COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

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Jonathan Cohn, senior editor of The New Republic, talks with Rachel Maddow about Mitt Romney's shamelessness about his exorbitant wealth and support for keeping tax rates on the rich low.

MADDOW: For the past few months, we have been calling Mitt Romney Mr . 22 percent. That's because no matter what he did, no matter how many of his opponents self-emulated, Mitt Romney , poor guy, could never seem to get past roughly 22 percent in the polls. It was like an artificial ceiling that he couldn't breakthrough no matter what else was going on. Well, tonight, there is some exciting news for Mr. Romney . And some sad news for our nickname for him because he is no longer Mr. 22 percent. Here's what is happened to Mr. Romney's numbers recently. Over the last month, particularly over the past week, it's been ceiling be gone. He's no longer stuck down in the low 20s. Now all of a sudden , the ceiling appears to be gone, he appears to be clearing 30 percent for the first time . In the larger picture of this campaign, Romney appears to be cruising. And if you are the Romney campaign, you are excited to see the ceiling gone and the poll numbers starting to soar. But at the same time that Mr. 22 percent is being retired, Mr. Romney gave his campaign a new number to worry about today. If I were the Mitt Romney campaign, I'm not sure if I wouldn't prefer old Mr. 22 percent to the new guy he just brought on the scene. The new guy he just brought on the scene is named Mr. 15 percent.

REPORTER: What's the effective rate you've been paying? MITT ROMNEY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: What's the effective rate I have been paying? It's probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything because my last 10 years I've -- my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past rather than ordinary income or rather than earned annual income. I got a little bit of income from my book but I gave that all away and then I get speaker's fees from time to time , but not very much.

MADDOW: Mitt Romney today explaining that the personal tax rate he pays is probably pretty close to 15 percent. At the end of there when Mr. Romney said that his speaker's fees have earned him not very much money ? What counts as not very much money to Mitt Romney ? Is $374, 000, that's what he earned in speaker's fees in one year in 2010 . So, Mr. Romney describing that amount as, quote, 'not very much.' And did you hear what he said right after that?

ROMNEY: I get speaker's fees from time to time , but not very much.

MADDOW: An evil laugh for good measure, perhaps a monocle, how about a cane? Some wax to twirls the ends of your inky mustache? It's not very much money . Wow. The broader issue here, though, is not just the astonishing magnitude of Mitt Romney 's fortune and what he thinks is funny about it. The material issue is what Mitt Romney wants for the country and what he'd do to the country as resident. The top marginal tax rate now is about 35 percent. That's supposedly the tax rate that the richest people in the country pay. But if you're a master of the universe financier like Mitt Romney , you don't have to pay what other rich people pay. You get a special mini tax rate , 15 percent, lower than anything else who earns a paycheck in our country . The reason that the financiers mini tax rate is something that's widely known this year, is thanks in large part to billionaire Warren Buffet . Warren Buffet has attempted to essentially make a national scandal out of the fact that he, the third richest man in the entire world, pays a lower tax rate than his own secretary does. And when President Obama came out with a proposal known as the Buffet Rule to try to correct that, to try to get millionaires who earn their money off investments to pay a little more so they are not taxed substantially less than regular working Joes , guess who said he'd stand in the way of the buffet rule? Mr. 15 percent himself. Mitt Romney saying that getting billionaires to pay as high a tax rate as say their secretaries, he said was the last thing I want to do. So, welcome not next phase of the campaign, the Mitt Romney 's taxes phase. Whereupon the nation learns that Mitt Romney 's plan as president would be for guys like himself to keep paying their special mini tax rate of 15 percent, while everybody else, your fault for not being a master of the universe financier getting coddled by the system.

MADDOW: Joining us is Jonathan Cohn , senior editor of ' The New Republic ' and a senior fellow at Demos . Jonathan , thank you for being with us tonight.

JONATHAN COHN, THE NEW REPUBLIC: Thanks for having me.

MADDOW: I hope you will forgive me the evil laugh , I could not resist. I know you're more even handed than that. I don't think anybody begrudges Mitt Romney for being a super rich guy. But if he is the Republican nominee does the subject of special treatment for rich people in the tax code , special treatment for rich people broadly economically speaking does that move to the center of the campaign?

COHN: I certainly hope it does. And let's be clear why. Again, like you said, nobody begrudges Mitt Romney making a lot of money . He was obviously an extraordinarily successful businessman. He made a lot of money for investors and, you know, he deserves to be well-compensated for that. But right now in America , we have a tax code that inexplicably lets people like Mitt Romney get away with paying lower tax rates than secretaries and people and sorts of middle class people. And the crazy thing is, here we have Mitt Romney coming along, not only does he seem to think that's OK, he actually wants to make that imbalance worse. He has put a tax proposal that would give much larger benefits to the wealthy and actually depending how you calculate it and implements it you could see some poor people who after this year would see their taxes go up in the Romney tax plan.

MADDOW: Mr. Romney often gets credit for not being as far to the right as the rest of the Republican field. I know that you've been digging into his overall economic plan, his overall tax plan. Compared to something like the Bush tax cut proposals, compared to other familiar conservative policies -- is he deserving of the credit for not being that far right?

COHN: I don't think he is. And I think, you know, for me, the current benchmark for what I would consider a really dangerously radical proposal to downsize the government is the Paul Ryan budget , what Paul Ryan proposed that came out of the House Budget Committee . You may recall there was a lot of controversy over it and there should have been a lot of controversy over it. He was talking about draconian cuts, a lot of them would have gone in Medicare . And, frankly, you would have ended up in a situation where you have senior citizens who couldn't pay their medical bills. And all sorts of problems like that, not just for the poor but middle class . Well, if you look dollar for dollar and you look at Romney has thrown in the table, and he's proposed a spending cap and you look at the number of dollars he wants to take out of the federal budget , he actually wants to take more money out of the budget than Paul Ryan did. Now, he hasn't said exactly how he would do it but one way or another , you are going to see huge cuts to programs like Medicare , like Medicaid , and it's not just the social services we're talking about. We're talking basic functions of government here. Do you like the FDA inspecting drugs for safety? How about the Centers for Disease Control ? How about the FBI ? How about roads? Well, some combination are going to get massive cuts, if Romney were to become president and get to implement his plan.

MADDOW: Mr. Romney in political terms has said that any criticism of his time at Bain Capital and what he sees as criticism of his own wealth is just a function of envy, that people are jealous of him and that anybody using that in political context is essentially fuelling class warfare , is there a flip side to that in terms of what he is offering overall in terms of an economic package? Is Mitt Romney offering to make the 1 percent problem worse, or even in his own terms, does he think that he might make income and equality better, whether or not people agree with his plans how to get there?

COHN: Look, capitalism, people uses this phrase creative destruction. It's a messy process. There's competition and people are going to feel the effects of that. And I think we all understand that. It's part of the way the free market works. It's how you create more wealth. But the question is, what do you do about that? And that's really what's so troubling about Mitt Romney . He doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that if you're going to have an economy where people sometimes lose their jobs, where they can't pay their bills, then someone's got to step in and say, look, if you lose your job, we're going to take care of you, we're going to make sure you get unemployment benefits. And you know what? We're going to make sure you can't lose health insurance and we're going to make sure you have good public services. Romney isn't just saying we should have a free market , he's saying we should have a free market and if people suffer, if they lose their jobs, if they're -- well, you know, that's just too bad.

MADDOW: Jonathan Cohn , senior editor of ' The New Republic ' and a senior fellow at Demos -- Jonathan , it's great to have you here tonight. Thanks for being here.

COHN: Thanks for having me