Ryan Plan: Mitt Romney Would Create All The Jobs If We Taxed Him Only .82 Percent

Hello, have you all spent this weekend getting used to a world in which a Romney/Ryan presidency is an actual possibility? Well, given that you’ve probably gotten used to a world in which Romney not paying taxes is an actual possibility, we’d say you’ve made some serious progress! See, under the Paul Ryan plan, Mitt Romney’s tax rate would IN THEORY be 10%, but in PRACTICE it would be somewhere between 0 and 1%. Now before you get pissy about that, just stop and think of all the jobs Romney would be able to create if he paid a .82% tax rate instead of 13.9%! Oh, how the wealth would trickle down! Car elevators and dancing horses for everyone!

In 2010 -- the only year we have seen a full return from him -- Romney would have paid an effective tax rate of around 0.82 percent under the Ryan plan, rather than the 13.9 percent he actually did. How would someone with more than $21 million in taxable income pay so little? Well, the vast majority of Romney's income came from capital gains, interest, and dividends. And Ryan wants to eliminate all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends…

Ryan would cut the top marginal tax rate from 35 to 25 percent and get rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax -- saving Romney another $292,389 or so on his 2010 tax bill. Now, Romney would still owe self-employment taxes on his author and speaking fees, but that only amounts to $29,151. Add it all up, and Romney would have paid $177,650 out of a taxable income of $21,661,344, for a cool effective rate of 0.82 percent.

But WAIT, if people like Mitt Romney would only pay a 0.82% tax rate, how would we fund things like oh, say, building and maintaining our bridges and our freeways, or our bloated military industrial complex, or social programs like Pell Grants and the SCHIP program and whatever else? The answer, of course, is that we would raise taxes on Poors and also would just give up on non-defense related government programs, which is only fair seeing as the government has already helped anyone worth helping anyway ( *cough* Paul Ryan *cough* ).

It might seem impossible to fund the government when the super-rich pay no taxes. That is accurate. Ryan would actually raise taxes on the bottom 30 percent of earners, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center , but that hardly fills the revenue hole he would create. The solution? All but eliminate all government outside of Social Security and defense[.]

Enjoy this moment while it lasts, America! It will be remembered as the day the GOP accomplished what terrorism, Communism, and World War II couldn't, and what climate change hasn't yet. USA! USA! USA!

 [The Atlantic]