Mitt Fails At Math

Mitt Romney's new tax plan is, in a word, horrendous.  James Kwak deconstructs it over at The Atlantic:

According to yesterday's bullet points, Romney wants to cut all tax rates by 20 percent, meaning that the top income tax rate, which is currently scheduled to rise from 35 percent (George W. Bush, 2001) to 39.6 percent (Bill Clinton, 1993), would instead fall to 28 percent.

There are several things about this plan that are either loony or deeply misleading. One is the claim that it would "address the debt crisis" because it will be paid for by $500 billion in spending cuts by 2016. But the only proposals mentioned would (a) repeal the Affordable Care Act (increasing deficits, since the ACA has been scored as deficit-reducing); (b) convert Medicaid to a block grant (no deficit impact); (c) increase government efficiency (yawn); and (d) cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for "younger generations" (no impact until well after 2016). In other words, it's a complete fantasy.

There's a shocker.  Mitt's latest plan is not only Laffer-lympics taken to the nth degree, the number don't add up because, well, they can't.

The bottom line is that if, like Mitt Romney, you want to cut tax rates by 20 percent, eliminate the estate tax, and eliminate the AMT, it is arithmetically impossible for the top 1% to pay anything close to their current effective tax rate. 

So yes, Mitt literally fails at math.  And this will benefit him with Republican primary voters, because let's face it, they don't want to believe in facts anyway.