Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been adamant that his tax plan won’t cut taxes for the rich. In the debate earlier this week, he said:

“The top 5 percent of taxpayers will continue to pay 60 percent of the income tax the nation collects… I will not reduce the share paid by high-income individuals.”

So would his plan cut taxes for high-income households? Most likely. Note that he specifies the share of federal income taxes.  Why is this important? If his plan was revenue-neutral, there would be no distinction: the same share of the same total revenue equals the same amount of taxes paid.

But it’s clear that his plan can’t be revenue neutral: According to the Tax Policy Center, the 20 percent cut would give households with income of more than $200,000 a $251 billion tax cut, but they only get $165 billion in tax breaks (excluding the tax breaks for savings, which Romney has proposed to retain). A more recent TPC analysis shows that the $25,000 cap on itemized deductions he floated in the debate would only raise $1.3 trillion, offsetting only a quarter of the $5 trillion cost of his across-the-board rate cut.

So it seems that Romney’s plan would lose revenue, and if high-income households are paying the same share of a lesser amount of overall tax revenue, that means their tax bill will fall. This conclusion is reinforced by Romney’s own choice of words.  If his plan really did ensure that the top households didn’t get a tax cut, why would he often insist on describing his plan using the clunky “I will not reduce the share of taxes paid” explanation? It’s a roundabout explanation that suggests that even Romney knows that his plan will result in high-income households paying less in taxes.

Politicians love to complain about “waste, fraud and abuse,” and to promise to root it out. But few of them ever actually take the opportunity to attack actual waste or abuse (as opposed to making fun of scientific research they don’t understand or bike path construction projects they disagree with). But soon, in the lame duck session of Congress that will begin after the election, members of Congress will have a chance to vote against actual waste and abuse, or—if they’re so inclined—to allow it to continue, at great cost to the taxpaying public. Thanks to an amendment to the Department of Defense authorization bill introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress has an opportunity to put an end to an egregious practice of self-dealing and self-aggrandizement by federal defense contractors that costs the government billions of dollars a year.

Top federal contract employees are treated very differently (and much better) than equivalent employees on the federal civil service payroll. Current law permits federal contractors to charge the government up to $763,029 a year for their employees, while even federal cabinet secretaries are paid no more than $200,000 a year, and the president is paid only $400,000 a year. Read more

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, federal legislation that has improved quality of life for millions of Americans, increasing recreational opportunities, improving public health, adding to our aesthetic enjoyment of nature and our environment, and providing business opportunities to manufacturers of boats and fishing equipment, rafting outfitters, and retailers of outdoor equipment. The Act is proof of the power and benefits of federal regulation; it transformed our world in so many visible ways and did more to protect our precious water resources than any other action, public or private, in the nation’s history.

It’s hard for young people to imagine just how polluted and threatened our waters were in 1972, when the Act was passed and signed into law by President Richard Nixon. I grew up near Detroit, on the shores of Lake St. Clair, the lake that, along with the Detroit River, connects Lake Erie and Lake Huron. After heavy rains, tides of human sewage and fecal matter would flow out into the lake, and continuous discharges of mercury and other toxins from industrial plants killed all but the hardiest and least appetizing fish. I swam in that lake Read more

Here’s some of the thought-provoking content that EPI’s research team enjoyed reading today:

• “Income Inequality May Take Toll on Growth” (New York Times)
• “Economic Health? It’s Relative” (New York Times)
• “Leading by Example: Minneapolis Acts on Employment Equity” (PolicyLink)
• “How a High-Speed Rail Disaster Exposed China’s Corruption” (The New Yorker)
• And finally, in case you missed it over the weekend, here’s a great Saturday Night Live skit on Apple’s iPhone 5 and the Chinese workers toiling away in Foxconn’s factories—something EPI has covered extensively:

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s budget proposal is short by nearly $9 trillion worth of specifics—the tax increases and spending cuts needed to meet promises of revenue-neutral tax changes and capping government spending at 20 percent of GDP. In this context, the Washington Post editorial board’s recent “pox on both houses” indictment of President Obama for a lack of second-term policy specifics, particularly with regard to fiscal sustainability, was entirely off the mark. Though too often lost on the punditry, the president has produced four comprehensive, independently analyzed and scored budgets—largely consistent and all fiscally sound—offering guidance to what a second Obama administration would imply for economic recovery and fiscal sustainability.

Economy: The president’s fiscal 2013 budget request included an adaptation of the American Jobs Act (AJA), originally a $447 billion package of stimulus spending and tax cuts proposed in Sept. 2011. I recently estimated that full passage of the AJA, relative to the scaled-back payroll tax cut and Emergency Unemployment Compensation extension Congress enacted, would have boosted real GDP growth by 1.4 percentage points and employment by more than 1.6 million by the end of 2012. Read more

Here’s some of the thought-provoking content that EPI’s research team enjoyed reading today:

• “The judicial jihad against the regulatory state” (Washington Post)
• “Social Security Keeps 21 Million Americans Out of Poverty: A State-by-State Analysis” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)
• “Transforming Medicare into a Premium Support System: Implications for Beneficiary Premiums” (Kaiser Family Foundation)
• “The Presidential Debate Commission is Chaired by Corporate Lobbyists, Funded by Corporations” (BoldProgressives.org)
• “A Risky Lifeline for the Elderly Is Costing Some Their Homes” (New York Times)

Despite a massive and endless campaign by business lobbyists and associations to vilify government regulation, 50 percent of Americans in a recent Gallup poll think there is too little regulation or just the right amount, while a minority (46 percent) think there is too much. According to the poll, Democrats tend to think regulation is too lax (42 percent think there is too little regulation while 32 percent think the balance is about right), and more Independents think the balance is right or that there is too little regulation (50 percent) than think there is too much (46 percent).

