This was a vague enough plan that Romney believed he could get by without making any of the ramifications clear, except the good stuff about cutting tax rates. But the Tax Policy Center ran the numbers and found that, even if you granted Romney a series of optimistic to wildly implausible assumptions, he would have to raise taxes on the middle class, by a lot. The rate cuts would lose so much revenue for the rich that there wouldn’t be enough to gain from reducing deductions.
Republicans have been frantically denying the math, which Obama has turned into the potent (and accurate) accusation that Romney’s plan would cut taxes on the rich in order to raise them on the middle class. Republican economistMartin Feldstein tried to defend Romney by doing his own study showing that Romney’s math could work, but in an epic blunder, inadvertently confirmed the charges.
MORE: Romney: My Magic Tax Plan Will Repeal Math — Daily Intel.