The media should be acting like Vice President Joe Biden and responding to to Mitt Romney's campaign with "contemptuous laughter" because "it's not serious," according to Matt Taibbi.
"Every single day in the newspapers it should be, 'Romney-Ryan Tax Plan Still Makes No Sense,'" Taibbi, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, told Current TV host Eliot Spitzer on Spitzer's show "Viewpoint" Monday. "They're making this extravagant promise, they're saying, 'We're going to cut everybody's taxes by 20 percent, it's going to be like Fairyland,' and yet they're being treated as though it's a serious political campaign, and they should be [getting] slaughtered by the press for this."
The Tax Policy Center recently concluded that Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible without raising taxes on the middle class. Taibbi echoed this analysis on Current TV, saying that cutting deductions to help pay for a 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates would "disproportionately" hit the middle class and lower class, while helping the rich the most. But Romney and Ryan "haven't been forced to give those answers," Taibbi said.
Taibbi said that instead of questioning the Romney-Ryan tax plan, the press has been lionizing Paul Ryan.
"Paul Ryan serves his purpose to the mainstream media without making sense," Taibbi said on Current TV. "We have this tendency in the press toward characterizing figures so that we have the policy wonk on the right, the policy wonk on the left. They play these roles effectively on television. Whether or not they actually make sense is kind of irrelevant to most of the cable news programming. They just have to play the parts well."
Taibbi criticized the media's credulous coverage of Romney's tax plan in a recent blog post for Rolling Stone, where he wrote that "we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences."
(Hat tip: The Raw Story.)
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