Mitt Romney is a Black Box

Puppycow said:
As far as the more general point that presidents still have to convince congress to pass the legislation they want, that's true far all candidates for president. I understand that. When they promise to do X, if X is something that would require an act of congress, I understand that to mean that they will try to get congress to do X and will sign it if they do it. My issue here is that he won't say specifically what he wants them to do.
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He's a consensus organizer. He doesn't stand for any particular position.
He brings people together in an endless business meeting and has them
work through the issues until everyone agrees on what to do. Think less
of him as a black box question mark and more of him like a transparent
glass semicolon.
 
I completely disagree with the sentiment in this thread. Romney has been perfectly clear what he is going to do when he is elected: not be Obama. That's what he is promising, and, darn it, he's going to live up to it. By definition. He's not Barrack Obama.

That's all he promises, because that is all he has. He is the "anyone" in "anyone but Obama."

Come on, what do you think he is going to replace the ACA with? HIS plan? Obama already implemented his plan. Does he have a better idea? Of course not, because if he HAD a better idea, he would have implemented it in Massachusetts.

So all he has left is, "Well, I promise that I am not Barrack Obama. Vote for me, so he you don't get HIM again."

And that is a promise he can keep.
 
Here's a classic example of what I'm talking about:

Paul Ryan: Giving specifics would ‘take me too long’

On Fox News Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan claimed that Americans don’t know enough about what a Romney-Ryan presidency would do, which explains the campaign’s current troubles. But when Chris Wallace pressed Ryan to discuss the specifics of the Romney-Ryan tax plan, the mathematics of which have confounded non-partisan experts, he refused even to say how much the tax cuts the ticket has proposed would cost.
. . .
“It would take me too long to go through all of the math,” Ryan explained Sunday morning. But Wallace wasn’t asking for “all” of the math, just basic numbers. As usual with the GOP ticket, the only specific figure Ryan wanted to discuss was how much he and Romney want to drop tax rates. Wallace repeatedly asked Ryan whether Romney’s proposed tax cuts would cost $5 trillion, a question meant to establish one side of the budget equation before moving to a discussion of how Romney would pay for the cuts. But Ryan repeatedly refused to go through the addition and subtraction, instead insisting that the numbers eventually come out in his favor — Romney’s proposed tax cuts would cost nothing, he said, because Romney would offset them by cutting loopholes, primarily for upper incomes.
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Finally some specifics! Why did he wait so long to say this?

Mitt Romney suggests cutting mortgage interest deduction on eve of presidential debate

In an interview Monday night with Denver TV station KDVR, Romney said, "As an option you could say everybody's going to get up to a $17,000 deduction. And you could use your charitable deduction, your home mortgage deduction, or others — your health care deduction, and you can fill that bucket, if you will, that $17,000 bucket that way. And higher income people might have a lower number."

A Romney adviser said changes in other areas — a taxpayer's personal exemption and the deduction or credit for health care — would also be taken into account if deductions were limited as Romney suggested. Combining changes to those two areas with the limit on deductions would maintain Romney's goal of keeping tax burdens the same for wealthy and middle income taxpayers, the adviser said.

On another controversial subject, in a separate local interview ahead of the debate, Romney told The Denver Post that he would honor the temporary permission the Obama administration has granted to many young illegal immigrants to allow them to stay in the country.
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OK, credit where credit it due: he's finally clarified his position on two of the issues I mentioned in the OP.

It seems like a reasonable idea too.
Limiting total deductions to something like $17,000 would mean that low income people could keep most of their deductions, but higher income people, who currently take rather large deductions in some cases (say for mortgage interest on a million-dollar home) would have to pay more.

One possible downside is it would reduce the incentive for charitable giving beyond a certain level.

I'm actually kind of intrigued by this idea to tell the truth!
 
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Puppycow said:
Finally some specifics! Why did he wait so long to say this?

Mitt Romney suggests cutting mortgage interest deduction on eve of presidential debate



OK, credit where credit it due: he's finally clarified his position on two of the issues I mentioned in the OP.

It seems like a reasonable idea too.
Limiting total deductions to something like $17,000 would mean that low income people could keep most of their deductions, but higher income people, who currently take rather large deductions in some cases (say for mortgage interest on a million-dollar home) would have to pay more.

