How Toxic Will Paul Ryan Prove To Be For Congressional Republicans Next Month?

Short of picking a deranged Bible thumper like Bryan Fischer or Todd Akin as a running mate, Romney couldn't have dealt the GOP a worse blow than his selection of Wall Street darling Paul Lyin' Ryan. Last week we looked at how he hurt his own chances of winning the White House. Now it looks like it was Ryan who gave Romney the idea of castigating 47% of Americans, even if Ryan's own percentage of Americans he wants to throw away is "just" 30%. Ryan's own elitist dogma-- never forget his entire so-called philosophy comes straight from Ayn Rand's adolescent novels extolling elistism-- found fertile ground in the mind of the foundationless, souless Mitt Romney. But what about Congress? Is Ryan's toxicity killing his colleagues in Congress too? After all, virtually all of them voted for his plan to end Medicare and Medicaid in order to lower taxes on the wealthy.

And Ryan is supposed to be the intellectual gian of the pair-- or even of the party! The intellecual giant who went on TV-- FOX News now less!-- and, when asked a simple softball question about the math behind his absurd claims that his plan is "revenue neutral," he looked at the camera and said, without blinking, that he had no time to discuss the numbers behind the most radical redistribution plan in American history. Too bad if you want to understand how Ryan's Reverse Robin Hood budget really works. "I don’t have the time," he told a startled Chris Wallace. "It would take me too long to go through all of the math. But let me say it this way: you can lower tax rates by 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class. For things like charitable deductions, for home purchases, for health care. So what we’re saying is, people are going to get lower tax rates." Huh?

Ryan and Romney, snake oil salesmen that they are, claim "time will tell," what their plans are. Shouldn't we know that before we vote for them? Even Republican voters are owed that respect. And Catherine Rampell at the NY Times endeavored to do the math for Ryan after his bungled appearance on Fox. 

There’s a reason why it would take too long-- infinitely long, you could say-- to go through the math that holds this policy proposal together: because math will never hold this particular policy proposal together.

You cannot lower tax rates as much as Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan propose to do and keep all the existing tax expenditures for middle class Americans and still end up with the same total amount of tax revenue.

As the Tax Policy Center demonstrated, cutting individual income tax rates by 20 percent from today’s levels would reduce tax burdens by $251 billion per year (in 2015) among households with income above $200,000.

If you leave preferential tax rates for savings and investing (e.g., long-term capital gains and dividends) untouched, as Mr. Romney has said he would do, that leaves only $165 billion of available tax expenditures that can be eliminated from this same group of high-income earners once their marginal tax rates fall.

That means there’s an $86 billion shortfall-- the difference between $251 billion in tax cuts and $165 billion in potential tax increases on this high-income group-- that needs to be accounted for somewhere.

By process of elimination that somewhere must be the rest of the population, the 95 percent of households earning less than about $200,000 annually.

The taxes for this group, which Mr. Romney has called “middle income,” would have to go up. The only ways to get the taxes collected from this group to go up would be to raise their rates (which Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have already ruled out) and/or eliminate the major tax preferences they enjoy.

It’s arithmetically possible to achieve some subset of the main principles that the Romney-Ryan tax plan aims for: cutting current marginal income tax rates by 20 percent; preserving/enhancing incentives for saving and investment; eliminating the alternative minimum tax; eliminating the estate tax; maintaining revenue neutrality; and not raising the tax burden on the middle class.

But not all of those principles can coexist so long as basic arithmetic survives.

 Washington Post wonk Ezra Klein did the same thing and summed it up even more succinctly: "[T]he problem isn’t that the math on their plan takes too long to detail. It’s that the math on their plan can’t be done. Or, it can be done, but when you do it, you get answers the Romney campaign doesn’t like-- for instance, that the tax plan will either raise taxes on the middle class or add to the deficit... Whenever they brush against the specifics of it, that becomes very clear, very quickly. And so Ryan pretends that the policy is too complicated for the country to understand, when in fact it’s too flawed for him to explain."

OK... that might work with the hardcore Republican base... but what about normal people? You think anyone with a jo of sense is going to believe any of Romney's and Ryan's fairytales about closing loopholes on the wealthy. Both men  have records to look at. And Ryan is still desperately ducking and weaving every time someone brings it up:

Peter Cook: Let me ask you about one specific here. I’m going to try to pin you down on one that people talk about a lot, at least specifically on Bloomberg. Carried interest, the 15 percent tax rate on carried interest. Private equity managers, hedge fund managers take advantage of that. Under a Romney-Ryan administration, should they expect that’s going to go away?

Lyin' Ryan: Look, we can get into an arcane argument about the definition of income, but our interest is not taxing capital more. Taxing capital more means less savings in the economy, means less seed corn for small businesses for economic growth, and activity. By raising the tax rate on capital you hurt jobs.

But, as Think Progress pointed out, "The carried interest loophole allows wealthy fund managers to treat the income they receive for managing other people’s money as investment income, and thus have it taxed at 15 percent, instead of the top income tax rate of 35 percent. These managers aren’t taking a risk with their own money, yet they get treated like they are for tax purposes.

As Citizens for Tax Justice explained, carried interest 'is clearly compensation for services and not a return on investment,' and thus private equity managers 'should pay income taxes at ordinary rates on their compensation, just like everyone else.' Romney himself benefited from the carried interest loophole to the tune of $2.6 billion in lower taxes over the last two years. Yet neither Romney nor Ryan can bring themselves to call for doing away with this particular tax giveaway."

You would never know it if you pay any attention to the DCCC or the  Beltway pundits on their payroll, but Ryan is simultaneously running for VP and a congressional seat. The DCCC is studiously ignoring that this would be the time to get behind Rob Zerban's campaign to take him out once and for all. (You can help Rob do that here.) Rob, like many of us, was incensed at Ryan's non-answers about his and Romney's big plans to institute European-style Austerity that is beggaring the middle class in Spain, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Portugal, France and England. “The problem with Paul Ryan’s math," explained Rob, "isn’t that it would take a long time-- it’s that it doesn’t add up. If Ryan can’t even answer softball questions from Fox News, how can voters in Wisconsin expect him to answer their concerns on jobs, education, and Medicare? The bottom line is this: Ryan can dodge the media, but he can’t dodge the voters-- and that’s why he’s headed for a double defeat on Election Night.”