Wallace is trying to do something that Ryan is not used to: ask him how the numbers in his plan add up. The Romney tax plan is premised on a mathematical impossibility. It promises to reduce tax rates by 20 percent and cover the lost revenue by eliminating tax deductions, exempting tax breaks for investment income. Even making a series of assumptions ranging from friendly to impossibly friendly, it cant add up. The lost revenue from the tax rate cuts on income over $250,000 exceeds the available revenue from eliminating deductions. Even Republican attempts to disprove this finding have inadvertently confirmed it.
In the interview, Wallace tries to walk through the facts with Ryan. He begins by asking about the cost of the rate cuts, which is about $5 trillion over a decade. Ryan refuses to answer the question. He tries various tricks to avoid it. First he pretends Wallace is asking a different question that hes asking about the net cost of the entire plan, rather than the gross cost of the rate cuts. He cracks jokes about the unreliability of statistics. He filibusters by making a speech about economic growth.
Wallace asks the question seven times, and Ryan fills one minute and 48 seconds avoiding it. Finally, the final time Wallace asks Ryan to give him the math, Ryan asserts, It would take me too long to go through all the math. There was plenty of time if he hadnt spent two minutes dodging the question! In any case, the math doesnt take a long time to explain, but Ryan doesnt want to explain it, because it would reveal unavoidable and unpopular trade-offs in the campaigns tax plan that hed rather conceal.
A person who thinks highly of Ryan, or who notes the sudden souring of his media coverage, might suspect that the problem lies in the fact that he is now defending Romneys plan rather than his own. But that is not the case. Ryans plan is worse. His would cut tax rates lower than Romneys (the Ryan budget would reduce the top tax rate to 25 percent, against the 28 percent Romney proposes) and rather than hold rates on investment income constant, he would eliminate all taxes on investment income. Taxes are one of the many black holes in the Ryan budget. He asked the Congressional Budget to score his plan as if it held revenue at a constant level, and the CBO basically said, well, okay, if you say so, but Ryan never comes close to saying how he would fill in the trillions of dollars of missing revenue that would require.
And nobody has ever asked him. Because Ryans role in the budget discourse was not to be questioned, but to question others. If he was asked to comment, it was to express his sadness over Obamas alleged unwillingness to enact the bipartisan debt plans that Ryan in fact killed.
Ryan is still an extremely skilled bullshytter vastly better at it than Romney. But hes actually seeing, for the first time, questions that attempt to pry information out of him, rather than the batting practice lobs to which hes accustomed. Hes going to emerge from the race with his legend punctured.
