Every night at 10:30, “Everybody Loves Raymond.” I tell him it’s stupid, but no, we have to connect with ordinary—he’s behind me, isn’t he?
Can you really say that you’re better off than you were four years ago? Don’t think about exactly four years ago, when the economy collapsed and we were still deciding whether Barack Obama or John McCain would be our next president. Obviously you’re better off than you were right then. But think about five years ago, before the crash and subsequent gradual improvement, and ask again: are you better off than you were four years ago? Because if you aren’t, Mitt Romney would like to point out that he has not been president during that time at all.
It’s a big advantage. Where a sitting president has to be responsible for his campaign and running the country, all Romney has to do is obey the Three Laws and let America continue its inevitable descent into penury until November, when he will win and everything will be okay. It’s an airtight plan. Step one takes care of itself, and step two—okay, step two is kind of complex.
In principle, it should be easy. As anyone waving a sign with the name of his state on it will tell you, we have to start by fixing taxes. Taxes are too high. The Romney plan would cut each marginal tax rate by one fifth—the top rate from 35% to 28%, the bottom from 10% to 8%. The budget is a big problem, too, so Romney’s tax plan is also revenue-neutral: although it would cut everyone’s taxes, it would still take in the same amount of money by eliminating loopholes and deductions. Finally, the Romney plan would not raise taxes on the middle class, because that is the second most important class in the United States.
It’s a brilliant idea, tarnished only slightly by expert consensus that it is mathematically impossible. The director of the Brookings Institution called it “impossible several times over.” Alan Viard at the American Enterprise Institute, where they love Mitt Romney, agrees that 20% off the top pretty much foxes the whole plan, but he’s still sanguine:
It’s not as if the entire philosophical approach he’s pursuing is doomed. But he’s going to need to cut rates significantly less than 20 percent if he wants to honor his other goals.
So at least on a philosophical level, the plan is not doomed. It is a good idea for everyone to pay lower taxes while the government keeps making the same amount of money. But Romney’s top-bracket tax cuts alone would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. He has about a trillion dollars worth of loopholes and deductions to work with in making up the difference, but not all of them are subsidies for chicken feed. There is the $99 billion mortgage interest deduction, for example, and the $53 billion charitable giving deduction, to say nothing of the $100 billion investment income deductions—each of which is very important to one segment of the electorate or another.
The Romney plan addresses these tough questions by leaving out any numbers or specific information that might pertain to them. He has the tax cuts in there and the promise of corresponding offsets, but he does not actually say where the savings will come from. It is a classic one-three, laying out the plan to vote ourselves more money and which great outcome will result, but not explaining how we will get there. In this way, it is the perfect metaphor for the Romney campaign.
Rom-bot 2012 is great at sensing what voters want. From the primaries to the present day, he has consistently identified things we wish would happen. His targeting system is also very reliable: defeat all Barack Obamas. It’s a potent combination. All Romney has to do is point out that everything sucks right now, then wait for input yeah!, then name a bunch of ways things could be better. Approval, November, end.
There is no way that plan could fail, unless the American public turned out not to be a bunch of stupid assholes. And despite some early indications to the contrary, they are not. Say what you will about the toxic vapidity of this election cycle; you still cannot submit an arithmetically nonsensical tax plan and get away with it. You cannot just say stuff about math.
Or maybe you can—November will tell. As of this morning, though, Obama enjoys his biggest lead over Romney since the election started. That’s a Rasmussen poll, by the way—agreed to be among the most consistently right-leaning polls in the country. The more the Romney campaign oscillates between pure negativity and pure fantasy, the more I think of this election as a referendum on the intelligence of our body politic. And the more I am pleasantly surprised.
