Brace yourselves, folks—former Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has just dropped a fiscal bombshell that’s rattling conservative cages.
According to Fox News, in a striking essay published in the New York Times on Friday, December 19, 2025, Romney calls for wealthier Americans to shoulder a heavier tax burden to confront the nation’s spiraling debt crisis.
Romney, once a standard-bearer for GOP fiscal restraint, argues that the national debt’s sheer scale demands a dual approach of spending cuts and revenue hikes.
His stance is a sharp departure from the typical Republican playbook, which often hammers on slashing budgets while shielding high earners from tax increases.
“And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more,” Romney declares in his essay.
Well, that’s a plot twist—here’s a multimillionaire waving the white flag on tax breaks, but let’s not pop the champagne just yet; progressive agendas often use such rhetoric to justify blanket tax hikes that hit everyone.
Romney insists that neither side of the aisle has the full answer, critiquing both unchecked spending and blind budget slashing.
“DOGE took a slash-and-burn approach to budget cutting and failed spectacularly,” he writes, pointing to past missteps while warning against Europe’s high-tax, high-spend model that stifles growth.
Sounds like a fair jab—reckless cuts can gut essential programs, but let’s not pretend taxing the rich alone fixes a culture of fiscal irresponsibility that’s been festering for decades.
Turning to spending, Romney zeroes in on entitlement reform as the only meaningful way to curb the federal outflow.
He’s blunt that without reining in these programs, no amount of budget trimming elsewhere will avert the looming financial “cliff.”
That’s the hard truth conservatives have long championed—entitlements are the elephant in the room, and ignoring them is just kicking the can down a very short road.
On the revenue side, Romney targets what he calls “caverns” or “caves” in the tax code, far beyond mere loopholes, as a prime source of untapped funds.
He paints a vivid hypothetical with Elon Musk, noting how massive estate gains escape capital gains taxes at death due to the “step-up in basis” provision, letting heirs dodge taxes on billions in profits.