As the Associated Press reported today, “Romney’s tax and spending plans don’t support his vow to dampen the debt fire.” But don’t tell that to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who said to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that Romney’s tax plan won’t blow up the deficit:

SCARBOROUGH: So you talk about Mitt Romney talking about how he’s going to be responsible. You look at Mitt Romney’s plans, though, you add them all up, the deficit goes up as much under Mitt Romney as it does under Barack Obama. You know, if you look at their plans, there’s not a big difference.

RYAN: Oh, there’s a huge difference. Are you kidding me?

SCARBOROUGH: At the end of the day Paul, how much is the national debt going to be reduced under Mitt Romney’s tax plans and spending plans?

RYAN: So, under Mitt Romney’s tax plan, he’s keeping revenues where they historically have been, which they actually rise from where they are now, just like our budget does.

Watch it:

But Romney has simply asserted that his tax plan will be deficit neutral, because he will limit tax deductions for the richest Americans, without laying out any way to actually achieve that end. He’s even admitted that this rather relevant part of his plan is missing.

And he hasn’t laid out the spending plans that would supposedly cut the deficit either. As the AP put it, “the closest [Romney] has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.”

Even if Romney actually followed through on his pledge to limits deductions for the rich, he would need 6.5 percent economic growth for the next five years to keep his tax plan from adding to the deficit. 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, meaning Romney would have to see the greatest growth of the post-war period simply to keep his tax plan out of the red.

Of course, this is just par for the course for Ryan, who pulled the same trick with the House Republican budget, pledging to close tax loopholes and limit deductions, but refusing to give any specifics.

The GOP’s reconciliation program, a result of the Budget Control Act that raised the nation’s debt ceiling last August, includes cuts to programs that help the poor, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Child Tax Credit, and the Social Services Block Grant, which provides money for various aid programs. The proposed cuts fail a “basic moral test” that all budgets should adhere to, Rev. Steven E. Blaine, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, wrote in the letter:

The proposed cuts to programs in the budget reconciliation fail this basic moral test. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it is the proper role of government to “make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on” (no. 1908). Poor and vulnerable people do not have powerful lobbyists to advocate their interests, but they have the most compelling needs.

As you pursue responsible deficit reduction, the Catholic bishops join other faith leaders and people of good will urging you to protect the lives and dignity of poor and vulnerable families by putting a circle of protection around these essential programs and to refrain from cutting programs that serve them.

As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, the GOP’s cuts would affect at least 28 million people, including 2 million who would lose SNAP assistance, 750,000 who would lose health insurance, and 23 million who would lose benefits from the Social Services Block Grant. All 47 million who receive SNAP assistance would face benefit cuts.

The GOP made deeper cuts than required to programs for the poor to preserve the nation’s bloated defense budget, but their deficit reduction efforts are miniscule compared to their attempts to preserve massive tax cuts for the rich. Republicans announced last week that they wouldn’t pay for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, meaning they have chosen to sacrifice beneficial programs for the poor to cut the deficit, while upholding tax breaks for the richest Americans.

Under the Republican plan, millions of Americans would lose access to services they depend on. Nearly two million would lose food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); at least 750,000 would lose access to health insurance from cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act; and 23 million would be affected by the repeal of the Social Services Block Grant, which helps fund child care and disability assistance to low-income Americans, among other programs.

As the following graphic shows, however, the GOP’s deficit reduction hysteria is little more than an effort to gut social programs while protecting massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans:

The number of Americans affected by the Republican cuts is actually higher than the graphic shows. While the GOP plan kicks 2 million people off of food assistance, all 47 million who receive SNAP payments will see reductions in benefits. The estimated number who will lose health insurance under the Republican plan is likely higher, and the number of Americans affected by the repeal of the Prevention and Public Health Fund is unknown. Cuts to financial regulatory agencies like the CFPB will also affect an untold number of Americans.

While Republicans push these cuts in the name of righting America’s balance sheet and staving off a debt crisis, their efforts are miniscule compared to their push to extend budget busting tax cuts for the rich. By promising last week that they will offer a full extension of the Bush tax cuts — at a 10-year cost of $2.4 trillion — without offsetting the cost, GOP leaders assured Americans that their deficit-reduction efforts will never be achieved.

