Lying liar: Romney's lies about his tax plan

One is an idiot. The other is a liar. But they both have the same policies. Last night, Mitt Romney lied so much it is hard to know where to begin. I'll stick to his lies about his tax proposals. Romney said:

I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don't have a tax cut of a scale that you're talking about.

A bald-faced lie. The non-partisan and respected Tax Policy Center (PDF) has calculated the cost of Romney's tax cut proposal'yep, $5 trillion.

Romney said, "I've said is I won't put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit." So where is the money going to come from to pay for Romney's $5 trillion tax cut? Romney said:

I want to bring down the rates down, at the same time lower deductions and exemptions and credits and so forth so we keep getting the revenue we need.

But there are not enough "deductions and exemptions" available for cutting to make up for the $5 trillion tax cuts Romney is proposing. Unless, of course, you are going to raise taxes on most Americans. So Romney is either lying about not increasing the deficit or he is lying about not raising taxes on ordinary Americans. Again, the the respected non-partisan Tax Policy Center explained (PDF):

[I]f tax expenditures were completely eliminated for households above $200,000 and reduced across-the-board by 58 percent for taxpayers below $200,000 then taxpayers with children who make less than $200,000 would pay, on average, $2,000 more in taxes [under the Romney plan.]

Romney is lying. As President Obama said:

[T]he fact is that if you are lowering the rates the way you [Romney] describe, Governor, then it is not possible to come up with enough deductions and loopholes that only affect high-income individuals to avoid either raising the deficit or burdening the middle class. It's -- it's math. It's arithmetic.

But arithmetic has a liberal bias. Unskew the math!

Romney also lied about not giving huge record breaking tax cuts for the rich. Romney said, "I'm not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people." Bzzzt! Caught in a lie again. The Tax Policy Center calculated that under the Romney plan, even assuming elimination of all deductions and exemptions, under the Romney tax plan, the top 0.1 percent would see an average tax cut of $246,652. Now that may seem like nothing to a man of Romney's immense wealth, but in the world the rest of us inhabit, that is a huge tax cut.

Finally, Romney said, "[M]y plan is not like anything that's been tried before." Uh, what? It's exactly what George W. Bush DID before, only worse. As Derek Thompson explained, the Romney tax plan is the Bush tax plan on steroids. And it is not just tax policy. Ezra Klein deftly explained that everything Mitt Romney is proposing has been tried before, by George W. Bush, and failed:

Lower taxes, fewer regulations, more domestic energy production, promises of deficit reduction that are quickly overwhelmed by increased defense spending and reduced tax revenues, and glossy rhetoric about economic freedom pretty much defined the Bush administration's economic policy. And how did that economic policy work out? It was a disaster.

George W. Bush was an idiot. Mitt Romney is a bald-faced liar. About everything. It's that simple. And his lying is a tactic to take the country back to the disastrous policies of the worst president of the last hundred years, George W. Bush. For all the flak the president has received for his debate performance last night, his answer on this was absolutely correct:

I think math, common sense and our history shows us that's not a recipe for job growth. Look, we've tried this -- we've tried both approaches. The approach that Governor Romney's talking about is the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003. And we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years. We ended up moving from surplus to deficits. And it all culminated in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Bill Clinton tried the approach that I'm talking about. We created 23 million new jobs. We went from deficit to surplus, and businesses did very well.

That's why Mitt Romney is lying. He is trying to sell the failed Republican policies of George W. Bush against the successful Democratic policies of Bill Clinton. If he told the truth, he'd be run out of the country on a rail.

The country needs to know the truth about Mitt Romney'he is a liar who is trying to take us back to the policies of George W. Bush. The country can not afford Mitt Romney's lies.