The Obama campaign is running with this. Good for them.

They could have mentioned that Willard claimed his wife’s horse hobby is actually a business with deductible losses of $77,731 – much more than the median family income in America.

Romney’s so-called plan lacks detail, however it depends heavily on “base broadening” and the magic of trickle-down economics. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul admits that won’t be enough to make it revenue-neutral as promised. The Tax Policy Center is correct.

The Tax Policy Center concluded that to achieve revenue neutrality, Romney would have to curtail many tax benefits currently enjoyed by middle- and lower-class households, including the mortgage interest deduction, the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance, the deduction for charitable contributions, the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit.

Without these benefits, the study said, middle- and lower-class taxpayers would be subjected to a net tax increase, even though their personal income tax rates would be lower.

As FDL’s Jon Walker notes:

It is important to point out this is not an actual analysis of Romney’s full tax plan because he either doesn’t have one or is keeping it secret from the American people. What it does do though is take the promises Romney has made on the issue of taxes and see if there is any possible way to fulfill them without shifting the tax burden from the rich to the middle class. Even when tax expenditures were eliminated in the most progressive manner, their analysis concluded people making less than $200,000 a year would still pay roughly $86 billion more.

Based on the available information, we must assume Romney’s tax plan would lower taxes for the rich while increasing them on the middle class. If Romney feels this is wrong, he can easily refute this at any time by simply releasing a fully detailed tax plan which can be analyzed;,until then “simply trust me” is not a defense.

brewski–

It’s explained above, but I’ll put it in simpler terms: If you do the math on Romney’s campaign promises, and try to make them revenue-neutral as he claims, they add up to a major middle-class tax increase and a huge tax cut for the rich. I note that the Romney campaign does not dispute the numbers, except for their unbelievable claim that tax cuts for the rich will result in creating 12 million new jobs (we know from experience that won’t happen).

I haven’t seen Obama’s ad, however a plan to “pay down” the National Debt is not the same as erasing the National Debt. All Obama would have to do to keep that promise is run a budget surplus, which he likely won’t because that would mean raising taxes on the rich and cutting spending at the Pentagon.

OTOH if not paid for Romney’s proposed tax cuts would add at least $3 trillion to the National Debt over ten years.

Source: Center for American Progress (PDF)

Wiilard is offering to cut taxes for the rich even more, on top of the Bush-Obama Tax Cuts For The Rich (he wants to cut the top rate from 35 to 15%), and eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax. He also wants to cut corporate tax rates. He hasn’t yet come up with a credible explanation of how all that could be paid for.

Obama says he wants to restore the Clinton tax rates only for the top income tax bracket (39.6%). That ought to bring in more revenues, though not nearly as much as letting ALL the Bush-Obama Tax Cuts For The Rich expire at the end of this year. According to the graph, the Obama administration isn’t promising to start reducing the National Debt until mid-2014. I suppose that has something to do with projected budget savings and Medicare taxes from the Affordable Care Act.

Faux News can’t stand the prospect of only giving the rich a tax cut on their first $250,000 of income.
Dishonest Fox Chart: Bush Tax Cut Edition