Mitt Romney promises to do the impossible

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Mitt Romney, having fully embraced the strategy of lying to the American people and counting on mass ignorance to elect him (because his policies don't exactly stand up to reality-based scrutiny), said that he would "not [reduce] taxes on high-income taxpayers." Rather, he would "[bring] down the rate of taxation, but also [bring] down deductions and exemptions at the high end so that the revenues stay the same, the taxes people pay stay the same — middle income people are going to get a break, but at the high end the tax coming in stays the same."

As Think Progress points out, however:

Romney's plan, in reality, would provide the very richest Americans a $264,000 tax break. It also maintains current tax rates on investments that are otherwise set to expire at the end of the year, and it eliminates the estate tax, paid by only the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans.

Romney is apparently arguing that he will raise enough revenue through the elimination of tax loopholes that benefit the rich to totally offset the tax cut he provides them, though an analysis from the Tax Policy Center found that to be a mathematical impossibility. There simply isn't enough revenue to be generated through the closure of those loopholes to offset the massive cost of Romney's plan, and even if it was possible, Romney again declined to provide host David Gregory a single loophole he would favor closing.

Romney also repeated that he would both balance the budget and reduce taxes on middle-income Americans, another mathematical impossibility. To provide the full tax cut, Romney would have to either abandon his pledge to maintain current revenue levels or raise taxes on middle-class families by as much as $2,000. Doing both, as Romney asserts he will, violates elementary laws of arithmetic.

The Romney campaign has already said it won't be "dictated by fact checkers." Apparently Mitt won't let himself be dictated by mathematics either. (Math has such blatant liberal bias, after all.)

If you think 2+2=5 and don't like thinking for yourself, you're just the sort of rube he's counting on.