Paul Ryan: Cut taxes first, balance budget later

Source: Washington Post

A number of folks are having fun with Paul Ryan’s Sunday interview on Fox News, in which he declined to explain how the Romney/Ryan tax cuts will be paid for: “I don’t have the time, it would take me too long to go through all the math.” Jon Chait sees this as the latest sign that Ryan will “emerge from the race with his legend punctured.”

But there’s another line from Ryan that is arguably just as revealing: Ryan explicitly admits that he and Romney would cut taxes even if they can’t make the math show that the tax cuts would be paid for.

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The Romney tax plan promises everyone an across the board tax cut, which would be paid for by ending loopholes and deductions, beginning with those enjoyed by the rich. Romney promises that the plan would be revenue neutral. The Tax Policy Center found, however, that it’s mathematically impossible to keep all these promises — the only way to pay for all those tax cuts is to target loopholes enjoyed by the middle class, ultimately hiking their tax burden. Romney sometimes deals with this by insisting the study is wrong and vaguely promising that he will, in fact, make the math work somehow, through negotiations with Congress — after he is elected president, of course.

But here Ryan allowed that even if the math explicitly indicates that the tax cuts cannot be paid for without raising middle class taxes — the conditional Wallace laid down — the Romney administration would proceed with the tax cuts, anyway. Cutting taxes is a more important short term policy goal in Romney’s plan than having it pay for itself. Indeed, Ryan’s claims, by any reasonable measure, represent a confirmed disavowal of the notion that the plan will be “revenue neutral,” if by “revenue neutral” we mean that the plan can be demonstrated to pay for itself up front.


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/paul-ryan-cut-taxes-first-balance-budget-later/2012/10/01/83313c38-0bf1-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_blog.html

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While many news outlets are noting Ryan's statements that the American people would get too bored to know about the details of Romney's tax plan, here the Washington Post notes that Ryan also admitted that Romney's primary objective is to implement the tax cut even if it explodes the deficit further. I guess if it turns out that the tax cut did not increase revenues (when does it ever), the Republicans can always demands the end to Medicare and Social Security.