text: On "60 Minutes" last night, Mitt Romney said it again. "I want to keep the current progressivity in the code. There should be no tax reduction for high income people." 
   
   You've heard Romney say this -- or some variant of it --dozens of times before. What's changed since then is that Romney has admitted that his tax cuts, if they're not going to add to the deficit, will have to increase taxes on people he defines as middle income and cut them on people he defines as high income. 
   
   
   
   Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Evan Vucci/AP 
   
   Before we get to that admission, a quick refresher. Romney's tax plan proposes to cut tax rates by 20 percent. That would cost trillions of dollars, and mean a particularly big tax cut for the rich. 
   
   But Romney promises his tax cut won’t cost anything, won’t raise taxes on the middle class, won’t cut taxes on the rich, and won’t end the tax breaks for savings and investment. 
   
   The Tax Policy Center, the gold standard in nonpartisan tax wonkery, looked at the tax cut and these promises and declared the proposal "not mathematically possible." Since Romney doesn't want to touch tax breaks for savings and investment like the capital gains cut -- a position he reiterated last night on "60 Minutes" -- there just isn't enough money in the remaining tax breaks for people making over $250,000 to pay for their tax cuts. 
   
   For awhile, the Romney campaign had no answer to this. They just said they didn’t believe the Tax Policy Center -- called it biased, even though it's run by one of George W. Bush’s top economists. 
   
   Then, slowly, right-leaning economists and outlets began releasing their own studies showing that, if you made some really, really questionable assumptions, you could kinda sorta make Romney’s math look like it might add up. And so you might have heard Romney say this to David Gregory on "Meet the Press": 
   
   The good news is that five different economic studies, including one at Harvard and Princeton and AEI and a couple at The Wall Street Journal all show that if we bring down our top rates and actually go across the board, bring down rates for everyone in America, but also limit deductions and exemptions for people at the high end, while you can keep the progressivity in the code, you could remain revenue neutral and you create an enormous incentive for growth in the economy. 
   
   The Harvard study was done by economist Martin Feldstein, and he makes a very important decision in his paper. He writes, “I think it is very reasonable to say that people in that high-income group” -- by which means people making over $100,000 -- "are not the ‘middle class.’” 
   
   And so, under really, really unrealistic assumptions, he shows that the math can kind of work, but that Romney’s policies would mean a really big tax increase for people making between $100,000 and $250,000 in order to pay for a big tax cut on people making more than $250,000. But that’s okay, because people making over $100,000 are not in the middle class. 
   
   And Romney has been all over the place trumpeting this study, saying this study shows his math works out. But then ABC’s George Stephanopoulos caught him out: 
   
   GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is $100,000 middle income? 
   
   MITT ROMNEY: No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less. 
   
   For the record, I'm actually with Feldstein on this one: I think it's reasonable to say households making more than $100,000 are not middle income. But Romney disagrees with me, and with Feldstein. 
   
   So the study Romney is promoting -- the one he says is the study you should be looking at -- actually shows even under the most favorable assumptions possible, he’s going to have to raise taxes on the people he defines as the middle class. In saying that that study is credible, he has admitted he can't make his tax promises add up. And yet he constantly, repeatedly says the opposite. 
   
   Romney has clearly calculated that there aren't many people who read these analyses. If he just keeps saying his tax plan can cut taxes on the rich while cutting taxes on the middle class while not cutting taxes on the rich while not costing a dime, eventually, his version of this will come to be seen as the truth. And perhaps he's right. But the numbers show what they show. ||||| Mitt Romney is optimistic about optimism. In fact, it’s pretty much all he’s got. And that fact should make you very pessimistic about his chances of leading an economic recovery. 
   
   As many people have noticed, Mr. Romney’s five-point “economic plan” is very nearly substance-free. It vaguely suggests that he will pursue the same goals Republicans always pursue — weaker environmental protection, lower taxes on the wealthy. But it offers neither specifics nor any indication why returning to George W. Bush’s policies would cure a slump that began on Mr. Bush’s watch. 
   
   In his Boca Raton meeting with donors, however, Mr. Romney revealed his real plan, which is to rely on magic. “My own view is,” he declared, “if we win on November 6, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.” 
   
