I hope he stays in and keeps Newster and Mittens at least a tiny bit honest.
I’m disgusted with Newt after I heard him this morning talking up the fact that Mitt “only pays 15% on his taxes, which is what most middle-class people pay, and Mitt is rich....*”. Newt knew good and well that Mitt was talking capital gains taxes and Newt was deliberately confusing them with income taxes. Disgusting.
* paraphrased from memory.
I hope he stays in and keeps Newster and Mittens at least a tiny bit honest.
I’m disgusted with Newt after I heard him this morning talking up the fact that Mitt “only pays 15% on his taxes, which is what most middle-class people pay, and Mitt is rich....*”. Newt knew good and well that Mitt was talking capital gains taxes and Newt was deliberately confusing them with income taxes. Disgusting.
***
All rates should be equal. The investor class needs to pay more, OR the people who work need to pay less.
EQUAL protection under the law.
This campaign is starting to get on my nerves. If Newt keeps acting like a jerk, Perry might as well endorse another amphibian, like Kermit the Frog.
The point he was making is that Romney, who pretends to be one of the people (meaning the employed class), is not. There’s nothing wrong with living on your investment income, especially if you were born rich like Romney and parleyed that into even more money. That’s ok...and I believe Gingrich wants to do away with capital gains taxes, so in the end, Romney would pay even less.
But Gingrich actually works for a living and pays not only his income taxes but self-employment taxes (FICA, etc.) on his income. Being self-employed myself, I know what that’s like: if Gingrich is paying only 35% of his income in taxes, it’s because he has a good accountant and lots of deductions because of the nature of his work. I work in a low-deductions field and earn much less than he did and one year I paid nearly 60% of my income between income and self-employment taxes. We don’t have a regressive tax system here, we have a repressive tax system.
But the whole point, as with the Bain video, is that Romney is saying one thing but the whole reality is entirely different. That doesn’t mean that it’s illegal or even wrong, but Romney should be honest about it.
And Gingrich’s proposal to have a flat tax on income of any kind would solve all of this. Accountants and tax attorneys might be a little PO’ed, though...