via: romney2012

Benjy Sarlin at TPM explains how the budget math between Romney and Ryan is getting so twisted, that now Ryan says they won’t even discuss how they’d balance the budget before the election!

Ryan’s choice was intended to bolster Romney’s promise to cut spending. In a bizarre twist, however, the only concrete policy change since Ryan joined the ticket has been a new promise to reverse $716 billion of Medicare savings enacted under the Affordable Care Act, complicating an already fantastical promise by Romney to balance the budget within eight years.

[...] As for his long-term Medicare plan, Romney is even less clear. He disavowed Ryan’s 2010 proposal to privatize the program and dramatically cut seniors’ benefits over time to bring down the deficit. But once again, he’s refused to fill in the details as to how many savings he’d achieve with his own partial-privatization plan, making it impossible to judge its impact. [...] As the independent Tax Policy Center noted in a study last month, Romney’s promise to cut income tax rates by 20 percent across the board by eliminating tax deductions for the rich simply does not add up. Even under the most charitable estimates, the study concluded Romney’s approach would raise taxes for 95 percent of Americans on average while slashing them for the wealthiest Americans.

Romney called the study “garbage” Tuesday, but his new running mate confirmed this week that they would not release any more information before the election as to how they would pay for their plan instead. “That is something that we think we should do in the light of day, through Congress,” Ryan told FOX News. Continue…

Maybe Mitt will pledge to release his tax returns after the election too. Why not? He’s not going to talk about specifics of his budget until then. Romney wants everything he’s done or stood for off limits or he whines that Obama is engaging in “gutter politics.” Why discuss anything else at this point? This is quite the impressive team you have there, GOP.