Thursday, February 23, 2012

Romney's Obama-esque Tax Plan

Romney just has this knack to remind me of why I decided to not vote for him if he is the GOP nominee.  The latest reminder is his updated tax plan, which actually seems to be a mirror image of Obama's corporate tax reform plan.  That plan reduces the corporate tax rate by 20% from 35% to 28% but then eliminates deductions and adds fees.  Romney's plan reduces individual tax rates by 20% (including the top rate from 35% to 28%) but then eliminates deductions, though the details around those are unclear.  He even made this Obama-esque comment:

I'm going to limit the high-end deductions particularly for high-income folks, we can make sure the top 1 percent is paying their current share or more.

Think my calling it Obama-esque goes to far?  Check out this passage from Obama's State of the Union address:

Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires.  In fact, if you're earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn't get special tax subsidies or deductions.  On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn't go up. 

Like Obama, he will probably go after charitable deductions, as if that is some sort of unfair tax shelter.  Charitable deductions create an incentive for people to give money to, well, charities.  While not all charities are created equal, a very large number of them exist solely to help the needy.  So by trying to punish the rich, you are, in fact, directly hurting the poor.  How does that make any sense if you are only punishing the rich because of a sense of fairness?  Oh yeah, how could I forget, Romney doesn't care about the poor anyway. 

Also, from a conservative point of view, cutting private funding to private charities will only make the poor more reliant on public handouts.  Again, that doesn't make sense.  Unless Romney just isn't a conservative. 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment