Romney wants to raise your taxes; Obama to lower them

Unless you make a lot of money each year -- $500,000 or more, basically -- your taxes will go up if Mitt Romney becomes president and carries out his plan to cut taxes for the very rich, and raise them for everybody else.

So says the well-respected Tax Policy Center. 

Performed by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, the study shows that Mitt Romney’s proposal would lead to significantly lower taxes for the rich, and a higher tax burden on middle- and lower-income taxpayers.

So says PolitiFact, the well-respected fact-checker.

Obama said Romney is proposing a tax plan "that would give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2,000 a year."

The claims are based on a study by the Tax Policy Center, which used what Romney has said about his tax plan and attempted to calculate outcomes for different groups of taxpayers.

The study prioritizes the idea that the plan would be revenue neutral. In that scenario, millionaires lose deductions, but the lower rates would still decrease their tax bill by an average of $87,000.

Middle-class taxpayers would see lower tax rates, too, but the loss of exemptions and deductions would hit them harder. People making $200,000 or less a year would see their taxes rise by an average of about $2,000.

The study is making the point that Romney’s plan is untenable: to cut rates that much without adding to the deficit, something has to give. It necessarily makes some assumptions, and therefore these conclusions are not definite as long as the details of the plan remain unknown. For that reason, people should be cautious in calling this Romney's plan.

We rate the claim Mostly True.

So says the well-respected (by a good share of Americans) Obama campaign. Click on that link and check out a handy calculator where you enter your family income and see how you'd fare, tax-wise, under either an Obama or Romney presidency.

Comments

[tucson]

The respected accounting firm Ernst & Young recently released a study showing that raising taxes on the wealthy will harm the economy, but this study has been widely ignored by the mainstream media. Ernst & Young says that if Ob*ma gets his way, about 700,000 jobs will be lost. So why does the media ignore something like this? Because they (mainstream media networks) don't report stuff that hurts their boy (no, that is not intended to be a racial slur), and Ob*ma is their boy (guy, dude). Journalists are his most loyal base and because they have so much invested in him they are not going to readily report information that hurts him.