The Paul Ryan Fox News interview fallout continues-We're getting Tax Cuts No Matter What!

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent has a knack for noticing the "little things" politicians reveal in their zeal to convince, con and win over the low information voter.

Like the unpaid for Bush tax cuts, the Romney/Ryan plan is the same, but this time it'll work, trust them. Tax cuts will greatly reduce revenues by trillions of dollars, which will have to be made up with spending cuts. But "base line" stuff like that takes too much time to explain, time the public doesn't have?

A number of folks are having fun with Paul Ryan’s Sunday interview on Fox News, in which he declined to explain how the Romney/Ryan tax cuts will be paid for: “I don’t have the time, it would take me too long to go through all the math.” Jon Chait sees this as the latest sign that Ryan will “emerge from the race with his legend punctured.” But there’s another line from Ryan that is arguably just as revealing: Ryan explicitly admits that he and Romney would cut taxes even if they can’t make the math show that the tax cuts would be paid for. After Ryan’s remark about not having the time to do the math, Chris Wallace pressed Ryan this way:

WALLACE: OK, but let’s assume it doesn’t. The question is, what’s more important to Romney? Would he scale back on the 20 percent tax cut for the wealthy? Would he scale back and say, OK, you know, we’re going to have to raise taxes for the middle class? I guess the question is what’s most important to him in his tax reform plan?

RYAN: Keeping tax rates down. By lowering tax rates, people keep more of the next dollar that they earn. That matters. That is incentives. That’s pro-growth policy. That creates 7 million jobs. And what should go first...

WALLACE: So that’s more important than...

RYAN: That’s more important than anything. And more importantly, it’s not what deductions are in the tax code but it’s who gets them.

That is as clear a statement of priorities as you could want. Ryan admits that even if the math in their plan can’t work, that even if the tax cuts cannot be paid for by ending loopholes and deductions on the wealthy, he and Ryan would not scale back their planned tax cuts on the rich one penny. And don’t worry, this won’t explode the deficit, because just trust us, the revenues generated by the growth unleashed by the tax cuts will ultimately pay for the plan.

The consensus among many mainstream economists is that this is a “fantasy,” and as Jonathan Bernstein has noted, the same promise by previous GOP presidents has proven it to be magical thinking. The Tax Policy Center found, however, that it’s mathematically impossible. Romney sometimes deals with this by insisting the study is wrong.

But here Ryan allowed that even if the math explicitly indicates that the tax cuts cannot be paid for without raising middle class taxes — the condition Wallace laid down — the Romney administration would precede with the tax cuts, anyway. Good to know. Hopefully the priorities on display here will be exposed during the debates.