Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s budget would add $10.7 trillion to the debt and reduce federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, exploding the “prairie fire of debt” Romney warned the nation about in a speech last week in Iowa.

Romney isn’t the only one decrying the debt while ignoring that his budget would make it worse. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), in an appearance on Fox News this morning, made the laughable claim that a budget that explodes the debt will simultaneously prevent a debt crisis:

RYAN: More to the point, though, the kind of budget Mitt Romney is talking about is one that prevents a debt crisis.

Watch it:

Ryan praised Romney’s 20 percent, across-the-board tax cuts that are paid for, he claims, by closing loopholes that primarily benefit the wealthy. The only problem with that, of course, is that Romney hasn’t laid out such a plan, and even if he did, it wouldn’t make up enough revenue to avoid adding trillions to the national debt.

This isn’t anything new from Ryan. Though he paints himself as a very serious person who is trying to reduce the debt, he authored the House GOP’s radical budget plan, which manages to add to the debt despite cutting spending on programs that help the poor and middle classes because, like Romney, he gives away trillions in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney used a speech in Iowa yesterday to blame President Obama for a “prairie fire of debt” that is supposedly spreading across the nation. Romney continued the assault today, giving a speech in Florida in front of a giant clock featuring a running total of the nation’s debt.

As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, Romney’s attack ignores that his own economic plan would add more than $10 trillion to the national debt. It also ignores Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, which had the nation’s highest per capita debt total when he left office in 2007.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (compiled by Connecticut’s chief analyst in 2009), Massachusetts had $10,504 in per capita bond debt in 2007, the highest total in the nation. No other state had more than $10,000 in per capita debt, and only one had more than $8,000. Massachusetts ranked second, behind only Alaska, in per capita debt as a percent of personal income, with debt making up more than 21 percent of each resident’s income.

State bond debt isn’t altogether a bad thing — it finances infrastructure projects and other programs that benefit state residents. But Romney’s accumulation of it while governor is an element of his Massachusetts story that he regularly omits.

Romney has painted the national debt as a moral crisis that “threatens what it means to be an American.” And yet, Romney’s past and his plans for the future prove that he isn’t actually willing to address it.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will return to Iowa today for the first time since the state’s January caucuses, where he will highlight the national debt and target President Obama for “add[ing] more than $5 trillion to it” — ignoring that the majority of the added debt since Obama took office is the result of Bush-era policies.

According to excerpts of his speech, Romney will lay out America’s responsibility to address the “prairie fire of debt” that “threatens what it means to be an American”:

Today America faces a financial crisis of debt and spending that threatens what it means to be an American. Here in the heartland you know in your hearts that it’s wrong. We can’t spend another four years talking about solving a problem that we only make worse every day. [...]

A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve. This is not a Democratic or Republican problem. That fire could care less if you have a donkey or an elephant in your front lawn, it’s still coming for your house. There’s plenty of blame to go around for both parties. But in my years leading businesses, an Olympics and a state, I’ve learned one simple principle of leadership that never falters: Leaders lead. I will lead us out of this debt and spending crisis.

There’s one major problem with Romney’s rhetoric: his economic plan makes the debt worse. Romney’s tax plan gives a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut to all Americans and repeals the Alternative Minimum Tax, costing $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing federal revenues to just 15 percent of GDP, according to Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden. Romney hasn’t offered a plan to pay for those cuts, instead simply asserting that he will balance the budget.

But balancing the budget under those terms would be next to impossible. Even if Romney limits tax deductions for the richest Americans as he says he would, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his plan from adding to the deficit. To put that in perspective, the best five-year period of growth since World War II was from 1961 to 1966, when the economy grew at 5.8 percent per year.

Income inequality surged onto the national political radar in 2011, as the 99 Percent Movement focused America on the fact that while the richest Americans’ incomes were skyrocketing, wages remained relatively stagnant for the lower and middle classes. American income inequality is now worse than it is in countries like Ivory Coast and Pakistan, and it may be even worse than it was in Ancient Rome.

That inequality has crushed the middle class and has perilous consequences for the American economy. It is also contributing to another problem: rising debt inequality. As income inequality has risen, the bottom 95 percent of Americans have fallen deeper into debt over the last three decades, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. The top five percent, meanwhile, have seen their personal debt reduced, CNN Money reports:

In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings.

The bottom 95% had incomes of roughly $160,000 or less in 2007, including capital gains.

And then there’s the top 5%. Their debt-to-income level actually fell during the same period, from 76 cents of debt for every dollar earned in 1983, to just 64 cents in 2007.

The contributors to rising income and debt inequality are clear — for the richest Americans, incomes are rising rapidly while tax rates have fallen to historic lows. The rest, however, are increasingly burdened by student loan debt as the cost of college soars, mortgage debt as the prices on their homes have plummeted, and credit card debt as they’ve tried to keep their head above water despite stagnant wages and rising unemployment.

