2012 presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty (R) yesterday laid out his economic “plan,” which is based around huge tax cuts that Pawlenty claims will spark a decade of 5 percent GDP growth, even though growth staying at that rate for that long has literally never occurred in America. As Michael Linden noted, Pawlenty’s tax plan would cost $7.8 trillion over ten years, triple the size of the Bush tax cuts.
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During his speech introducing the plan, Pawlenty excoriated President Obama as “a champion practitioner of class warfare.” “I come from a working class background. I didn’t grow up with wealth. But I’ve never resented those who have it,” Pawlenty said. But as a new analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice shows, in addition to being outrageously expensive, Pawlenty’s tax plan is based on the Republican brand of class warfare — giving millionaires huge tax breaks:
– Taxpayers with incomes in excess of $1 million would enjoy an average cut in personal income taxes of $288,822, a 41.4 percent cut.
– Taxpayers with incomes in excess of $10 million would enjoy an average cut in personal income taxes of $2.4 million, a 46.3 percent cut.
– The cost of the personal income tax cuts just for taxpayers with incomes in excess of $1 million would be $141.8 billion.
And that’s just for Pawlenty’s income tax plan. He has also proposed eliminating the capital gains and estate taxes entirely, two moves which would overwhelmingly benefit the very richest Americans.
Pawlenty likes to point to his middle-class background while giving his economic pitch, but his tax plan implies either a huge tax shift, requiring the middle-class to pay for his massive tax cuts for the wealthy, or sky-high deficits in perpetuity. As part of the plan he introduced yesterday, Pawlenty also endorsed a spending cap that would require deeper cuts than the radical House Republican budget, as well as a cockamamie “Google test” that, if taken literally, implies that Pawlenty would be okay with eliminating the Pentagon.
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