   Are you feeling reassured? 
   
   In fairness to Mr. Romney, his assertion that electing him would spontaneously spark an economic boom is consistent with his party’s current economic dogma. Republican leaders have long insisted that the main thing holding the economy back is the “uncertainty” created by President Obama’s statements — roughly speaking, that businesspeople aren’t investing because Mr. Obama has hurt their feelings. If you believe that, it makes sense to argue that changing presidents would, all by itself, cause an economic revival. 
   
   There is, however, no evidence supporting this dogma. Our protracted economic weakness isn’t a mystery; it’s what normally happens after a major financial crisis. Furthermore, business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly since the official recession ended. What’s holding us back is mainly the continued weakness of housing combined with a vast overhang of household debt, the legacy of the Bush-era housing bubble. 
   
   By the way, in saying that our prolonged slump was predictable, I’m not saying that it was necessary. We could and should have greatly reduced the pain by combining aggressive fiscal and monetary policies with effective relief for highly indebted homeowners; the fact that we didn’t reflects a combination of timidity on the part of both the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, and scorched-earth opposition on the part of the G.O.P. 
   
   But Mr. Romney, as I said, isn’t offering anything substantive to fight the slump, just a reprise of the usual slogans. And he has denounced the Fed’s belated effort to step up to the plate. 
   
   Back to the optimism thing: It’s true that some studies suggest a secondary role for uncertainty in depressing the economy — and conservatives have seized on these studies, claiming vindication. But if you actually look at the measures of uncertainty involved, they’ve been driven not by fear of Mr. Obama but by events like the euro crisis and the standoff over the debt ceiling. (O.K., I guess you could argue that electing Mr. Romney might encourage businesses by promising an end to Republican economic sabotage.) 
   
   You should also know that efforts to base policy on speculations about business psychology have a track record — and it’s not a good one. 
   
   Back in 2010, as European nations began implementing savage austerity programs to placate bond markets, it was common for policy makers to deny that these programs would have a depressing effect. “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect,” insisted Jean-Claude Trichet, then the president of the European Central Bank. Why? Because these measures would “increase the confidence of households, firms and investors.” 
   
   At the time I ridiculed such claims as belief in the “confidence fairy.” And sure enough, austerity programs actually led to Depression-level economic downturns across much of Europe. 
   
   Yet here comes Mitt Romney, declaring, in effect, “I am the confidence fairy!” 
   
   Is he? As it happens, Mr. Romney offered a testable proposition in his Boca remarks: “If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president’s going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy.” How’s that going? Not very well. Over the past month conventional wisdom has shifted from the view that the election could easily go either way to the view that Mr. Romney is very likely to lose; yet markets are up, not down, with major stock indexes hitting their highest levels since the economic downturn began. 
   
   It’s all kind of sad. Yet the truth is that it all fits together. Mr. Romney’s whole campaign has been based on the premise that he can become president simply by not being Barack Obama. Why shouldn’t he believe that he can fix the economy the same way? 
   
   But will he get a chance to put that theory to the test? At the moment, I’m not optimistic.
target: – Paul Krugman has long derided the "confidence fairy": a notion that government cuts will somehow spark more consumers and investors to buy. We're seeing another version of that fairy now, after learning that Mitt Romney, at his infamous "47%" fundraiser, also claimed that his election would offer an economic lift "without actually doing anything," thanks to "optimism about the future of the country." Instead of offering much in the way of policy specifics, Romney is "declaring, in effect, 'I am the confidence fairy!'" Krugman writes in the New York Times. Romney's wrong: For one thing, "business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly since the official recession ended." What's more, as the election has recently appeared to turn in President Obama's favor, "markets are up, not down, with major stock indexes hitting their highest levels since the economic downturn began." Of course, "Romney’s whole campaign has been based on the premise that he can become president simply by not being Barack Obama. Why shouldn’t he believe that he can fix the economy the same way?" Click for Krugman's full column, or over at the Washington Post, Ezra Klein breaks down Romney's tax plan and finds it would raise taxes on those he defines as middle-income.