Romney thinks you're stupid, you are if you invite Bush back into your home

Imagine you just hosted a big neighborhood gathering. Everybody came over, ate the food, drank the beer and left the typical big old mess. Then, on top of that, you realize that one sketchy neighbor, whom you really never trusted in the first place, got a hold of your laptop while everyone was distracted by the festivities and hacked into your bank account wiping it out.

As though the theft itself wasn't bad enough, not only could you not get law enforcement's attention but as you're falling behind in various payments and losing your home, the neighbors for some alternate reality reason all pitched in and decided to help the thieving neighbor because he'd blown through his ill-gotten and is now teetering on bankruptcy.

Now, would any right-thinking person expect you to .. or even ask you to ... invite this miserable soul to your next get-together? I'd think not. But former governor Romney thinks you should and, remarkably, that you would offer such thievery re-entry to your home. 

 In May of 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president on a platform of extravagant tax cuts for all, his campaign did something that would be considered remarkable today: it submitted his tax plan to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, to see how much all those tax cuts would cost the Treasury.

The bipartisan committee ran through the details provided by the campaign and predicted that the tax plan would cost about $1.3 trillion over nine years, an underestimate but a clear sign of its high price tag. With the budget in surplus at the time, Mr. Bush didn’t dispute that cost, and never tried to pretend that the cuts would be free. Within a decade, in fact, they would turn out to be the biggest factor in the huge deficit he created.

Twelve years later, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, claims his far deeper tax cuts would have a price tag of exactly zero dollars. He has no intention of submitting his tax plan to the committee or anywhere else that might conduct a serious analysis, since he seems intent on running a campaign far more opaque than any candidate has in years.

Romney's message to voters? We decide, you abide.