When it comes to the budget-busting Bush Tax Cuts, however, the story changes. Both the 2001 and 2003 versions of the Bush Tax Cuts expire at the end of 2012, and when the House GOP attempts to permanently extend the cuts later this year, they won’t offer a plan to pay for them, The Hill reports:

House Republicans say they have no plans to pay for the extension of the Bush-era tax rates, a move that could erase the deficit reduction they have achieved since winning their majority in the chamber in 2010.

The lawmakers also said that Republicans had always intended for the rates on income and capital gains, enacted during former President George W. Bush’s first term, to be permanent.

“From my perspective, you’re setting tax policy on a permanent basis, long-term basis,” said Rep. Tom Reed (N.Y.), a freshman Republican and member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. “It’s not a pay-for situation. It’s just strong policy that needs to be adopted.”

As The Hill notes, “It is Republican Party orthodoxy that tax cuts do not need to be offset because of the additional tax receipts they spur through economic growth.” As history has shown us, the Republican Party orthodoxy is wrong. The Bush tax cuts — at a 10-year cost of $2.5 trillion — did not inspire economic growth and instead blew a massive hole in the federal deficit, adding trillions of dollars to the debt. Without the Bush tax cuts, the dire debt situation Republicans insist is their top concern would actually be sustainable:

Aside from the debt, the economic costs of the Bush Tax Cuts were astronomical. With the money spent, the U.S. could have provided better health care, more student aid, and hired more teachers and public safety officials — thousands of which lost their jobs when federal and state budgets were crunched during the Great Recession. Even top Republicans have admitted that the GOP’s justification for the cuts — that they would create millions of jobs — was wrong.

Far from learning from their mistakes, though, Republicans are doubling down. The House GOP budget, passed last month, contains tax cuts that are even more heavily slanted toward the wealthy and would blow an even bigger hole in the federal budget.

Blahous’ accounting assumed Medicare spending would simply cease once the Medicare trust fund runs out. This would render the ACA’s spending cuts to Medicare moot, while its spending in other areas would remain — and thus severely worsen the ACA’s effect on the deficit. But Medicare isn’t the only government program with a trust fund that may soon run out. If Blahous’ logic is applied consistently to the entire federal budget, it radically changes the country’s overall debt path, as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget discovered when it ran the numbers:

By Blahous’ accounting, debt as a percentage of GDP would drop to almost zero by 2050. That’s essentially equivalent to the drop predicted by Paul Ryan’s latest “Path to Prosperity” budget. If Blahous’ accounting framework is accurate, there is no long-term debt problem and thus no need for the GOP’s 2013 budget proposal.

This, of course, is nonsense . And nothing demonstrates this point better than the fact that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and the Republicans didn’t use this baseline in measuring the cuts to the deficit in their own budget. They relied on the CBO’s method: Once the trust funds run out, Congress will continue the spending that keeps the relevant programs going because our society has a demonstrated commitment to maintaining the social safety net for retirement, health care, and so forth. This is largely what creates the future debts everyone is so concerned with in the first place. That much more realistic baseline is the one against which the CBO measured the ACA, and found that it does lower the deficit.

-Zachary Bernstein

But Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who chairs the House Budget Committee, told Bloomberg TV today that he finds the GOP candidates’ plans “very credible,” before he went on complain about the Obama administration’s budget for increasing deficits too much:

Very credible. They are talking about entitlement reform. They are putting specifics on the table on Medicare and Social Security reform. The president, knowing that these are the big drivers of our debt, is ducking it. He gave us a budget that increases spending about $1.5 trillion and has a tax increase of $1.9 trillion. So out of the $47 trillion he is planning over the next ten years, he only wants to deliver about $400 billion of deficit reduction– is a scintilla of deficit reduction. It is ignoring the program, punting, ducking the issue. It’s the fourth budget from the president. It is not serious. We need serious leadership, and both of these candidates have put very credible, specific, serious plans on the table.

