The Atlantic / By Nancy Cook and Rebecca Kaplan
In the weeks before Rep. Paul Ryan released his latest budget blueprint this year, he urged all of the presidential candidates to follow his fiscal lead. He critiqued GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference as “pretty good,” but cautioned that all of the candidates needed to take bold policy stances. “We need to have an election with a mandate, so we can fix these problems,” he said at a breakfast with reporters in mid-February.
He was equally noncommittal about his allegiances weeks later, when he praised both Romney and Rick Santorum for broaching the topic of entitlements on the campaign trail. “Their specifics have jived perfectly well with what we’ve been saying,” he told National Journal. “We’re all saying the same thing, and that’s very good in my opinion.”
And, when his big budget was finally unveiled in late March, the chairman of the House Budget Committee dared the GOP candidates to not follow suit. “I expect the Republican nominee to offer the country the legitimate choice that they deserve,” Ryan, of Wisconsin, said. “I expect our nominee to propose how to get us out of a debt crisis.”
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Alec MacGillis at the New Republic:
…under the “Ryan plan” that made the congressman famous, Mitt Romney would pay zero taxes.
Don’t believe it? Romney himself said so, just a few months ago. The Ryan plan — formally, the “Roadmap for America’s Future” — “promotes saving by eliminating taxes on interest, capital gains, and dividends; also eliminates the death tax.” Mitt Romney’s income — more than $20 million each of the past two years — comes almost entirely from capital gains on his investments, or from “carried interest,” a cut of Bain Capital profits that are taxed as capital gains (the infamous “hedge fund loophole.”) His only major ordinary income was from the speaking fees he collected ($374,000, or “not much,” as he put it.) This explains why his tax rate was only 13.9 percent last year — because the capital gains rate is 15 percent, well below the top rate of 35 percent for ordinary income.
But if the capital gains was eliminated altogether? Well, let’s let Romney explain the result in his own words, as he did at an NBC primary debate in January:
Hours before he plans to release his 2010 tax returns, Mitt Romney noted at the GOP debate in Tampa that under his opponent’s tax plan, he wouldn’t have paid any taxes at all. The moment came after Newt Gingrich joked about Romney’s 15 percent tax rate, saying: “I’m prepared to describe my flat tax as the Mitt Romney flat tax.”
Romney jumped in to ask: Do you tax capital gains at 15 percent or zero percent? Gingrich’s answer: Zero.
“Under that plan, I’d have paid no taxes in the last two years,” Romney said, alluding to the fact that all his income is from investments.
Why do people that don’t believe in government want to run the government…unless they want to run it into the ground? Wait, didn’t we just get through 8 years of that deconstructing Republican bullshit with the heartless penguin and Alfred E. Newman administration? Oh, but lets go back to that – it worked so well…Thanks for a Republican ticket on that Dumbshit Airways…