Ezra Klein in Bloomberg View on Romney's tax plan Klein outlines the analysis that the non-partisan Tax Policy Center ran on Mitt Romney's tax proposals and criticizes the Romney campaign's response. "No matter how hard the Tax Policy Center labored to make Romney's promises add up, every simulation ended the same way: with a tax increase on the middle class," Klein writes. "The tax cuts Romney is offering to the rich are simply larger than the size of the (non-investment) deductions and loopholes that exist for the rich. That's why it’s 'mathematically impossible' for Romney's plan to produce anything but a tax increase on the middle class."

Peggy Noonan in The Wall Str​eet Journal on the campaign Noonan has criticisms for both candidates this week. She has big expectations for Bill Clinton, now slated to speak in a prominent spot at the Democratic convention, saying he could give the campaign the narrative Obama cannot. Meanwhile, she adds to the fray her own critiques of Mitt Romney's trip abroad. Her final point: "People don't make the decision after Labor Day anymore. They're making their decisions now. They've been making them for months ... So everything counts, everything is important, and when a week passes when you do yourself no good, you do yourself some bad."

William Reilly in The Washington Post on fuel efficiency standards Mitt Romney recently suggested he might undo the Obama administration's gas-mileage standard, requiring cars have an average of 54.5 mpg by 2025. "This Republican says to Romney and the rest of the GOP leadership: Please don’t politicize a nonpartisan issue that the country has already resolved. The effort will probably backfire," writes Reilly, co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Energy Project. He goes into detail to argue that, "giving Americans more miles per gallon is good for our economy, our national security, the environment and our pocketbook."

Stephen L. Carter in Bloomberg View on inequality Economic inequality is at the center of this year's political debate, but Carter suggests we're framing it incorrectly. "Although the Gini index of income inequality has increased only slightly during the past decade, the rate of poverty has risen steadily, now standing at over 15 percent. In short, the moral dilemma of inequality arises not because some tiny number of people are too rich, but because some large number of people are too poor." Neither party talks as much about poverty as they used to, he says, and he echoes the arguments of Luigi Zingales, who focuses on education as the central solution.

Joshua Green in The Boston Globe on the Democratic demographics "After the election, white men will constitute a minority of the Democratic House caucus for the first time in history," Green writes. It's a trend that reflects changing demographics in the country, but that hasn't much affected the Republican caucus. "And because women and minorities view government differently, and want different things from it, than white men do, this change both tracks and exacerbates the partisan polarization that is consuming Washington."

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