Watch it:

Ryan then dismissed the Tax Policy Center analysis showing that Romney’s planned 20 percent reduction in tax rates and repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax would increase the debt by $3 trillion, claiming that Romney has “base broadening” that will offset the cost. Romney has made the same claim, but has yet to provide any specifics about what sort of tax provisions he’ll eliminate. Simply put, his plan’s math doesn’t add up.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Romney’s plan would increase debt to 96 percent of GDP by 2021, unless he actually follows through with his offsets, at which point it would go to 86 percent. Santorum’s plan, meanwhile, would bring it to 104 percent of GDP. The Committee’s “realistic baseline” for the debt projects it going to 85 percent of GDP by 2021. So all of the GOP candidate’s plans (except for Ron Paul’s) make the debt projection substantially worse.

Ryan, of course, has plenty of experience with budget-busting economic plans, so perhaps its not surprising that he finds the latest offerings from the GOP candidates so enticing.

I think we may err, and I would include myself in this as I say “we,” in being a little bit too eager to promote some of those rare projects on the Right. It was very hard for me because I love “Atlas Shrugged” the book. “Atlas Shrugged,” the movie… I couldn’t believe that so many on our team contrived to like it. Because it was not a successful film, it wasn’t good. So I think to that extent, partially, the Right-wing stuff is very often very ad hoc and it’s a one-off. Which is why it’s so remarkable when something comes outside… way outside the system of extraordinary high craft-quality, let alone artistic quality. Like “The Passion of the Christ” or even “Fireproof.” “Fireproof” was not a masterpiece, it’s not an Oscar-worthy film. But it was emotionally, I think, an interesting film and sound and reasonably well-crafted.

He cites as two examples of movies he really loves Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, particularly noting the latter’s focus on the immigrant experience. I’d really love it if the latter in particular could be remade or updated and embraced by conservatives and liberals alike, though I suspect there’d be less conservative sympathy for the immigrants if they were Latino rather than European and undocumented rather than products of Ellis Island. And Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is really more an anti-corruption movie than a Democratic or a Republican one.

While these two movies might not be fantastic proof, it is true that conservative ideas and decently-crafted filmmaking aren’t inherently incompatible. I thought there were a lot of things that didn’t work about Act of Valor, but the movie did really reinforce for me that if we’re going to send people away from their families to do extremely dangerous things on our behalf, they may have to live by an alternate set of values than my own to get through it. You can sell forceful projection of American military force through action movies, or fiscal responsibility through family comedies. There are a lot of options for pairing ideas with genres, and a lot of people you can hire to make dialogue sing rather than thud. You don’t have to make a movie bad to make it authentically conservative.

Former Gov. John Engler (R-MI)

Today on ABC’s This Week, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI) noted that Romney’s tax plan would exacerbate income inequality while causing the deficit to explode. Former Gov. John Engler (R-MI) responded by dismissing the numbers, saying that “voters aren’t analysts”:

GRANHOLM: Every analysts who’s looked at, for example, Mitt Romney’s tax plan, says it exacerbates income disparities. Even the deficit, between $2 trillion and $6 trillion he adds to the deficit.

ENGLER: Voters aren’t analysts. Voters are emotional, and it’s about leadership. And they know what they’ve got. If they like that, they can vote to keep it.

Watch it:

Romney’s tax plan would cost four times as much as the Bush tax cuts, reducing revenue to a paltry 15 percent of GDP, a level far below that which was raised the last time that the federal budget was balanced. And Romney can’t even keep straight what his plan does to the taxes of the richest Americans, saying on the same day that he would raise them and cut them.

“The President and his party’s leaders have fallen short in their duty to tackle our generation’s most pressing fiscal and economic challenges,” claimed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). “By contrast, the new House Majority has fought to put the brakes on the President’s spending spree.”

However, as Center for American Progress Director of Tax and Budget Policy Michael Linden noted, CBO was projecting a surplus for 2012 as recently as 2007, and plummeting federal revenue — not the GOP’s imaginary “spending spree” — is responsible for the lion’s share of the swing from surplus to deficit:

Most of that swing from surplus to deficit was the result of the Great Recession’s onset. Between September of 2008 and January of 2009 alone, economic conditions prompted the CBO to revise estimates of 2012 revenue collections downward by over $240 billion. [...]

The remainder of the deterioration did happen after 2009, but higher spending wasn’t even close to the main culprit. The real problem was lower-than-expected revenues.

