on tax policy, says politicians are typically much more specific about the benefits of the tax cuts they're proposing than the burden of the loopholes they want to close.

"It's a general rule of politics, dating back to at least Cicero, that politicians promise all things to all people and never promise pain unless their back is to a wall," Bartlett says.

In fairness, Obama has been equally vague in discussing his own plans for tax reform. He agrees with most policy experts that a tax code with lower rates and fewer loopholes would be more efficient. But like Romney, he hasn't spelled out which loopholes he'd cut. Bartlett says that omission is less glaring in the president's case.

"Obama has not made tax reform, by any stretch of the imagination, the centerpiece of his campaign," he says. "Whereas I think it would be hard for people off the top of their heads to say what else Mitt Romney stands for."

For now, tax analysts and voters will just have to keep guessing about how Romney's plan would work, and decide whether they trust the candidate to fill in the details after the election."

http://www.wbur.org/npr/160910384/rhetoric-aside-few-details-of-romneys-tax-plan