Newt’s Plan, Mitt’s Morass By Deroy Murdock
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/290118
Despite losing Tuesday’s Florida primary, Newt Gingrich used his Sunshine State effort to showcase his voluntary 15 percent flat tax — 2012’s smartest idea yet, both strategically and substantively. Through the November 6 election, this concept can inoculate Republicans from the Democrats’ ceaseless lies about the wealthy “not paying their fair share” of taxes. And, if implemented, Gingrich’s prescription would reinvigorate America’s feeble economy.
Among the barbs that Gingrich and Willard Mitt Romney traded, the former House speaker made this generous-sounding comment at the January 23 Tampa debate:
“I’m prepared to describe my 15 percent flat tax as the Mitt Romney flat tax,” Gingrich declared. “I’d like to bring everybody else down to Mitt’s rate, not try to bring him up to some other rate.”
As Gingrich further explained at the January 26 Jacksonville face-off:
I have proposed an alternative flat tax that people could fill out where you could either keep the current system — this is what they do in Hong Kong — . . . with all of its deductions and all its paperwork, or you’d have a single page: ‘I earned this amount. I have this number of dependents. Here is 15 percent.’ My goal is to shrink the government to fit the revenue, not to raise the revenue to catch up with the government.
Gingrich’s initiative is excellent politics. President Obama and his liberal pals simply refuse to acknowledge the latest IRS data, which irrefutably demonstrate that the oft-excoriated top 1 percent of filers in 2009 generated 16.9 percent of the nation’s income and paid 36.7 percent of its income tax. Meanwhile, the Tax Policy Center reported last August that in 2011, those earning between $20,000 and $30,000 paid an effective rate of 5.7 percent in combined income, payroll, corporate, and death taxes. Those who made at least $1 million paid 29.1 percent.