Why Romney's Tax Plan is Mathematically Impossible | Next New Deal

Why Romney's Tax Plan is Mathematically Impossible | Next New Deal: How is that? Romney's plan has three goals. It starts by lowering tax rates by 20 percent. It then seeks to keep raising the same amount of tax revenues as it did before by removing tax expenditures, or the variety of exemptions, deductions, or credits in the tax code that function as government spending. As the wonks would say, it wants to "lower the rates and broaden the base." However, and this will be crucial, it excludes expenditures related to investment income and savings from being available for these cuts. Finally, it wants to maintain the current level of progressivity by making sure that the top one percent pays no less in taxes and everyone else pays no more. The Tax Policy Center analysis shows that it is impossible to do all three: enacting the Romney plan requires cutting taxes on the top one percent and raising them on everyone else.