Mitt the Massachusetts Moderate: "If We Lower Taxes…We'll Get Our Head Handed To Us Politically"

Greg Hengler | December 26, 2011 11:24 PM

Tea Party Patriots Townhall, December 2012, excerpted at time stamp 7:03 to 8:50.

[TEXT OF THE EXCERPT]

QUESTION: Do you support complete reform of the tax code and how would you go about accomplishing tax reform?

ROMNEY: First off, there are things I want do immediately that cannot wait the full process of an overhaul of the tax code. So I will lower the corporate rate from 35 to 25. That I think can be immediately approved and can be done without reducing the revenues to the government because that will eliminate offsetting deductions and exemptions that go tocorporate America.

Number two; I will eliminate the tax and interest dividends on capital gains, the saving taxes on middle income Americans. I thinkeverybody else who is running is planning on eliminating those taxes also for higher income Americans.

The calculation I saw from the Tax Policy Council shows that eliminating those taxes on higher income Americans will add to the deficit by $1 trillion a year. I am simply not going to do that. We’ve got a budget we have to balance. Those are the first things.

Then secondly I will move towards a tax reform program which follows the model of Bowles-Simpson, which is lowering rates, lowering the deductions and exemptions for high income individuals and achieving economic growth by having substantially lower rates.

But I am not looking to do something, which dramatically reduces taxes for the top 1%.

The people who have been hurt most in this Obama economy are middle income Americans and if we go out there and starting touting plans to drastically lower taxes for the very highest income people, not only will we get our head handed to us politically; we will as a nation find ourselves stalled in getting tax reform that is sobadly needed.