Romney Tax Plan 'Mathematically Impossible'

Mitt Romney has said that he has an economic plan and he's "not afraid to put it on the table." But the truth is that "the only thing he has put on table is dessert," writes Ezra Klein on Bloomberg. Romney says he'll cut all marginal tax rates 20% without increasing the deficit or reducing taxes paid by the top 1%. He's never explained how he would make this happen. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center tried, and came back with a two-word verdict: "mathematically impossible."

The Center bent over backward trying to make the numbers work, assuming the most favorable conditions, and even using Romney's own proposed "implausibly large" growth effect estimates. "Every simulation ended the same way: with a tax increase on the middle class," Klein writes. Eliminating loopholes for the rich simply won't pay for the tax cut they'd receive. That means the middle class and poor would have to pay for them, with tax hikes and spending cuts, in what Klein terms "a reverse-Robin Hood act." Click for his full column. (More Mitt Romney stories.)