$3 Trillion Here, $3 Trillion There - NYTimes.com

OK, $2.9 trillion. Anyway, pretty soon you’ll be talking about real money.

Richard Rubin and Stephen Sloan direct us to a new Tax Policy Center assessment of the tax cuts in the Ryan plan (all, repeat all, of which go to top incomes and corporations) which has been posted but not yet advertised on the TPC home page — you have to know that it’s there.

The people at TPC are careful to say that this is not a full assessment of the Ryan plan, because

The proposed resolution includes measures to broaden the individual and corporate tax bases, but lacks sufficient detail for an estimate including those provisions.

I’ll say. In fact, the proposal says it will broaden the tax base, but says nothing whatsoever about how. And it would take an awful lot of broadening to make up for the revenue losses, which are estimated at $2.9 trillion.

To be fair, $370 billion of that is taxes associated with financing health care reform, which Ryan and co. want to repeal; but then again, CBO says that repealing health care reform would add more than $230 billion to the deficit, so it’s pretty nearly a wash.

As Rubin and Sloan point out, even completely eliminating the mortgage interest deduction wouldn’t be enough to close more than a fraction of the gap.

And what does the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee have to say? His spokesperson says,

The pro-growth tax reform proposal included in Chairman Ryan’s budget proposal is both revenue neutral and holds revenue at historical norms.

I believe that translates as, “We believe in voodoo. Also, arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias.”

Looking at this massive tax cut — NOT taken account of in the CBO estimates — might almost make you think that (a) the Ryan plan would actually increase the deficit and (b) the whole goal is not to reduce the deficit, but to transfer income upward. In fact, it so happens that the estimated cost of those tax cuts is almost exactly equal to the proposed cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs helping lower-income Americans.

But none of that can be true. After all, the guy has won an award for fiscal responsibility.