And just as rising income inequality has hampered economic growth, rising debt inequality will threaten the nation’s future, experts say. Both times America had similar levels of debt inequality — in the 1920s and 2000s — crippling financial crises followed. And though the amount of debt held by the bottom 95 percent has shrunk since the end of the recession, that’s largely due to foreclosure and bankruptcy and shouldn’t be taken as a positive sign. “We’re still in similar levels of vulnerability as we were in 2008,” Michael Kumhoff, the report’s author, told CNN.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the GOP’s new budget this morning, and in doing so, he touted it as a plan to make America’s level of debt more sustainable. “We’ve shared with Americans a specific plan of action that cuts spending, pays off the debt and gets our economy back on the path to prosperity,” Ryan said.

The problem with Ryan’s rhetoric is that his plan fails to match it. By giving massive tax breaks to corporations and the top one percent and preserving unsustainable levels of defense spending, the House GOP’s plan to reduce the debt would fail to reduce the debt. In fact, because it assumes levels of revenue that are pure fantasy under his tax proposals, the plan would actually increase the debt, according to an analysis by Center for American Progress Tax and Budget Policy Director Michael Linden:

But the House budget’s entire claim to deficit reduction is built on the foundation of those fantasy revenue levels. Without them, the debt goes up, not down. In fact, with all the House budget’s tax cuts properly accounted for, revenue would average just 15.3 percent of GDP from 2013 through 2022, not 18.3 percent. The result: deficits would never drop below 4.4 percent of GDP, and would rise to more than 5 percent of GDP by 2022.

The national debt, measured as a share of GDP, would never decline, surpassing 80 percent by 2014, and 90 percent by 2022. By comparison, President Barack Obama’s budget proposal, released in February, would stabilize the debt by 2015, and bring it down to 76 percent by 2022.

As Linden notes, the GOP’s “debt reduction” isn’t just based on fantasy levels of revenue — it’s based on “massive, unrealistic” spending cuts as well. Medicaid would face $1 trillion cuts in the first decade, while education and workforce training programs would get cut in half and transportation funding would be reduced by nearly 25 percent. The plan, which also ignores previous deals and increases defense spending, would also require deep cuts in other vital domestic programs.

“If you agree it’s morally wrong to ignore the most predictable crisis in U.S. history, this is your budget,” Ryan tweeted yesterday. Apparently, though, it seems Ryan and his Republican colleagues got so wrapped up in creating a budget that benefits the top one percent, they forgot to actually reduce the debt.

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

2012 GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich is outdoing his Republican rivals in promising enormous tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans. According to an independent analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Gingrich’s plan would violate basic notions of fairness by requiring middle-class families to pay higher tax rates than millionaires.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with it. Gingrich’s plan is by far the most fiscally reckless plan to be released by a major 2012 contender. The magnitude of the tax cuts he is proposing to the wealthy and corporations would drive the debt to unprecedented and dangerous levels even if federal spending is cut drastically.

Gingrich has not proposed specific levels for federal spending, so to analyze the effect of his plan on the debt, we assumed that he adopts all of the draconian spending cuts in House Budget Committee Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget. Gingrich originally dismissed the Ryan budget as “right-wing social engineering,” but later said he would vote for it.

The spending levels in the Ryan budget are unrealistically and irresponsibly low. And yet Gingrich’s tax giveaways are so enormous that there wouldn’t be nearly enough revenue to fund even this extreme conservative vision of government.

The Gingrich plan would reduce federal revenues by $1.28 trillion below CBO’s baseline, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, resulting in revenues of about 13.2 percent of GDP. That is an absurdly low level. Unsurprisingly, therefore Gingrich’s plan would pile up debt shockingly fast. Ultimately, Gingrich’s plan would:

– Result in perpetual trillion-dollar deficits: The budget deficit is expected to be 6.2 percent of GDP in the current fiscal year, but projected to decline in the coming years. With Gingrich’s tax plan in place, however, deficits would be even higher in perpetuity. In the best year under his plan, fiscal year 2015, the deficit would be $1.2 trillion, or 6.6 percent of GDP. Annual deficits would continue to mount, reaching $2 trillion in just over a decade. Again, this assumes that drastic spending cuts also take place.

– Explode the debt to historic levels: Under the Gingrich plan, the publicly-held debt would double by 2019, and triple by 2024. By the end of a second Gingrich term as president, the debt would reach $25 trillion, or more than 100 percent of GDP. The United States will have added about $12.5 trillion in debt during that period, with no end in sight.

– Commit the United States to trillion dollar interest payments on the debt: By enacting a tax plan with grossly inadequate revenues, the U.S. would be committing to pay ever-increasing sums of money to creditors like China. Under Gingrich’s plan, by 2021 the United States would be paying more than $1 trillion every year just in interest on the debt. Interest on the debt would represent nearly a quarter of all government spending.

Of course, if Gingrich can’t get spending down to the Ryan level, his deficits would be larger and his debt higher. In short, Gingrich’s tax plan simply cannot be taken seriously. As fiscal policy goes, it is every bit as ridiculous as his nutty proposals to replace school janitors with child laborers or colonize the moon.