Romney on Taxes

I believe I've mentioned before that I voted for Mitt Romney in 2002, and I retain a respect for the Mitt Romney who existed back then and even governed Massachusetts for a while before he got the idea of running for president into his head. But the new far-right Romney's the one who released this tax blueprint on Thursday. It has seven planks:

• Make Bush's tax cuts permanent, a measure that mostly helps the rich.
• Further reduce income tax rates across the board, a measure that mostly helps the rich.
• "Any taxpayer with Adjusted Gross Income of under $200,000 would pay a tax rate of absolutely 0% on all of the income they earn from their savings, capital gains and dividends." Here's a change -- a proposal targeted at the unique needs of the upper middle class! It's not clear to me what's supposed to happen here if you go from earning $199,877 one year to earning $200,182 the next year: A giant tax hike?
• Permanent elimination of the estate tax, deviating from the theme of measures that mostly help the rich by coming up with something that exclusively helps the rich.
• Corporate tax rate cuts. Guess who this helps?
• No increase in FICA. Since the only form of FICA increase that has any political support involves raising the FICA cap this, in practice, is yet another pro-rich-people measure.
• "Governor Romney supports the full deductibility of qualified medical expenses," which, again, primarily benefits the rich.

Basically, it's like Bush's policies but more so.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/10/romney-on-taxes/46630/