Romney offers pie-in-the-sky golden age as reason critique of his tax plan is unfair

MItt Romney policy director Lanhee Chen Mitt Romney has been calling the Tax Policy Center's demolition of his tax proposal biased. His complaint in a nutshell: You liberals don't take into account the flurry of economic growth that will take place if only we chop taxes. Lanhee Chen, Romney's policy director, wasn't specific in his gripes about the center's claims that the proposal'a rich guy's wet dream the candidate dares to call tax "reform"'would increase taxes for 95 percent of Americans:

'The study analyzes only half of Governor Romney's tax program, ignoring the reforms that would make America's corporations more competitive by moving from the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world to one that is comparable to our trading partners. And the study ignores the positive benefits to economic growth from both the corporate tax plan and the deficit reduction called for in the Romney plan. These glaring gaps invalidate the report's conclusions.'

Chen also argues that you can't expect objectivity from a study drafted by a former member of the Obama economic team. But he doesn't point out, as Benjy Sarlin does, that another author of the study was part of George H. W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

Romney's proposal, which would make a 20 percent across the board income-tax cut supposedly paid for by eliminating deductions, has never had specifics attached to it. And that made it tough for the Tax Policy Center to decide what its impact would be. So it created a best-case scenario favorable to Romney. Even then, however, its analysis showed the beneficiaries would be the top 5 percent of the population. Everybody else would see their after-tax income fall.

Chen says, however, that because study didn't include a proposed cut in the corporate tax that will supposedly usher in an economic boom. There are believers and skeptics on that score. The biggest problem comes from analyses not of Romney's future plans but of what has happened in the recent past, namely the Bush tax cuts. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, as explained in Romney's new tax cuts would work just like the Bush tax cuts: Enhance economic inequality, found that over a nine-year period those cuts poured the bulk of the benefits into the coffers of the already wealthy.

That upward skew generated no boom. As you may have noticed.