Math on Romney tax plan does not add up

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan make a lot of appealing promises about their tax plan. They claim they can cut everyone’s taxes, keep the middle class tax breaks and increase defense spending without cutting our Medicare or Social Security benefits or exploding the dreaded deficit they continuously claim is going to destroy America as we know it. These promises are about as real as a herd of unicorns. In other words, Romney and Ryan are selling you a fairy tale.

Their promises are as fake as the non-existent “six studies” they claim support their faulty math:

Of the six studies, two are blog posts by the conservative American Enterprise Institute; one is a report by the Republican-friendly Heritage Foundation; one is a paper by Princeton professor and former George W. Bush adviser Harvey Rosen; the fifth and sixth are a Wall Street Journal op-ed and blog post by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, an adviser to the Romney campaign.

In addition, not all the studies appear to reach the same conclusion as Romney. …

Feldstein, for instance, concludes that the numbers add up if effective taxes rise on incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, even though Romney has ruled that out. Rosen, for his part, makes the math work by omitting part of the revenue losses and assuming huge economic growth effects from tax reform.

To this day, Romney and Ryan adamantly refuse to give specific details on their magic math even though it’s so obvious that their numbers don’t add up; even Fox News is challenging them. But if they told you exactly what they intend to do, you wouldn’t vote for them. Also, they couldn’t make these outlandish claims anymore because the bottom line is, no matter how hard they spin, the math on the Romney/Ryan plan just doesn’t work as they promise.