Mitt Romney hasn’t been too shy about making blatantly false accusations about President Obama’s economic policies throughout the duration of his primary campaign. His wild assertions reached a crescendo on Tuesday when he told supporters at a campaign stop in Iowa:
“I think president Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society, we’re an entitlement society, where government’s role is to take from some and give to others.”
Essentially, Romney is trying to make the case to Republican voters that Obama’s radical ideology enables him to create economic policies that help one group of Americans at the expense of another. Although he might not explicitly be saying it, he’s claiming that the idea of having an economic policy that tilts the odds in one groups favor is reprehensibly wrong. “Merit” he say’s is what differentiates him against Obama’s un-American idea of “entitlement.”
So it should come as a major surprise at how one-sided and preferential Romney’s own economic plan is when it comes to helping the rich at the expense of everybody else. The Tax Policy Center is out with a new report that analyzes Mitt Romney’s economic plan that he released last fall. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post breaks down the results:
Individuals in the top 0.1 percent, or those making over $2.8 million, would get an income tax cut of nearly half a million dollars.
Individuals in the top one percent, or those making over $629,000, would get a cut of over $80,000.
Meanwhile, people in the other percentiles would see a tax reduction, but a far smaller one. Those in the 95-99 percentiles would see a tax cut of around $7,500. Those in the 90-95 percentiles would see a tax cut of around $2,500. And those in the 80-90 percentiles would see a cut of around $1,100.
Broken down by quintile, those in the fourth highest would see a tax cut of roughly $6,900; those in the third highest would see a cut of around $500; and those in the bottom two would see a slight increase.
Let me reiterate that: under Romney’s economic vision for the nation, anybody who makes over $2.8 million per year, the top 0.1 percent, will get half a million dollars in tax cuts while everybody else pretty much get’s treated like suckers by a government that exclusively favors the ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra rich. I decided to chart these numbers for kicks:
It goes without saying that Romney’s economic plan is insanely favorable to people in Mitt Romney’s income bracket. But the next time that he wants to claim that Barack Obama wants to create an “entitlement society,” he only needs to look at this chart to remind himself that he wants to too.
