October 10th, 2012
(1) “Romney says abortion legislation isn’t part of his agenda.”
“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the GOP presidential candidate told The Des Moines Register’s editorial board during a meeting today before his campaign rally at a Van Meter farm.
(2) “Romney’s overly optimistic tax plan.”
I asked a tax policy expert to crunch the numbers on a typical household with an individual filer and deduction amounts. Consider them an evangelical suburbanite at the $100,000 level who has a mortgage, tithes, and has some annual medical expenses. Here’s what comes back:
“If you make $100,000, have a new $300,000 mortgage @ 4 percent, tithe 15 percent, pay $5,000 in state/local taxes, and have $7,500 in qualified medical expenses, you would pay $12,100 in federal income taxes on AGI of $60,500 w/ deductions of $39,500 (assume 20 percent effective rate). Under the Romney plan, you’d pay $13,280 (new effective rate would be 16 percent on AGI of $83,000), an increase of nearly 10 percent.”
Click your heels together three times and say, “There’s always the SCOTUS.”
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What legislation should he pursue?
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SCOTUS picks are worthless now anyway, the place is about as civic-minded and above-the-fray as a jr. high class president’s election
M.F. October 10, 2012 at 11:42 pm
Romney solved that with his “pick a number” deduction phase-out. Set it at $50,000 and middle class families should be fine.
Plus, ~25% of AMT payers have AGI under 200k, which means this alleged doomsday scenario for the leveraged Blue State middle class is already basically in effect.