Romney’s Three Biggest Tax Whoppers in the Town Hall Presidential Debate

During Tuesday night’s presidential candidate town hall debate, President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney went at it again over, among other things, their respective approaches to tax policy.  While both candidates come up short on proposing fair and sustainable tax policy, Romney was downright brazen in misrepresenting the facts about his own and Obama’s tax plans.  Here we break down his three biggest whoppers.

Romney Says “Of Course” His Tax Plan Adds Up

After months of criticism from all sides for failing to specify which deductions he would eliminate in order to make his tax plan add up,  Romney floated the idea during the debate of having a cap where each American gets up to $25,000 of deductions and credits. As Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) noted when Romney first floated a $17,000 cap a couple weeks ago, the reality is that even if Romney eliminated every single deduction for the wealthy, he would still violate his promise to “not under any circumstances reduce the share that’s being paid by the highest income taxpayers.” The tax cuts in his plan (which he does specify) would result in a net tax reduction of $250,000 on average for millionaires, even if they had to give up all the tax expenditures they currently enjoy.

Seeming to contradict his own point about the share of taxes the wealthiest Americans would pay, Romney also said that he particularly wanted to bring personal income tax rates down for individuals at the high end of the income spectrum because so many small businesses are taxed under the personal income tax. Romney is again missing the point that only 3 to 5 percent of business owners (and the richest ones at that) would be affected by a high end rate change, and it would only be on the profits those business owners take home.

When Romney defends the arithmetic of his tax plan, he emphasizes that he will not reduce “the share” of taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans. We suspect this is so he can argue later that since his across-the-board tax breaks would reduce the tax burden on different income groups equally, even if it gives the wealthiest the largest tax breaks, the ratios stay the same. Of course, it would be impossible for Romney to cut high end rates without breaking his pledge to make his plan revenue-neutral. But it’s already been established (as discussed above) that his revenue pledge conflicts with his pledge to make these specific tax cuts and pay for them without raising the net taxes paid by the middle-class.

Romney Claims Middle Class Will See $4,000 Rise in Taxes Under Obama

Trying to deflect the argument that he would have no choice but to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his across-the-board tax cuts, Romney tried to throw it back at Obama, saying that “people in the middle class will see $4,000 per year in higher taxes” under the President’s budget plan. This is jujitsu of epic proportions.

First, Romney misrepresents a study by the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) which is NOT about higher taxes that would be levied next year, as the Governor suggested, but rather provides an estimate of what people who make between $100,000 and $200,000 could have to pay to cover their share of the debt accumulated under President Obama’s policies (both those implemented and those proposed).  Second, he’s not even talking about the middle class, because a truly middle-income taxpayer makes much less than $100,000.  Third, and most importantly, if Romney wants to say that tax proposals that would increase the debt are equivalent to future tax increases, then he needs to admit that his own plan, which likely increases the debt much more than Obama’s, is equivalent to a massive tax increase.  Indeed, Romney still hasn’t explained how he would pay for $10 trillion in tax cuts and another trillion in increased defense spending over the next ten years.

Romney Says He will Create 12 Million Jobs

One of Romney’s boldest claims of the night was that he had a “five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years.” The numbers the Romney campaign uses to make this assertion, however, are so blatantly bunk that Romney earned 4 Pinocchios from the Washington Post’s fact checker.

Romney’s 12 million jobs claim relies most heavily on a study of Romney’s tax plan which found that it would create seven million jobs over 10 (as opposed to four) years. That study (PDF), however, rests on two false foundations. First, it overestimates the positive economic impact of tax reform, an impact which has been proven to be minimal at best. Second, because Romney has not yet laid out a plan that is even mathematically possible or detailed enough to model, the study necessarily rests on a whole series of assumptions about the plan that border on fictitious.

Romney’s evidence supporting the power of his plan to create the other five million jobs is even weaker than those he claims from tax reform. Three million of his alleged new jobs are among those that would already be created over the next eight (not four) years under current energy policies, some of which Romney actually opposes. Similarly misleading, Romney regularly points to a study with a speculative estimate that Chinese violation of U.S. intellectual property rights is costing two million jobs.  Romney wants us to infer that he would somehow save two million jobs by preventing China from pursuing this practice, even though he has never identified a truly effective tool the U.S. has at its disposal for changing the behavior of Chinese counterfeiters.