In January 2009, the CBO forecast 2012 revenues at $3.1 trillion. Today, the CBO expects that this year’s revenue will be just $2.5 trillion, a nearly $600 billion difference. That revenue decline accounts for fully 48 percent of the swing from projected surplus to current deficit.

And while some of that decline has to do with continued economic weakness, the majority of it, about $335 billion, is the direct result of the tax cut deal signed into law in December 2010. That deal, which extended all of the Bush tax cuts, even those that exclusively benefit the very wealthy, is the legislative factor by far most responsible for this year’s deficit.

It was Republicans who insisted that the Bush tax cuts be extended for everyone in 2010, even during a time of record deficits. Not only is revenue the main factor behind today’s deficit, but it’s also the driver behind projected deficits:

As we’ve noted, a do-nothing Congress could virtually eliminate the deficit by simply not extending a slew of expiring tax breaks at the end of the year.

Not only that, but as the Tax Policy Center found, Santorum’s plan would blow a $1.3 trillion hole in the budget, gutting federal revenue by about 40 percent:

The Santorum plan would reduce federal tax revenues substantially. TPC estimates that on a static basis, the Santorum plan would lower federal tax liability by about $1.3 trillion in calendar year 2015 compared with current law, roughly a 40 percent cut in total projected revenue. Relative to a current policy baseline, the reduction in liability would be about $900 billion in calendar year 2015.

“I was surprised at how large the revenue losses were,” said TPC’s Roberton Williams. “It’s a lot of rate cuts and doesn’t get rid of anything to help pay for that.”

The average tax cut for a millionaire under Santorum’s plan would be nearly $448,000. For the richest 0.1 percent of the country, the tax cut would be worth $1.3 million annually. Santorum often complains that the deficit “is exploding,” but his plan would do nothing to turn around the nation’s budget woes, instead spending trillions to cut taxes for those at the very top of the income scale.

“We’re about to release 30,000 prisoners in the state of California because we can’t house them in a humane way,” said Executive Producer James Duff. “Last year in pursuit of the death penalty, the state of California spent $172 million.”

This, of course, is true—Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget is projected to bring the state’s deficit down to $9.2 billion, which is not small potatoes, and leaves the state with a long way to go. And that fiscal crunch and prison overcrowding are a tremendous problem that has a real impact on how people carry out their duties, whether it’s prison guards using different tactics on maintain control on unit, or the situations in which prosecutors are willing to cut deals and how they think about probation versus jail time. It’s intelligent to have a show acknowledge that, and to draw its drama from the ongoing structural problems of the state. It’s not exactly Tony Kushner’s East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, which is about the reasons California is broke and the tax-dodging mentality that crops up like an infectious disease. But it’s still a decision that reflects a sense of both time and place, that actually makes use of the fact that the show is happening in California instead of just being there because it’s easy.

An expanding workload and cuts in funds have left the Internal Revenue Service unable to adequately perform either of its primary duties — collecting taxes and providing the public with reasonable service, according to a report released Wednesday by the I.R.S.’s internal monitor.

The agency’s staff reductions and backlog have limited its ability to collect the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that the government is owed but not paid, Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate, said in her annual report to Congress.

In the report, Olson noted that, due to budget cuts, the IRS “is unable to maximize revenue collection, contributing to the federal budget deficit.” “It will never be possible to eliminate the tax gap entirely, of course, but even modest improvements would help to reduce the federal budget deficit. Moreover, even apart from the fiscal implications, the size of the tax gap raises important equity concerns,” the report added.

The latest data shows that there is a $385 billion gap between the taxes owed to the U.S. and those collected, meaning close to 15 percent of federal taxes went unpaid. There would have to be a $3,400 “noncompliance surtax” paid by every tax compliant household, in order “to enable the federal government to raise the same revenue it would have collected if all taxpayers had reported their income and paid their taxes in full.” The IRS, meanwhile, estimates that every dollar spent on enforcement brings in $4-$5 dollars of additional revenue.

For the past year, Republicans have doggedly insisted that the nation’s deficit is a crisis that eclipses high unemployment. But they’ve only been willing to reduce the deficit through drastic spending cuts — and have denounced Buffett for saying tax increases on the rich need to be part of the solution.

