www.csua.org/u/y7m -> finance.yahoo.com/news/tax-policy-center-spotlight-romney-173604062.html
New York Times By ANNIE LOWREY | New York Times - Thu, Oct 25, 2012 1:36 PM EDT * Donald Marron, the Tax Policy Center's director, contends that the nonprofit group provides reliable, nonpartisan information. New York Times/Daniel Rosenbaum - Donald Marron, the Tax Policy Center's director, contends that the nonprofit group provides reliable, nonpartisan information.
all of the promises he had made on individual tax reform: including cutting marginal tax rates by 20 percent, keeping protections for investment income, not widening the deficit and not increasing the tax burden on the poor or middle class. It concluded that Mr Romney's plan, on its face, would cut taxes for rich families and raise them for everyone else. The detailed paper proved kindling for a political firestorm.
"garbage-in, garbage-out" analysis and his campaign accused it of partisan bias. The Obama campaign used the center's numbers to argue that Mr Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut. Economists jumped on the bandwagon too, flinging analyses back and forth and picking apart the projections and assumptions in the report. At the Tax Policy Center itself, responses ranged from irritation at the partisan nature of some attacks to incredulity over the political hysteria. "There was this rsum-hunting, White-House-visitor-log" searching feel to the response, said the center's director, Donald Marron, a former Bush administration economist. In many ways the report did just what the center was created to do: inject some solid numbers into a shifty, accusatory, raucous political debate. The decade-old center -- a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two nonpartisan grandes dames of the Washington world -- was founded precisely to "fill that niche," Mr Marron said. "A lot of tax policy discussions are -- how to describe them? "We believe that good information leads to better policy discussions and ultimately better policy outcomes." The center's claim to provide reliable, nonpartisan information comes in part from its staff makeup. It has about four dozen affiliated staff members and scholars -- most are economists, several are considered top experts in their fields, and a number have experience in either Republican or Democratic administrations.
highly sophisticated tax modeling system, one that took about two years to build and has a small coterie of specialists to tend it. The model resembles those used by government offices to forecast the effect of changes to the tax code, and it relies on about 150,000 anonymous tax returns and a wealth of data on pensions, education, consumer expenditures and economic growth. "They're one of the few groups that have this very big, very accurate model," said Martin A Sullivan, the chief economist and a contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a specialty publisher. "What they're doing is just making the best computations available" for others to interpret, he said. That includes so-called distributional analyses that show how changes to the tax code would change the relative burden on high-income and low-income families -- a dry tax topic yet one of the most politically potent ones of the campaign, given the broader debate about tax fairness and inequality. The analysis of the Romney proposal has proved highly controversial not just among politicians, but also among some economists.
Harvey S Rosen of Princeton have argued that Mr Romney's tax math might work if he raised taxes on families making more than $100,000 a year -- not $200,000 to $250,000 a year, as he currently promises -- or if his plan gave a strong jolt to economic growth. "Reasonable economists disagree on" the growth effects of plans like Mr Romney's, said Alan J Auerbach, a tax expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who added that he did not see the math working out as currently described. "It matters a lot what kind of reductions you're making or how you're paying for tax cuts." Others have argued that the Tax Policy Center filled in too many of the holes in Mr Romney's light-on-detail proposal -- making a full analysis impossible and skewing the center's paper's results. "It is not an analysis of Governor Romney's plan," said Scott A Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation. "It has been, I think, mislabeled as such and misinterpreted as such. We don't think there are enough details to analyze," he said, adding that he believed that it was possible to devise a distributionally neutral, revenue neutral tax reform that cut rates in the way Mr Romney described. The Tax Policy Center said that it had sought as many details as possible from the Romney campaign. "We wrote a technical, accurate paper given the available information," said William G Gale of the Brookings Institution, one of the paper's main authors, in a recent interview. "The criticism that you can't analyze the Romney tax plan because there isn't one? That hasn't stopped other economists from analyzing its growth effects. I like to have substantive discussions about tax policy. Many economists across the political spectrum have said they found the report's conclusions convincing, like Alan D Viard, a tax expert at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. And I welcome Governor Romney and the Republicans' strong push, but the plan doesn't work out.
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Just a normal woman o 3 days ago This study isn't telling anyone with brains what we didn't already know. Fact is, no president can ever keep all of their campaign promises. A president certainly can't if he has a congress who hates their president more than they love their country.
J A o 11 days ago @a number have experience in either Republican or Democratic administrations. It takes more than just an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to achieve non-partisanship. These Democrats and Republicans must be willing to put the public's interest ahead of their party's interest and they must both be willing to work with the 1/3 of the country that is neither Democrat nor Republican.
dapeck o 2 days 15 hours ago anybody who thinks that we will see many of these promises by either of these 2 presidential candidates actually occur are drastically kidding themselves. i have watched presidents come and go in my lifetime and i have learned to take what they say with a grain of salt as most of it will never be brought up again after the election. politicians are very well known and versed in saying whatever the potential voter wants to hear. my first couple of elections i participated in, i believed, but that quickly changed. i have also noted very little difference in political parties actions once they are voted in. in fact its hard to tell what party is in power most of the time as they think and act so much alike once the election is over.
Eric o 11 days ago "I like to have substantive discussions about tax policy. He forgot that in politics, no one is interested in making policy based on the best model - they simply want to find ANY model that supports the policy they already wanted in the first place.
Daniel S o 11 days ago I am not a fan of increased govt spending by either parties - and yes, both very much do it. But this belief that you can somehow cut taxes without cutting govt spending to match and not the deficit has got to go.
o 3 days ago Romney will cut the taxes for members of the Mormon Church so they can tithe more to its tax free investment fund which it uses to manipulate political contests around the country. The end game is political and theocratic control of the United States.
WilliamH o 11 days ago I think the larger issue here is that with all of the experts and massive computer programs there is disagreement over what this plan will actually do. This should be a clear indication the the tax code is too large and too complicated and rather than trying to change a piece of trash, we need to throw it out an...
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