Romney Shakes Etch-A-Sketch: Comes Out In Center
I’ve long maintained that Governor Romney’s biggest problem in this race is how far he had to pivot to the right to win in the Republican primaries. Those positions have made for great ads for President Obama, so naturally the flip-flopping governor is moving back to the political center. First it was health care. Now it is taxes:
To get the rate reductions Romney has promised, you either have to increase the deficit or have to increase the tax burden on the middle class. It just can’t be done otherwise.
So which did Romney have in mind? Well, now campaign adviser Kevin Hassett says neither, arguing that if Romney’s math doesn’t add up (and it doesn’t), he just won’t cut rates that much: “If you think the base-broadeners don’t add up, if you think he can’t get to 28 percent, then the right thing that would happen, as you know, if you’re going to have a revenue-neutral reform, is that they would have a different change in rates.”
So no tax reductions? What is next among sacred cows to the right? Well if he listens to Bush appointees, Christie Todd Whitman thinks it should be the environment:
“I’d hope he’d go back to the way he was as governor of Massachusetts,” said Whitman, a George W. Bush-era Environmental Protection Agency chief, during an interview with POLITICO on Tuesday. “Because in that position, he was finding the balance that can be struck between environmental protection and economic growth because it’s not a zero-sum game.”
Copyright 2012 Liberaland
By: Stuart Shapiro
Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.
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