The American Spectator

Charlie Rangel has quite a tax plan for you. Rudy and Romney roundly criticize it.

But their agreement ends there. Romney sends around this on his Massachusetts record. Rudy responds with an email by taking issue with Mass. growth figures during Romney's time, his failure to lower the top corporate tax rate and his use of the phrase "closing loopholes."

On this last point they have a point. Romney uses this phrase in debates and in a letter to the Boston Herald Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom yesterday wrote: "He balanced the budget all four years he was in office without raising taxes, and instead of losing thousands of jobs every month, we were adding thousands of jobs every month. Corporate loophole closings are not tax increases. When companies use the law to avoid taxes in a way that was never intended, that's a loophole and we closed them. That's called tax enforcement."

Now critics will argue that this simply isn't correct. Enforcement is enforcing existing laws and "closing loopholes" means changing the laws so the government gets more money. ( Even Charlie Rangel knows what "closing loopholes" means.)