The Romney campaign can claim that their tax plan to cut taxes for everyone by 20% works …. but it’s pure fantasy.  Watch the exchange above between Chris Wallace and senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie; his response is simple – yes it does work despite all the overwhelming evidence otherwise.  This has tremendous implications for the American people.  They will see huge cuts to important services like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid in order to pay for these tax cuts or the middle class will just get their taxes increased.

It’s one or the other and maybe both …. but it is simply IMPOSSIBLE for Romney to do what he claims he’s going to do.  He thinks he can cut taxes by $5 trillion without raising taxes on the middle class (even though it’s mathematically impossible) and not blow up the deficit and still keep important government programs available.

Romney used to claim that it was only five studies back up his tax plan; Politifact rates that claim “mostly false” HERE.

The nonpartisan scorekeeper in Congress – the Joint Committee on Taxation says it’s impossible to reduce rates from 35% t0 28% for the wealthy without raising taxes on the middle class HERE.

The non-partisan Brookings Institute says Romney’s plan is mathematically impossible here and will only lead to tax increases on the middle class HERE.

The Chief Economist and a former McCain economic adviser says “the arithmetic doesn’t work” in Romney’s tax plan HERE.

Here’s a transcript of the back and forth, via HuffPo:

Gillespie: These are very credible sources, and, you know…

Wallace: One of them is from a guy who is – is a blog from a guy who was a top advisor to George W. Bush. So these are hardly nonpartisan studies.

Gillespie: Look, Chris I think if you look at Harvard and AEI [American Enterprise Institute] and other studies are very credible sources for economic analysis

Wallace: You wouldn’t say that AEI is a conservative think tank?

Gillespie: I would say it is a right-leaning think tank. That doesn’t make it not credible.

Wallace: It doesn’t make it nonpartisan.

Gillespie: It does make it nonpartisan. It’s not a partisan organization, I can tell you, there are many instances where there have been things AEI came out with and said, I didn’t find it to be necessarily to be helpful to the Republican Party.

Wallace: Would you say Brookings Institution is nonpartisan?

Gillespie: I would say the Brookings Institution is left leaning and nonpartisan.

Then there was this exchange between Chris Wallace and Ed Gillespie where Gillespie repeats the Romney lie that women account for 92.3% of all the jobs lost under Obama.  Kudos to Chris Wallace for fact checking Gillespie mid-stream on this blatant falsehood.  Gillespie is only parroting the claim that Romney makes continuously throughout the country because he is desperate to win the women vote.

Politifact rated that claim “mostly false” HERE.

The transcript:

Gillespie: You know, 858,000 women have lost their jobs since President Obama took office.  Ninety-two percent of the job losses in this recession or this recovery — slow stifled recovery — have fallen on women.

Wallace: Wait.  You know that it is true that more women have lost jobs and it’s true that more women are without jobs now, but it is not true that 90 percent — they did under Obama, but many, many more men — because they are in the job sectors that people lose jobs first — lost jobs under President Bush.  So, it’s a little bit of an accounting trick.  And all of the independent fact finders have said it’s misleading.

Gillespie: Those independent fact finders aren’t very independent.  If you look at their bona fides, they tend to come from left-leaning organizations.

Wallace: The Washington Post? PolitiFact?

Gillespie: Who The Wasthington Post quoted were liberal economists.  The fact that more men lost [jobs] before he took office doesn’t make it a good thing that more [women] lost it since he took office. That’s a bad thing and we need to reverse that. … His policies, by the way, when you fill up your minivan, a lot of women see the costs. You know, the fact that you fill up for $20 bucks you just have to come back for more and more.

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