The Opposite of Courage

Another post from Prof. Thoma - again, please follow link.
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http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/08/the-opposite-of-courage.html

The Opposite of Courage

Romney doesn't want you to know the truth about his economic plan:

A Tax Plan That Defies the Rules of Math, by David Firestone, Editorial, NY Times: In May of 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president on a platform of extravagant tax cuts for all, his campaign did something that would be considered remarkable today: it submitted his tax plan to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, to see how much all those tax cuts would cost the Treasury.

The bipartisan committee ran ... predicted that the tax plan would cost about $1.3 trillion over nine years, an underestimate but a clear sign of its high price tag. With the budget in surplus at the time, Mr. Bush didn’t dispute that cost, and never tried to pretend that the cuts would be free. Within a decade, in fact, they would turn out to be the biggest factor in the huge deficit he created.

Twelve years later, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, claims his far deeper tax cuts would have a price tag of exactly zero dollars. He has no intention of submitting his tax plan to the committee or anywhere else that might conduct a serious analysis, since he seems intent on running a campaign far more opaque than any candidate has in years.

He has made his economic plan the fundamental basis of his candidacy, and yet with the Republican convention just two weeks away, we know next to nothing of the plan’s details. ...

On issue after issue, the dominant theme of Mr. Romney’s plan is a refusal to make real choices..., you can scrutinize all 160 pages of his economic booklet without finding any evidence of decision-making. ...

The plans Mr. Ryan submitted as House budget chairman — which are now Mr. Romney’s too — were never models of clarity, but they at least made his priorities quite stark: more than three-fifths of his cuts would come from low-income programs like job training, Pell grants and food stamps. That’s not something Mr. Romney ever talked about on the stump ...

When the campaign refuses to release details -- tax returns come to mind as well -- it's because it has something to hide. The question to ask, and the last paragraph has the answer, is what he is trying to hide about his budget proposal. There's no way whatsoever to make his numbers work out without deep cuts to social insurance programs that benefit working class households, and higher taxes would also be required for these households (in part to offset large tax cuts for upper income households). But Romney doesn't have the courage to tell you that, instead he wants to keep it hidden, to blow smoke around the numbers, anything but the truth about his plan.