Romney’s Tax Plan Is Now The Schrödinger’s Cat Of Policy Proposals

by evanmcmurry

Mitt Romney’s tax plan has officially reached Schrödinger’s cat stage. It simultaneously decreases the deficit and lowers everybody’s taxes—provided, of course, you don’t actually lift the lid and look inside.

So long as the cat is both dead and alive, the Washington Examiner can get away with publishing nonsense like this, attacking Obama’s characterization of Romney’s tax plan as taking from the poor to give to the rich:

[Obama’s] claim is based on a report from the Tax Policy Center, even though the authors — who include one former Obama aide and a former aide to President George H.W. Bush — preface their study by saying, “We do not score Governor Romney’s plan directly, as certain components of his plan are not specified in sufficient detail, nor do we make assumptions regarding what those components might be.”

See? How can Obama criticize Romney’s tax plan when he doesn’t even know what it is, because Romney hasn’t told anybody? It may seem impossible for Romney’s plan to both drop the deficit while cutting taxes across the board by 20%, but until Romney says how he’s going to do that, which he won’t, you can’t be sure it doesn’t, which it can’t—except it might! If Romney doesn’t reveal the details of his plan, its two mutually-exclusive aims don’t actually cancel each other out; death and life coexist within the box.

By the way, how did the Romney campaign respond to that study from the Tax Policy Center last week?

The Romney campaign has emphatically rejected the study on several grounds. First, it claims the paper is “biased” because of the involvement of an economist (Adam Looney) who worked on the staff of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers…Finally, it says the study admits it is not really examining Romney’s plan.

Ah. So when the study is attacking Romney’s tax plan, it’s written by an Obama crony and based on chimeras. When the exact same study is used to attack Obama’s characterization of Romney’s tax plan, it’s a bipartisan report that acknowledges its own empirical limitations. Somehow the study got in the box with the cat.