Romney Tax Plan: Cut Mitt Romney’s Taxes Nearly In Half

A $4 MILLION Tax Cut for Himself, A Tax Increase for You?

When it comes to Mitt Romney’s taxes and his tax proposals, there is a lot to be shocked about. You can be shocked that Mitt Romney uses unfair tax loopholes to pay a 15 percent tax rate — a rate far lower than millions of middle class Americans pay. Or you can be shocked that he wants to raise taxes on nearly half of middle class families with children, even as he hands out trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and corporations. But perhaps the most shocking news of all may be that Romney’s tax plan would cut his own taxes by NEARLY HALF.

Here’s the rundown.

While much of the attention on the Bush tax cuts focuses on marginal income tax rates, they also included deep cut tax cuts for investors, hedge fund managers, and private equity managers. This is one of the things that makes the Bush tax cuts so egregiously skewed toward the wealthiest Americans, including Mitt Romney. Extending the Bush tax cuts in their entirety, as Romney has proposed, would result in a huge personal windfall for himself and other wealthy Americans — at the expense of both the deficit and painful spending cuts that the rest of us will have to endure as a result. One need only look at Romney’s own plan to slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other vital programs to understand what continued and ever-larger giveaways to the wealthy will cost the rest of us.

Today, Citizens for Tax Justice calculated Romney’s personal windfall from his own plan. The result: a 40 percent tax cut for Romney. Greg Sargent at the Washington Post explains what would happen under current law (i.e. the Bush tax cuts expire and a new tax on investments included in the Affordable Care Act is maintained) versus Romney’s own plan:

Under that regime, Romney would pay an overall tax rate of around 24 percent.

The group then calculated what Romney would pay if his own plan passed. That is, if you kept the Bush tax cuts in place, including keeping the capital gains tax at 15 percent, and scrapped the Medicare tax, as Romney wants to do.

Under that system, Romney would pay a rate of a little under 15 percent — because virtually all his income is from capital gains and dividends.

The group calculates that this means Romney’s plan would give him a tax cut of more than 40 percent.

“This doesn’t even include Romney’s proposal to cut corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent, which would primarily benefit wealthy shareholders like himself,” Robert McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, tells me.

Here’s the chart version provided to me by the group: