Fact Check: Romney misleads on middle class taxes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/10/16/fact-check-romney-misleads-on-middle-class-taxes/

Romney’s claim that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class by $4,000 has earned him three Pinocchios in the past. 

The figure is drawn from a very dry report titled “A Simple Measure of the Distributional Burden of Debt Accumulation.”

The study tries to calculate the burden of servicing the national debt by various income groups, examining what would happen under current law, current policies and Obama’s budget. (Current law refers to policies that are supposed to happen, such as expiring tax cuts; current policy reflects the fact that Congress has said it will not let certain tax cuts expire.)

Among the three scenarios, there’s actually not much difference — for households making between $100,000 to $200,000, the burden would be between $2,800 to $5,400 a year through 2022 — and the Obama administration’s budget falls right in the middle. In other words, the study shows how much lower taxes could be if the nation did not keep adding to the debt load; it does not show, as the ad claims, that Obama has some sort of secret plan to raise taxes.