Paul Ryan Still Can't Name One Tax Loophole Romney Will Close

Debate moderator Martha Raddath asked Paul Ryan how Mitt Romney will pay for his tax cuts. Ryan proceeds to provide a meandering response.

RADDATZ: Well, let's talk about this 20 percent. You have refused -- and, again -- to offer specifics on how you pay for that 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. Do you actually have the specifics? Or are you still working on it, and that's why you won't tell voters?

(Crosstalk) RADDATZ: Do you know exactly what you're doing?

RYAN: Look -- look at what Mitt Romney -- look at what Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill did. They worked together out of a framework to lower tax rates and broaden the base, and they worked together to fix that.

What we're saying is, here's our framework. Lower tax rates 20 percent. We raised about $1.2 trillion through income taxes. We forego about $1.1 trillion in loopholes and deductions. And so what we're saying is, deny those loophole and deductions to high-income taxpayers so that more of their income is taxed, which has a broader base of taxation...

Also in the absence of such base broading, TPC estimates that on a status basis, the Romney plan would lower federal tax liability about $900 billion in calendar year 2015 compared with current law, roughly a 24 percent cut in total projected revenue. Relative to a current policy baseline, the reduction in liability would be about $480 billion in calendar year 2015.

Romney would reduce the top tax bracket from 35 percent to 28 percent. The corporate tax rate would go down from 35 percent to 35 percent. The Tax Policy Center eliminated every possible tax loophole. The Tax Policy Center found that Romney's plan would increase the deficit. So much for the Romney plan being deficit neutral. Mind you, Romney and Ryan refuse to say what loopholes they would eliminate.

The Tax Policy Center found that the bottom 99 percent would not benefit from the Romney tax plan.

The result shown in the distribution tables would be little changed for the bottom 99 percent of tax units and the overall pattern of tax changes would be qualitively the same - the largest tax cuts as a share of after-tax income would go to the highest income earners.

The Romney plan has nothing to do with creating jobs or lowering the deficit. It is a giveaway to the richest Americans and corporations. This plan is so bad that Ryan has to cite American Enterprise Institute blog posts as studies that back his plans. Blog posts from a hack think tank are not studies.

Rednecks Against Obama

Southern conservatives explain they won't vote for Barack Obama because he is an "Arab" (false) and a n*&ger." These people are shit-faced drunk and vulgar. The woman thinks we are at war with Iran. That makes her about as savvy on foreign policy as the American Enterprise Institute.

Meet Rudy's Unfriendly Friends

Meet Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy advisors.

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

These guys are like Dick Cheney with a shotgun. Someone is eventually bound to get shot with these warmongers around.

Podhoretz is a longtime member of the neoconservative movement. This is is full statement on why he wants to bomb Iraq.

“Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians as I hope and pray we will. We’ll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest.”

Podhoretz prays that America will bomb Iraq. Think about the madness of that statement.



Michael Rubin was adviser on Iran and Iraq for Donald Rumsfeld. That alone should disqualify him from future public service. He will most likely serve in a Giuliani administration.

Daniel Pipes is against the Khalil Gibran International Academy being allowed to teach the Ababic language in Brooklyn. His reasoning is that the school will become a breeding ground for terrorism. His blog post is filled with faux-intellectual xenophobia. Which is what drives the neocon movement. It certainly isn't logic or reason.

Also, learning Arabic in and of itself promotes an Islamic outlook, as James Coffman showed in 1995, looking at evidence from Algeria. Comparing students taught in French and in Arabic, he found that "Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamist movement and greater mistrust of the West." Those Arabized students, he notes, more readily believed in "the infiltration into Algeria of Israeli women spies infected with AIDS … the mass conversion to Islam by millions of Americans," and other Islamist nonsense.

Pipes can not put his head around that America isn't Algeria. The United States is a democracy that does not have the social and economical problems of a third world nation. If this school really is a hotbed for terrorism the FBI would shut it down in a minute. It most likely already is being monitored by the feds.

No one should be surprised by Rudy's choice of advisors. He believe torture depends on which country performs the heinous acts.