One possible downside is it would reduce the incentive for charitable giving beyond a certain level.

I'm actually kind of intrigued by this idea to tell the truth!
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Some downsides:
1. This is in exchange for dropping the tax rates by 20%, which would result in a massive tax cut for the wealthy, even with the loss of deductions. Their taxes would go down.
2. Right now, the standard deduction is around 12K? So the average person would lose their deductions in the case of a health crisis, since they could easily spend that much on health care costs for the year. For those people, their taxes would go up.
3. This is also in exchange for lowering, not raising the capital gains tax. So again, folks like Romney would get a tax break.
4. It still wouldn't be enough to offset the 20% rate cut, so middle class people like us would still see a tax hike or a massive hit to the debt.
 
Puppycow said:
Finally some specifics! Why did he wait so long to say this?

Mitt Romney suggests cutting mortgage interest deduction on eve of presidential debate
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It doesn't sound like he's even proposing increasing the standard deduction to $17K and eliminating the others tax code complexities. It sounds like he's tossing this out as a possible idea we can talk about after the election.

He says, "As an option you could say everybody's going to get up to a $17,000 deduction. . . . " Does that mean he's proposing this? Again, it sounds like he doesn't want to have the debate on this proposal (non-proposal?) until after the election.

One possible downside is it would reduce the incentive for charitable giving beyond a certain level.
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You'd also do away with the incentive for home ownership, etc.

All of these tax code "complexities" have specific purposes that would be lost. (See the thread about revenue neutrality. The example I've been picking on is the child/dependent care tax credit. Increasing the standard deduction this way wouldn't help someone for whom child care is a barrier to taking a job.)
 
Unabogie said:
3. This is also in exchange for lowering, not raising the capital gains tax. So again, folks like Romney would get a tax break.
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Romney lives mainly off of capital gains. According to his 2011 tax return, if he had taken all the deductions available, he would have paid about 9%. Are we to believe he can't survive unless that rate is even lower?

Steve S
 
Unabogie said:
Some downsides:
1. This is in exchange for dropping the tax rates by 20%, which would result in a massive tax cut for the wealthy, even with the loss of deductions. Their taxes would go down.
2. Right now, the standard deduction is around 12K? So the average person would lose their deductions in the case of a health crisis, since they could easily spend that much on health care costs for the year. For those people, their taxes would go up.
3. This is also in exchange for lowering, not raising the capital gains tax. So again, folks like Romney would get a tax break.
4. It still wouldn't be enough to offset the 20% rate cut, so middle class people like us would still see a tax hike or a massive hit to the debt.
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Yeah, I'd like to see the folks at the Tax Policy Center run the numbers on this so we can get a more accurate idea of what the actual effects would be. I'm not necessarily endorsing the idea, but I do think it is interesting and worth considering. I would have to see those numbers from a trustworthy non-partisan source before I could endorse the idea. It certainly may still be the case that this would (a) not be revenue neutral and/or (b) benefit the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor people, in which case I couldn't support it.
 
Okay, let's see if Mitt has the guts to sell this idea to the voters.

Not to say there's anything wrong with the idea of tinkering with the home mortgage interest deduction--in Canada, there's no home mortgage interest deduction at all, and Canadians get along just fine--but quite a few homeowners in the USA rely on that deduction and they might feel the rug is getting pulled out from under them. Mitt would have to assure them that that isn't the case.

Also, quite a few taxpayers have found themselves suckered in the past by the politician's line that, "You'll lose one benefit but you'll make it up elsewhere." Such promises rarely seem to be realized.

And not to put too fine a point on it, what used to matter to me when I lived in the USA (and what matters to me in Canada as well) was my overall tax burden, not merely my income tax rate. The income tax rate was only part of the picture. In the George W. Bush years, I found to my disappointment that my overall tax burden increased despite Little Bush trying to sell me on the notion that my taxes actually went down. Well, my income tax rate went down a little, but my other taxes went up to more than cancel out any supposed tax cut.
 
Tricky said:
I don't like the metaphor. A "black box" is something that works, but you don't know why. We have no evidence that Mitt Romney's mysterious plans would work.
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I think the traditional phrase is: "A pig in a poke." That is, a burlap sack with something in it, alleged to be a pig, but you don't get to find out exactly what unless/until you buy it.

I think all politicians are this way to some extent.
 
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