CLASS WARFARE, ROMNEY-STYLE

Nothing gets Mitt Romney more animated on the campaign trail than inveighing against President Obama’s penchant for wealth-redistribution. The president wants to “substitute envy for ambition and poison the American spirit by pitting one American against another and engaging in class warfare,” as Romney put it earlier this week in Des Moines. But as the non-partisan Tax Policy Center reported yesterday, the former Massachusetts governor is waging his own brand of class warfare. Romney’s plan would save a middle-income American about $1,400 a year—and lighten a 1 percenter's tax load by $171,000. It would also add $600 billion to the deficit in 2015. (Among those benefiting from Romneynomics would, of course, be Romney; his net worth is estimated at $250 million, making him one of the 3,140 richest people in America—part of the 0.001 percent.) The Economist calls Romney’s plan “very progressive, by 15th-century standards.” But if you ask a lot of conservatives, Romney’s plans are the next worst thing to Obama’s. Ex-Reagan official Peter Ferrara writes in Forbes that with Romney proposing tax cuts for middle-income Americans, he’s engaging in “Obama neo-socialist class rhetoric.” In The Wall Street Journal, columnist Kimberley Strassel takes Romney to task today for merely saying that he opposes “tax cuts for the rich.” No matter his actual proposal to cut rich people’s, she says, Romney is “playing the class game.” 


Oh Yea

 “What about three men? Reason says that if you think it’s OK for two, then you have to differentiate with me as to why it’s not OK for three.”

—Rick Santorum, answering questions in New Hampshire about his opposition to same-sex marriage