Romney’s Tax Plan For Plutocrats

Romney’s tax plan is a remarkably insane piece of work, for reasons that only start with this:

2) The reason Romney’s plan doesn’t work is very simple. The size of the tax cut he’s proposing for the rich is larger than all of the tax expenditures that go to the rich put together. As such, it is mathematically impossible for him to keep his promise to make sure the top one percent keeps paying the same or more.

Alas, this doesn’t mean that — the immense and justified unpopularity of slashing treasured benefits in order to fund massive upper-class tax cuts notwithstanding — Ezra’s #3 is necessarily true. A lot of pundits will treat Romney’s bare assertions as credible whether or not they’re mathematically possible, and the first major Democratic politician to point out that even if Romney gets rid of a lot of deductions he has no intention of getting rid off his tax plan would be a huge-upper class tax cut will probably be awarded eleventy-billion Pinocchios on fire. (For an idea of how the con will operate, see the “my general spending cuts will never result in any specific spending cut” routine run by the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver who may run with Romney.)

But it’s certainly an atrocious plan. How hackish do you have to be to try to defend it? Very, very hackish.