Romney and taxes

Nice piece from Chait taking a look at Romney’s position on taxes.  It’s stuff like this that makes many liberals think he knows better and is just pandering to the conservative base (and I think they are right about this)

Romney proposes only to eliminate capital gains taxes on income under $200,000 a year. That would cover just a tiny portion of capital gains, making it essentially a symbolic measure. A few months ago, The Wall Street Journaleditorial page railed against Romney’s plan. The problem, the editorial noted, was not just that Romney wasn’t offering any new tax breaks for the rich. It was that the retreat “suggests that he’s afraid of Mr. Obama’s class warfare rhetoric” – that, in general, he will shrink from the task of advocating for policies that increase income inequality.

Any conservatives liable to worry about this would be positively alarmed after hearing Romney defend his position on Saturday night. During one portion of the debate, Romney mentioned that he, unlike Newt Gingrich, would restrict his capital gains tax cut to those under the $200,000 annual threshold. Gingrich replied, accurately, that households under that ceiling have barely any capital gains. Romney replied:

And — and in my view, the place that we could spend our precious tax dollars for a tax cut is on the middle class, that’s been most hurt by the Obama economy. That’s where I wanna eliminate taxes on interest dividends and capital gains.

“Spend our precious tax dollars” — that is a phrase to strike terror in right-wing hearts. For twenty years, the basis for Republican budgeting has been to refuse to acknowledge any tradeoff between cutting taxes for the rich and other governmental priorities. The Democratic position is to insist that tax cuts for the rich be measured against other possible choices — lower taxes for the rich mean higher taxes for the middle class, or lower social spending, or higher deficits. Here, Romney is actually employing the Democratic formulation.

Of course, I also think that, as Drum frequently argues, Romney is so desperate to win over the base, that even if elected, he’ll go with what the Tea Party wants, rather than that which is actually good policy.  Still, it is quite interesting to see him not only being more sensible than the rest of the Republican field on taxes, but actually borrowing the (more intellectually honest) Democratic frame.  Even if conservatives don’t consciously process his choice of language such as this, I think it is surely part of the reason that they seem to instinctively distrust Romney.