The $5 trillion tax-cut myth (A closer look at Obama's favorite debate line)

Washington Post ^ | 10/05/2012 | Robert Samuelson

[SeekAndFind]

After 47 percent, the presidential campaign’s most incendiary number is $5 trillion. That’s the tax cut planned by Mitt Romney with most benefits going to the wealthy, according to President Obama and his campaign. The president has used the figure repeatedly, as have his surrogates and ads. In Wednesday’s debate, Romney vehemently denied that there ever was a $5 trillion tax cut for the rich. He’s right. The figure is a partisan construct that, somehow, has been given a pass by most of the media as one plausible version of the truth. It isn’t.

To be sure, the Obama campaign’s enthusiasm for the $5 trillion figure is easily understood. It perfectly fits its spoken and unspoken narratives about Romney. He’s not just wealthy and indifferent to the needs of average Americans; he’s also an eager tool of the wealthy. He’d use his office to cut their taxes and advance their interests at everyone else’s expense. He’s not running for president so much as Leader of the Filthy Rich.

Here’s Obama at one rally:

“My opponent, he believes in top-down economics, thinks that if you spend another $5 trillion on a tax cut skewed towards the wealthy, that prosperity will rain down on everyone else.”

It’s a powerful argument, marred only by the fact that the $5 trillion tax cut is a fiction.

Let’s see how this happened.

[depressed in 06]

Has anyone found the law that subsidizes the out sourcing of jobs overseas?

[Jim from C-Town]

‘The figure is a partisan construct that, somehow, has been given a pass by most of the media as one plausible version of the truth.’

Somehow, SOMEHOW! We all know how, The same way a blatant lie about unemployment falling .3% in ONE MONTH on fewer than 120,000 jobs created in a country of some 310 millions!

It was given a pass by the same sycophants in the press that used to work for Pravda in the old Soviet Union.

[driftless2]

I guess the Obama team figures that failing to get the revenue he promised by other means, President Romney would announce on tv to the nation that he was raising the taxes on the middle-class by five trillion dollars, and nobody would demand he be removed from office. Obviously, his chances for re-election would be slim and none. Obama and his pals figure Americans are stupid enough to fall for that lie. They might as well argue that failing to get the revenue he promised he would get, Romney was going to invade Mexico and Canada and expropriate all their oil. These people are shameless.

[Jumpmaster]

Ahh, taxes. Think we need a convoluted tax code? Check out Russia since the collapse: http://www.worldwide-tax.com/russia/russia_tax.asp

[Svartalfiar]

How do they even get $5T as a number? Last I checked, US revenue per year is only around $2.5T, of which $1.5T is personal/corp taxes. So unless they’re specifically taking numbers as a cumulative cut over a couple decades, I don’t know how they can get that number.