Vice presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz gave voice to the frustration of millions when she pressed Rep. Paul Ryan for the details of the tax plan he and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney are proposing. The plan calls for keeping all the George W. Bush tax cuts in place, plus cutting individual income tax rates by an additional 20 percent, all supposedly without adding to the deficit.

Let's talk about this 20 percent," Raddatz said. "You have refused yet 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?"

Romney and Ryan say they would accomplish their prodigious feat by reducing tax deductions and loopholes used by the rich and through the stimulus effect of tax cuts have on economic growth. What the nominee and his running mate won't identify is which loopholes they'd close or how they would reduce deductions. They know their numbers won't add up unless their proposed changes include eliminating popular deductions for things like the interest charged on mortgages and student loans and deductions for state and local taxes.

When the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center analyzed the Romney/Ryan plan, it concluded that it was impossible to lower rates that much in a revenue-neutral way solely through measures that target the wealthy. Instead, the center concluded, the across-the-board tax cuts would have to increase the burden on the middle class while providing a tax bonanza for the well-off. People who make $1 million or more per year would see an average tax cut of more than $256,000, the center concluded.

To recap: Romney has proposed a 20 percent across the board income tax cut, to cut corporate taxes, and repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, among other things. He claims that he will make up the lost tax revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in the tax code. This is where the $5 trillion dispute comes from about Romney's tax plan—his tax cuts are projected to cost around $5 trillion. He argues that it's not fair to characterize his proposal as a $5 trillion tax cut because—you'll have to take his word on this—he's going to offset it by closing loopholes.
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Romney's math doesn't work. Tax loopholes have become the modern equivalent of wasteful spending--a generic and vastly overestimated pool of money politicians can cite as offsets for their expensive policies. The Congress's nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that if you repealed all itemized deductions from the tax code (as in goodbye mortgage interest deduction), it would only pay for a 4 percent cut in tax rates.

And more specifically to Romney's plan, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (whose findings the Romney campaign used to tout), has run the numbers and figured out that the wealthy don't currently get enough breaks in the tax code to pay for the Romney tax cuts. In order to pay for the cuts middle class taxpayers would have to lose expenditures—more than offsetting the tax breaks they would see.

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And while Romney and Ryan have talked about a half-dozen independent "studies" which defend his tax plan, they are actually not studies at all—rather they're three blog posts, an op-ed, and a couple of white papers, one of which was written by Romney's own economic advisers. Oh, and they don't actually back up his plan, according to The Atlantic's Matthew O'Brien.

So understand that while Romney's goal sounds good, it's straight out of campaign fantasy land.

While discussing the U.S. health care system, Romney amazingly and wrongly said that Americans don’t die for lack of health insurance.

“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’” he said.

“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

Oh yes we do, Mr. Romney. This nation has millions of people who become ill because they can’t afford preventive medicine. We have sick people who can’t get well because they can’t afford medications. We have people who live in pain because they can’t pay for treatments.

And yes, Mr. Romney, we have people who die sooner than they should because they don’t have insurance. Different studies have placed the number from 18,000 to nearly 45,000 people a year.

“He is ignorant of the facts,” said Sharon Lee, a physician and chief executive of Family Health Care, a clinic in Kansas City, Kan. “I see patients all the time who die or have very high morbidity because of a lack of insurance.”

Paul Ryan finally had enough time to go through the math of the Romney tax plan during the vice-presidential debate. He didn't use it. Ryan filibustered instead. About the most specific he got was citing "six studies" he said vindicate the plan's mathematical plausibility.

Except they don't.

Romney's tax plan is a three-legged stool that doesn't stand. Here's how it works -- or doesn't. Romney wants to 1) cut tax rates across the board by 20 percent, 2) cut tax expenditures to pay for these tax cuts, and 3) maintain progressivity. The problem, as the Tax Policy Center pointed out, is there aren't enough tax expenditures for the rich to pay for all the tax cuts for the rich. Romney's plan only works if he cuts out the tax cuts for the rich, raises taxes on the middle class, or explodes the deficit. In other words, Romney can pick two, and only two, of his tax goals -- what Matt Yglesias of Slate calls the "Romney Trilemma".

That sound you hear is the three-legged stool falling down.

All this hasn't stopped a fight against the tyranny of arithmetic. The defenses of the Romney tax plan generally fall into three broad categories. The first assumes the plan will set off magic growth of the monster variety; the second assumes Romney defines "middle-class" differently than he does; and the third assumes Romney would eliminate tax expenditures he has indicated he would not eliminate. Let's briefly consider the six such "studies" that Ryan cited -- most are actually blog posts -- in turn.

Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his allies are banking heavily on a high-risk, high-reward media strategy in the final weeks of the campaign, hoping that burying President Obama in ads will give them a crucial edge on Election Day.
Ad purchases in the presidential race doubled or in some cases tripled last week in swing states such as Colorado, Florida, Iowa and Virginia, tracking data show. The surge is being driven by Romney and well-funded allies, who decided against running more ads earlier in the campaign in favor of a big bang at the end.

Restore Our Future, a super PAC dedicated to helping Romney, has booked $14 million worth of ads in nine states for the final week of October — more than it spent on ads during the month of September. The group is also ramping up its spending, airing a mix of ads criticizing Obama and extolling Romney in Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia.

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The ramped-up advertising by Republicans left Obama behind his GOP foes in total ad expenditures last week for the first time since the summer, though he has massive cash reserves after raising $181 million in September. Obama and his key outside ally, the Priorities USA Action super PAC, have kept up a steady barrage ads attacking Romney in Ohio and other battlegrounds.

That Willard Romney is a preposterous candidate for either party to run three years after his general social and economic class nearly burned down the world economy always was a given. That, in the intervening years between his two presidential campaigns, Willard Romney really has become quite a remarkable liar is something to which we all should have become accustomed by now. (It certainly shouldn't have startled the president as much as it obviously did last week.) That he would attempt to "pivot" away from the stances he took to win the Republican primaries was as inevitable as the dawn, especially given the previous two factors we've mentioned. When it is argued that he is running a "post-truth" campaign, this should surprise approximately nobody. However, I am rather stunned that the quote from the primary debates that seems to be most revelatory of the Romney campaign was the answer he gave when poor, unfortunate Rick Perry asked him about the undocumented immigrants who once trimmed the hedges at the Romney family manse.

"I'm running for office, for Pete's sake, I can't have illegals."

This is not just lying or fudging or flip-flopping, although it contains elements of all of these. It is the same impulse that has fueled his (apparently successful) refusal to disclose fully his tax returns. It is the same impulse that led him to say what he did in the debate about his health-care plan and pre-existing conditions, and then have his campaign dispatch Eric Fehrnstrom to the spin room to declare precisely the opposite.

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This is altogether stunning. All candidates soft-pedal positions that they feel might cost them votes. (Romney's running mate is something of a past master at it.) All candidates lie, or fudge, or flip-flop with something like abandon in order to win an election. But what Willard Romney is saying to the electorate here is so deeply, profoundly cynical that it seems to me to be unprecedented. In essence, this is what he's selling to the country.

"I'm not giving you specifics because I might lose the election, and I'm telling you that right up front so you can make it part of your calculation about voting for me. If I tell you what I'm going to do, you will vote against me. I know that. You know that. We are in agreement that, if I lay out my policies in clear and unambiguous language, you will not vote for me. If I tell you explicitly that, yes, your mortgage-interest deduction is going up the spout so I can shovel a few zillion more quatloos toward the Pentagon, nobody who owns only one house ever will vote for me. So, no, I'm not going to tell you what loopholes will be closed. For that reason, and that reason alone, I am declining to tell you what I will do as your president.

"I am not refusing to do this because circumstances in office may make me go back on what I have promised. I am not George H.W. Bush. I am not refusing to do this because I have to clue what I will do if I win. I am not George W. Bush, either. I am doing this because my policy ideas will make me unpopular and therefore, I am not going to share them because the opposition may use them to say mean things about me and help me lose the election. We all are in agreement on that. I am not required to do anything that might jeopardize my chances, and that includes telling you people what I will do if you elect me, because I'm running for office, for Pete's sake."

Conservative lawmakers have attempted, for decades, to cut federal funding for public broadcasting, arguing that they have a liberal bias.

One of Newt Gingrich's first acts as speaker of the House in 1995 was to call for the elimination of federal funding for CPB, and for the privatization of public broadcasting. Neither attempt was successful, though it did keep the hot-button issue in the limelight for years.
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In 2005, a House subcommittee voted to drastically cut CPB funding, and eliminate all of it within two years, a move many blamed on Tomlinson himself.

"Republicans have never been fond of public broadcasting. Republicans have always thought that public broadcasting across the board is liberal, is not particularly supportive of Republican and conservative points of view," Sterling said. "Democrats tend not to think that, unless they're from very conservative districts."