Specifically, Ryan proposed to:
* eliminate taxes on "interest, capital gains, or dividends" and estate taxes* allow investments to be "fully deducted immediately" by corporations
* "eliminate the corporate income tax entirely" and replace it with "a single-digit consumption tax" that businesses and investors would calculate themselves.
* repeal the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to assure that millionaires and billionaires who take advantage of tax-code loopholes will have to pay something
How good would a Romney-Ryan administration be to the private-equity constituency?
According to a study by the chairman's staff of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, most working Americans who earn under $200,000 a year would see their taxes go up under the latest version of the Ryan budget. By the same token, Mitt Romney -- whose income is "comprised of interest income, capital gains and dividends" -- would pay less than 1 percent of his income in taxes.
The Romney-Ryan approach, forged and advocated for by candidates with personal and family ties to private-equity concerns, will yield great benefits for those very wealthy Americans who understand private equity as a personal reality.
But as the Joint Economic Committee report says...
"House Budget Committee Chairman Representative Paul Ryan claims that the policies outlined in his budget will reform the broken tax code and put 'hardworking taxpayers ahead of special interests.' In reality, the Ryan plan gives the largest tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and will pay for those tax cuts by raising the tax burden on middle-class workers."
Indeed, the report concludes...
"The richest households would receive the greatest benefit from these changes. The top 0.1 percent, for example, would receive an estimated average federal tax cut of close to $1.18 million per taxpaying household in 2015."
America's robber barons have had to wait for more than a century -- since Teddy Roosevelt went rogue and joined the anti-trust campaigners -- for a Republican ticket that would truly represent their interests.
But every indication is that the Romney-Ryan ticket will be of, by and for the private-equity managers who have become the masters of America's economic universe.
The Romney-Ryan ticket rejects the American faith of not just Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt but of Republican presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt.
"The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power," Teddy Roosevelt warned at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910. "The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise."
That remains the prime need.
Now, unfortunately, the party of Teddy Roosevelt is preparing to nominate a ticket that is passionately at odds with the principle that the general welfare must prevail over the passions of men "whose chief object is to hold and increase their power."
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