In one sense, this is good news, showing that anti-government cynicism is substantial but still a minority position. Yet it is disturbing to know that 77 percent of Republicans are so opposed to additional regulation when

• an estimated 100,000 people a year die needlessly from preventable hospital acquired infections;
• thousands die, more than 100,000 are hospitalized, and millions are sickened by contaminated food while the rate of infections linked to foodborne salmonella has been rising and food safety rules are stalled in Washington;
• air pollution that can be controlled for less than $3 billion a year causes between 13,000 and 34,000 preventable, premature deaths, 15,000 preventable, non-fatal heart attacks, 19,000 hospital and emergency room visits and 1.8 million days of missed work or school each year. As Steven Pearlstein points out in a recent column, the projected annual compliance cost of EPA’s final cross-state air pollution rule is $2.4 billion, compared with annual health benefits ranging from $120 billion to $280 billion. But the EPA rule was recently struck down by two Republican judges.

It is perfectly clear to me that more regulation would make millions of us both safer and freer—free from the fear that a random bite of spinach or a routine surgery will kill us or a loved one. And when I look back over the past 40 years and consider how much cleaner our lakes and rivers are now, how much more dangerous our workplaces were, and how unsafe the mines, factories, pharmaceuticals, and even the bridges and railways are in less advanced and less regulated countries like China, the last feeling I have about regulation is that we have too much, rather than too little.

Last night’s vice presidential debate was a good, lively, back-and-forth between Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.). The statement I singled out below was one that I found troubling (among a few)—and one that does a huge disservice in informing American voters on what changes in tax policy essentially mean. About halfway through the debate, Ryan said:

“Now, we think that government taking 28 percent of a family and business’s income is enough. President Obama thinks that the government ought to be able to take as much as 44.8 percent of a small business’s income.”

Far too often when discussing tax policy you will hear lawmakers and pundits use phrases such as the one above—government is “taking X percent of a family’s or a business’s income.” This, whether purposeful or not, unfortunately promotes misinformation regarding how tax rates work. A voter might hear something like what Ryan said and think, “I make $200,000, which puts me in the 33 percent bracket, which means government is literally going to take $66,000, or around a third of my total income, in taxes ($66,000 is 33 percent of $200,000).” This is wrong on a number of levelsRead more

Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) was an inspiration to millions, an unrelenting advocate for the poor, for the disabled, for victims of domestic violence, and for the powerless in our society. When Wellstone and his wife and daughter died in a plane crash 10 years ago, along with staff members and the plane’s crew, the nation lost one of its most important and original voices. We also lost one of our most effective advocates for decency in political life, for justice, and for peace in the world.

We were honored to work closely with Sen. Wellstone on issues of worker safety, labor standards, unemployment insurance, and budget policy. After his death, EPI named its conference room the Paul Wellstone Room, and in our work we still look to his example and courage in telling the truth, fighting for the well-being of the poor and all working families, and treating everyone with the respect and dignity they deserve.

In These Times has published a remembrance of Sen. Wellstone, written by Peter Dreier of Occidental College, that captures how rare he was and what a tremendous loss his death was to Minnesota, to the United States, and to the world.

In the vice presidential debate last night, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) cherry-picked statistics from the Congressional Budget Office on the number of people covered by employer-sponsored health insurance once the Affordable Care Act (ACA) takes full effect. Several fact-checkers (PolitiFact, Washington Post, CNN, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Think Progress) have already challenged his assertion that 20 million people would lose their employment-based health insurance. His number comes from a CBO report, which explored various extreme scenarios for employers under the ACA. That report states: “in CBO and JCT’s judgment, a sharp decline in employment-based health insurance as a result of the ACA is unlikely.”

What’s often left out of this story is the fact that, even in this extreme and unlikely scenario, 29 million more Americans will have insurance (under the ACA). Even if the extreme scenario where 20 million no longer retain insurance through their employer, the vast majority of them will be able to find high-quality, fairly-priced insurance through the new exchanges. Unlike today, the insurance exchanges will be well-run insurance markets where consumers can’t be discriminated against for having pre-existing conditions and where many will be offered subsidies to make insurance affordable. Further, as the CBO estimates, it is expected that those who no longer received ESI would receive “an increase in taxable wages and salaries.”

In that same report, the CBO illustrates another scenario where 3 million more Americans would receive employment-based insurance under the ACA. Their best guess was 5 million fewer, and 31 million more insured overall. So, while the scenario Ryan cherry-picked is highly unlikely, if it comes to bear, Americans without employer-sponsored health insurance will still be captured by the ACA safety net.