The Serious Paul Ryan Says He'll Explain His Budget After the Election

     I just don't know what the world is coming to now. How can I believe in anything if not that Paul Ryan is the most serious man in the country and also the most bold and the most courageous?

     He was supposed to imbibe this campaign with the New Seriousness that makes David Brooks swoon. And yet what have we learned from Ryan so far? Not much more than we learned from Romney which was zip.

    "It’s official: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have both confirmed in interviews that they will not be revealing the specifics of their tax plan before the election. Which is another way of saying that these two self-styled deficit hawks have no intention of revealing how their plan would actually pay for itself, rather than explode the deficit, until they’re in the White House. Voters — and, presumably, the news media — are expected to take this on faith. How will the press respond?"

    "Romney made this explicit in his new interview with Fortune magazine, when asked for specifics about how he’d make his tax plan — which cuts taxes across the board in ways that disproportionately benefit the wealthy — pay for itself:

QUESTION: Specifically what tax loopholes would you close and what exemptions would you eliminate to make the revenue-neutral equation work?

ROMNEY: Simpson-Bowles laid out a formula that shows that you can do just as I described. That you can bring down the rates, limit deductions and exemptions for people at the high end, and with additional growth that comes by virtue of the stimulative action you can reach a balanced budget. I will follow a model similar to Simpson-Bowles and work with Congress to identify which of the alternative methods we should apply to reduce deductions, benefits, and exemptions. Those reductions will occur for people at the high end. I have noted before my commitment to preserve tax preferences for middle-income taxpayers such as homeownership, charitable giving and health care.

     "The actual work of making the plan revenue neutral will be done “with Congress,” i.e., it won’t come until Romney is in the White House. Meanwhile, on Fox News, Ryan was asked to answer the charge that the Romney/Ryan plan would inevitably lead to a higher tax burden for the middle class:

BRIT HUME: Will we soon see a plan that’s specific about which loopholes to close?

RYAN: That is something we think we should do in the light of day, through Congress, unlike how Obamacare was passed.

      "Ryan’s answer to this perfectly valid question is to shout “Obamacare” and hope no one notices that he didn’t actually answer it. But the Tax Policy Center study found that the only way to make Romney’s plan revenue neutral is to close loopholes that would end up raising the middle class’s tax burden. Romney, in the Fortune interview, attacked the study for making “garbage assumptions.” But in addition to the fact that those assumptions are as generous as possible to his plan, the assumptions were made necessary by Romney’s own refusal to specify what loopholes and deductions he’d eliminate to make his plan revenue neutral. Now

     "Romney and Ryan have both confirmed that they see no need to do this until after the election. "
Ryan is widely accorded the designation of being fiscally “courageous” and “serious,” on the strength of his repeated warning that the country faces fiscal apocalypse. He repeatedly vows that the Romney-Ryan ticket won’t duck “tough choices” in getting the country’s fiscal house in order. But both are explicitly confirming that they see no need to tell us what those “tough choices” will be until after the election. Needless to say, this is by definition neither courageous nor serious. Could this be made any clearer?

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-the-romney-ryan-tickets-deficit-fraudulence/2012/08/15/493946ea-e6c3-11e1-8f62-58260e3940a0_blog.html

    So this is what a serious campaign looks like? Why does it seem depressingly like the previous, unserious one" Could it be that seriousness is an overrated virtue?

    Romney still hasn't gotten around his disconnect where he thinks it's acceptable to say 'Elect me and I'll tell you what I'm going to do after the election.'

    Ryan was supposed to introduce seriousness into the campaign. Now the Bold One is ducking questions like he's Mitt Romney or something.