Last fall, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that if Buffett was feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check to the Treasury. Now, Buffet says he’s willing to do just that to pay down the national debt — if Republicans will do their part too:

The billionaire investor, in the new issue of Time magazine, says he will donate $1 to paying down the national debt for every dollar donated by a Republican in Congress. The only exception is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell – for whom Buffett said he would go $3-to-$1.

The idea stems from a New York Times opinion piece Buffett wrote last August in which he said the rich ought to pay more taxes. It sparked an instant controversy, with some Washington conservatives calling on the 81-year-old “Oracle of Omaha” to voluntarily pay extra.

“It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” the Berkshire Hathaway CEO told Time…

McConnell certainly has the resources to meet Buffett’s challenge — he’s worth at least $10 million. Buffett went on to say that the U.S. needs a system that “takes very good care” of citizens who work hard but don’t happen to make millions in the financial sector.

Romney’s economic plan includes a $6.6 trillion tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits the rich and corporations. As a result of this gargantuan giveaway, the plan “would yield approximately $6.5 trillion in deficits from 2013 through 2021.” And as the Tax Policy Center found, Santorum’s plan doesn’t fare much better:

The Tax Policy Center has not yet formally modeled the former Pennsylvania senator’s tax platform. However, because it cuts rates significantly but does not eliminate tax preferences—and even expands a few—it would very likely add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit. Looked at from that prism, it is not so different from the ideas raised by most of his GOP rivals.

Like other Republican tax planks, Santorum’s would benefit corporations and high-income individuals. No surprise there. But unlike his rivals, he’d also cut taxes for many families with children.

Santorum is no bleeding heart, however. Even as he’d cut their taxes, he’d shred direct government spending for programs aimed at assisting these same households.

When it comes to economic policy, the GOP field is largely in lockstep, supporting new, huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations and opposing efforts to ensure that millionaires can’t pay lower taxes than middle-class families. That kind of end result fits right in with the economic beliefs that Santorum holds, as he’s said that he is “for income inequality” and believes that the country’s economic woes are the result of “huge moral failings.”

The senators claim that these reductions are simply “real, sustainable spending cuts.” However, as McClatchy reported, about 70 percent of the deficit reduction in DeMint’s plan is placed right onto the backs of low-income Americans:

A plan by Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina to slash the federal budget deficit would hit the poorest Americans especially hard, directing 70 percent of its $4.2 trillion in spending cuts at safety-net programs intended to help tens of millions of low-income people.

The plan proposes $20 billion in cuts that would affect the affluent. It suggests almost $3 trillion in cuts that would affect low-income Americans, leading one liberal economist to call the plan “cruel.”

“It’s cruel,” said Andrew Fieldhouse of the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s inexcusable to cut supports that help those adversely affected by the economic downturn.” Alan Viard, who was on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, added that “this plan places a disproportionate burden on low-income groups.”

Even with tax revenue at a 60 year low, DeMint proposes no new revenue other than from one-time sale of government assets, which is obviously not a sustainable revenue source. Interestingly, he also does nothing on Medicare, even while walloping Medicaid and means testing Social Security.

This is hardly the first time that DeMint has been the right-wing id on economic policy, as he also put forth the Senate Republican stimulus plan, which consisted of nothing but huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. He simply shows what the right-wing would do if it had absolute control of the budget: gut the social safety net while largely sparing the richest Americans any pain.

All of us are going to give a little something if we’re going to get out of the hole we’re in. Everybody’s going to see something different…I think it’s better for us to take the pain that we’re going to have to take and make sure it’s meted out in the proper order than take much more severe pain. When I talk to my colleagues on the other side, and some of my closest colleagues are the most liberal, I find them more intellectually honest oftentimes, the very people they want to help, unless we change these [government programs] now are the very people who are going to get hurt if we don’t fix it.

Watch it:

Coburn is absolutely a staunch conservative with whom we disagree on most budgetary issues, but to his credit, he has consistently said that new revenue needs to be a part of any realistic deficit reduction package, acknowledging what the vast majority of his Republican colleagues won’t. He has said it’s “pretty stupid and naive” for Republicans and anti-tax zealots like Grover Norquist to think that a budget deal won’t include new revenue, accurately pointing out the depths to which government revenue has plunged in recent years.