Senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie was caught off guard Wednesday when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked him how long Romney’s budget proposal would take to balance the national budget:

BLITZER: How many years would it take for the Romney budget to result in a balanced budget?

GILLESPIE: Uh…Wolf, I’m not sure of that myself, actually. I’ll get that to you though and I’m sure it’s on our website. I should know it and I’m embarrassed on your air that I don’t have that number at the top of my head. I didn’t know we were going to talk about that today. I apologize. I should have prepared for that question. I didn’t know you were going to ask.

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Gillespie didn’t have the number on hand because, as Romney himself said in March, his budget plan “can’t be scored” and is missing key details about which deductions it would eliminate. Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan failed to answer the same question a day earlier, telling Fox News’ Brit Hume, “I don’t know exactly what the balance is. I don’t want to get wonky on you, but we haven’t run the numbers on that specific plan.” In sum, Romney’s plan is “mathematically impossible.”

The Romney budget requires even harsher cuts in entitlement programs than Ryan’s radical House-endorsed plan. Ten-year cuts in spending would range from one-third deeper than those in the Ryan budget to almost twice as deep as the Ryan cuts, with potentially disastrous consequences for low-income and middle class Americans — including taking food stamps away from as many as 13 million people.

During an interview with Fortune magazine that was published today, Mitt Romney said that he would eliminate federal funding for Amtrak as one of his cuts aimed at balancing the budget:

So first there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to strand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.

This is certainly not the first time that Romney has singled out Amtrak for the budget cutting knife. “Amtrak ought to stand on its own feet or its own wheels or whatever you’d say,” he told a crowd earlier this year. But, leaving aside that the cuts Romney highlights are not going to get him anywhere close to balancing the budget, Romney intends to slice Amtrak funding at a time when funding for rail service is more necessary than ever.

Amtrak announced earlier this year that it is on pace to break the ridership record it set last year. By 2040, Amtrak “Amtrak said traffic in the [Northeast] corridor could reach 43.5 million passengers, almost four times the level today.”

However, as the New York Times noted, Amtrak desperately needs some upgrades: “Most days, trains in the Northeast are full. Several locomotives and railcars are 30 years old or more. Aging rails, bridges and tunnels hold down top speeds and limit expansion of the network.” America’s freight train infrastructure is also deteriorating.

Already, the National Association of Railroad Passengers has warned that cuts to Amtrak that are being pushed by House Republicans “would be tantamount to shutting down the entire Amtrak network, because the remaining routes could not cover the system’s overhead costs.” Obviously, eliminating Amtrak’s funding entirely would have much farther reaching consequences.

Vice President Joe Biden said yesterday during a speech that a Romney administration would “let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street.” “He is going to put y’all back in chains,” Biden added.

During an interview on CBS Wednesday, Romney was asked for his reaction to the comment. Romney responded by claiming that Biden’s charge is “factually inaccurate” because “nobody is talking about deregulating Wall Street”:

ROMNEY: Of course, we have to have regulation on Wall Street and on every street to make sure that our economy works well, so it’s factually inaccurate to begin with. [...] The comments of the Vice President, as I heard them, were one more example of a divisive effort to keep from talking about the real issues. Look, no one is talking about deregulating Wall Street.

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But Romney, on many occasions, has called for the repeal of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, the first significant reform of the nation’s financial system since the Great Depression. In it’s place, all Romney’s economic plan calls for is a “streamlined regulatory framework.” The only specific aspects that Romney says he would implement are already in Dodd-Frank, which Romney admits in his plan.

Meanwhile, the House Republican budget written by Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), dismantles key parts of the Dodd-Frank law. The GOP budget would render the government once again incapable of dismantling a failing financial firm, forcing it to resort to the same bailouts employed in 2008. Until Romney provides an alternative, his plan is nothing but deregulation of the sort that led to the 2008 financial crisis in the first place.

The Romney campaign spent last week claiming that the Obama administration is trying to “gut” the welfare reform law of the 90s. The Romney camp portrayed the administration as removing the work requirements included in that law, when all the administration did is offer states waivers to design new work programs if they choose.

During an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd today, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad continued the parade of falsehoods, continually claiming that the administration single-handedly weakened work requirements in the welfare law, despite Todd’s protestations:

BRANSTAD: We reformed welfare in the 1990s, now the Obama administration’s trying to undo the work requirement.

TODD: Wait a minute, Gov. Branstad, I can’t let that go. They haven’t done that. [Crosstalk] You leveled a charge about the welfare work requirement. It turns out that’s not true. Where did you get your information?

BRANSTAD: It absolutely is. I was one of the governors that helped get it, and when we passed it, it was designed not to be waived. And now the President of the United States has, by executive order in July, weakened that which was very effective.

TODD: The waivers are for state governors. The waivers are for you. [...] If governors weaken it to a certain point, the federal government yanks the waiver. [...] Nothing about this issue, every charge that has been leveled about this welfare reform order that the president signed, every accusation that has been leveled by some Republicans have been proven to be not true.

BRANSTAD: Well, the fact of the matter is that the president did it. He didn’t have to take this action to weaken the strong work requirement that was passed.

TODD: It doesn’t weaken it…The works still there, governor, it’s still there.

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Former President Bill Clinton, who signed the welfare reform law, called Romney’s charges “disappointing” and “not true.” CBS’s AdWatch added, “It’s a leap to assume that governors and legislators will seek to return to ‘plain old welfare’ and that the Obama administration will give them the go-ahead.”

When he wasn’t lying about how the welfare waivers would operate, Branstad was praising the 90s welfare reform law, which, in reality, has rendered aid programs incapable of getting funds to those who need it most in an economic downturn. Welfare aid used to reach 75 percent of families living in poverty, but during the heart of the Great Recession, fewer than 30 percent of impoverished families received help.