Paul Ryan’s proposed budget plan has taken center stage with the weekend announcement that he is Mitt Romney’s running mate. There’s a problem for Romney, though: Much of the budget contains ideas notably different from the presidential candidate’s own proposals.
Appearing on PoliticsNation Monday, Washington Post columnist and msnbc policy analyst Ezra Klein said Ryan’s plan would “bring the top tax rate down a lot lower than Mitt Romney would. It’s a much more regressive tax cut than even Romney’s offered.”
Ryan’s plan would cut all taxes on investment income, effectively bringing Romney’s own tax rate down to a whopping 0.82%.
Romney surrogates like John Sununu are already backing away from the Ryan plan. Appearing on Hardball earlier Monday, Sununu emphasized the GOP ticket is Romney-Ryan, not Ryan-Romney.
Ryan also wants to increase defense spending. “One thing that’s really important to understand about the Ryan budget … before you can put a dollar toward deficit reduction, you’ve first got to pay for the defense spending,” Klein said, adding that Ryan’s proposed Pentagon budget is “hundreds of millions more than Obama has it.” “We have no idea how he pays for that, and it’s not clear he can actually get that money out of the tax code,” Klein said. Ryan’s tax cuts would cost between $4 trillion $5 trillion on top of the Bush tax cuts, though the vice presidential nominee reportedly told CBO scorers to just “just assume that my tax cuts don’t cost anything.” PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton distilled Ryan’s lack of explanation down to one directive: Just “assume that it’ll be alright.”
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