world war i is around the corner and the empire is coming down. pulitzer prize-winning columnist and editor of the washington post and analyst eugene robinson. good morning. good morning. gene, are you a nationals fan? absolutely. we have a baseball team that s on the rise, best record in baseball. you do. best pitching rotation in baseball. the last month of the season, best slugging team in baseball. this is a hot team. i ll tell you what can they plooease just be th senators? i m going to cheer for them, but i m going to call them the senators. we don t care what you call them, just watch them. they re really a fun team to watch. let s try and move this conversation down the road a little bit. go braves. go ahead. during wednesday s debate, mitt romney defended his tax plan, rejecting president obama s claim that the plan would ultimately raise the tax burden on the middle class by eliminating some tax deductions. the romney campaign has released an a
trillion. guess what? yes, we do in one regard. we want to let that $1 trillion tax cut expire so the middle class doesn t have the bear the burden of all that money going to the super wealthy. that s not a tax raise. that s called fairness where i come from. and last night on politics nation, jared bernstein explained to al sharpton that the math in mitt romney s tax plan doesn t add up. if you re going to cut taxes 20% across the board, which is mitt romney s plan, you re going to blow a $5 trillion hole over ten years in the government s revenue. now, what governor romney says is i can make that up by closing tax expenditures and loopholes, but there s two problems with that. one, the arithmetic. if you look at people over 200,000, just look at the wealthiest couple of percent, the revenue cuts about $250
want to let that trillion dollars tax cut expire so the middle class doesn t have to bear the burdens of all that money going to the super wealthy. that s not a tax rate. that s called fairness where i come from! bret: the potential for a republican commercial to end at yes, we do, charles, is pretty high. how much are our guys paying him, because it isn t enough. this guy is terrific for us. the gaffe here isn t only the trillion dollars, it s the part where he calls was that the super rich? the super billionaire as soon as super wealthy. he is talking about people who aren t $250,000 a year, people who own a dry cleaning? and enterprise and they are the super wealthy. i mean, he s the gift that republicans love because he s always there, who will give you something once a week. on the serious side because it s really i think people will discounts what he says because it s biden.
of the republican convention being about 90% white but also i think because people really aren t used to white people being p discussed as the racial group. we are the americans and everybody else has a hyphen and descript descriptor. i think part of the discussion is, hey, you can t talk about white people but we re starting to because we re just one racial group in a multiracial america. you saw you mitt romney during the convention try to play up the no, sir tall gentleman of the past. that s what the golden age in the subtitle is about. part of it that s so vexing for democrats i think, alex, is that the middle class doesn t really get the extent to which the government created the middle class, that we made decisions in the aftermath of world war ii and the great depression out of fear as well as out of optimism that we were going to flatten income and equality and create a middle class. we raised taxes. we put in place a series of programs that widened opportunity, even union
class families who may be underwater on their mortgages, but responsible with their payments to actually have the ability to knock down barriers to help them refinance their mortgages that would put $3,000 back in their pockets over the course of a year. that s why we fought for the payroll tax cut, to have $1,000 more in people s paychecks over the course of a year. that s why overall over the course of this administration, we ve cut taxes for middle class families by more than $3,600. so our focus is on the middle class. i can t say that that s a debate that s going to be had on the other side, because you know the policies, the $5 trillion tax cut, repaying wall street reform, repaying the consumer product bureau. those are the types of things that we have worked to reform and change, so the middle class doesn t face an economic crisis and decades worth of income failing. last question here, stephanie, what did you learn from the kerfuffle over with t