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Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg View on Romney's "gender gap" focus After Democratic allegations of a Republican "war on women," Mitt Romney's campaign promoted statistics showing that women disproportionately lost jobs under the Obama administration, and that his White House is a hostile workplace for them. "The evidence that Romney is lagging in the polls because voters are upset about a 'war on women' -- rather than because of a bruisingly negative primary campaign or the recovering economy -- is pretty thin. But Republicans are responding not just to the polls but to the persistent mythology of the gender gap," writes Ponnuru. Romney should ignore calls to close the "gender gap" because appealing to women who vote particularly on "women's issues" seems likely to fail. He should target women who vote on a variety of causes. "Republicans deserve credit for resisting the idea -- the lazy instinct, really -- that what female voters care most about are stereotypically 'women’s issues,'" and Romney should follow suit.
Leonard Burman in The New York Times on the Buffett Rule as bad policy The Fair Share tax, or the Buffett Rule, would require people making over $2 million a year to pay an income tax rate of at least 30 percent. "[H]eaven knows that the tax code needs an overhaul ... The Fair Share tax is not the right tool for this job. It is bad policy. If it became law, it would needlessly complicate taxes and create new inequities," writes Burman. The rule, like the "alternative minimum tax" that came before it, would eventually encompass the upper middle class in decades to come as incomes rise, and it would create bizarre loopholes that could, for instance, disincentivize people making just under $1 million a year to marry. Instead, we should eliminate loopholes focus on raising the capital gains tax rate to levels under the Reagan administration. That's the one that allows Warren Buffett to pay a lower rate than his secretary. "That approach would also make the tax system much simpler."