First, let's be clear. Republicans don't give a rat's behind about deficits or the national debt. Their hero Ronald Reagan tripled it, George W. Bush doubled it -- and Dick Cheney famously said that deficits don't matter. That Paul Ryan proposal Republicans love so much? Yep, it makes the debt worse.

All of that background makes this rather amusing indeed.

National Republicans, paired with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, will focus their attention this week on President Barack Obama's handing of the national debt, the groups announced Monday.

The effort will include a "major policy speech" from Romney, according to Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, who was part of a conference call announcing the effort Monday morning.

"Governor Romney will be in Des Moines tomorrow afternoon at Drake University to give a major policy speech and it'll be based on the out-of-control spending and debt," King said on the call.

First, there is no "out of control spending" -- that's a lie. Total government spending under Obama has decreased. The debt is where it is because taxes are at historic lows and revenues are even more depressed by the fact that we're still emerging from the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Second, if Willard is so worried about the debt, why does he want add trillions to it?

Romney proposed to cut federal income tax rates by 20 percent more for all earners, which would slash U.S. revenue by more than $2 trillion over 10 years.

Romney economic adviser Glenn Hubbard said the lost cash would be recovered by closing tax loopholes and boosting economic activity. But until the campaign offers a more specific plan, Budget Watch analysts said Romney’s entire framework would add about $2.6 trillion to the debt by 2021.

Proving, yet again, that Republicans don't care about debt and deficits.

You wish, just once, that a reporter would ask, "Governor, if the debt is such a problem, why do your tax proposals add trillions of dollars to it?" But that's probably asking too much.

Krugman calls out Times contributor Steve Rattner as a concern troll for his economic distortion of the "true" cost of the Affordable Care Act. (You may have heard the wingnuts parroting the so-called "study" on which this horse hockey is based all last week?) Krugman doesn't pull any punches:

The way to cut through the whole double-counting nonsense is to ask the following: did the ACA improve or worsen the fiscal outlook compared with what it would have been without the legislation? The answer is that it improved the outlook – the additional revenues plus cost savings outweigh the cost of the subsidies. End of story. Don’t take my word for it — that’s what Robert Reischauer, the good trustee, says.

So what about the alleged double-counting? That exists only in the minds of the trolls. The Obama administration has never claimed that a dollar of savings somehow counts twice.

Does it matter that some of the savings accrue to the Medicare trust fund? Not for the unified budget. And as it turns out, not for the non-trust-fund budget either, because everyone understands that Medicare will be supported out of general revenues when the trust fund is exhausted, so any savings on trust fund spending eventually redound to general revenues.

There’s nothing here, except in the tortured word games of people who are desperately looking for a way to make trouble.

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I'm not sure if Nancy Pelosi is playing smart politics or she's lost her mind. I'd like to think it's the former.

It's true, the Simpson-Bowles commission report has turned into something larger than a failed effort at deficit reduction. It has attracted a cult following among DC insiders, like Rep. Jim Cooper, who has lionized it as That Thing That Should Have Passed But Didn't, as if they actually agreed on the recommendations.

So Nancy Pelosi does an interview with Charlie Rose, who has apparently joined The Cult of B-S (Bowles-Simpson), and Rose pushes her all over the place on the Grand Bargain during the debt ceiling debacle, before pushing her hard on The Great B-S report, and after endorsing it as having "good bones," she says this:

The Republicans and Democrats -- it was bipartisan -- brought a version of Simpson-Bowles to the floor last week, but it was more of a caricature of Simpson-Bowles and that's why it didn't pass. If it were actually Simpson-Bowles I would have voted for it.

Really? She would have voted for something that touched Social Security even though Social Security isn't even a budget or deficit problem? Why? She would have raised the Medicare age because why?

Here's something I learned from David Corn's new book, Showdown: Senate Democrats were told at an early 2011 strategy session that voters were focused on deficit reduction and they'd better be too.

But the lawmakers had left Washington not to relax but to cogitate on the issues they would confront in the coming year. One session that would stick the most with many of them was not led by a policy expert but by Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who had one major point to impart: you have to be serious about deficit reduction or the voters will not listen to you.

Garin based this warning on polls and focus groups, that showed voters supporting deficit reduction as the major pathway to job creation. We can thank right-wing message muddling for that misunderstanding, but nevertheless, there it is. As Corn put it:

They had imbibed the GOP message: the problem with the economy was governmental red ink.

And that message led to the bottom line:

But Garin measured voter perceptions, not whether voters were correct. And he told the senators that voters would not listen to what the Democrats -- including the president -- had to say about jobs and investments if they did not sense that the Democrats were willing to wrestle the debt monster to the ground.

Clearly the Senators heard this, as did the White House, which is why there was the laser-like focus on the deficit. Not that it made a difference, since in the long run, it just doesn't matter what Democrats do. If they're for it, Republicans will oppose. In everyday life, we call that "oppositional defiant disorder." In politics, it's just standard operating procedure.

So when you hear Nancy Pelosi talking about the Grand Bargain in these terms, think in that context, and then think about her conclusion:

"It was a way to say we are serious about this, we can govern. And they walked away from that."

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Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney unveiled what he has repeatedly deemed a "bold" plan to deliver a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. As it turns out, the plan isn't so bold after all. For starters, it's largely a retread of the 15 percent tax cut scheme Bob Dole rode to defeat in 1996. And after a wave of analyses showed Romney's plan would produce oceans of red ink while giving the rich yet another payday courtesy of the U.S. Treasury, Mitt admitted today that his plan "can't be scored" because "I haven't laid out all of the details."

As The Hill reported today, the GOP frontrunner is now essentially claiming he deserves an "A" because the dog ate his homework:

"So I haven't laid out all of the details about how we're going to deal with each deduction, so I think it's kind of interesting for the groups to try and score it, because frankly it can't be scored, because those kinds of details will have to be worked out with Congress, and we have a wide array of options."

As Ezra Klein's Wonkblog rightly concluded:

"Let's be clear on this: A tax plan that can't be scored because it doesn't include sufficient details is not a plan. It's a gesture towards a plan, or a statement of intended direction, or perhaps an unusually wonky daydream. But it's not a plan."

Romney's may not be a plan, but it is a recipe. At a time of record income inequality, the lowest federal tax burden in 60 years, and large budget deficits without listing all of his ingredients, Mitt Romney is just offering a recipe for exploding national debt and a windfall for the wealthy.

As the Washington Post explained in its discussion of an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, "until the campaign offers a more specific plan, Budget Watch analysts said Romney's entire framework would add about $2.6 trillion to the debt by 2021." That's likely a conservative estimate. As ThinkProgress and the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery and Ezra Klein documented, Mitt Romney's risky new scheme makes George W. Bush look like Karl Marx:

Romney's claim that his plan would promote job and economic growth while reducing the deficit is also likely false. The Bush tax cuts were promoted under the same guise, only to blow a $2.5-trillion hole in the federal budget that was accompanied by worst performance of any post-war expansion" for growth in investment, GDP, and job creation. Romney's tax cuts are even more expensive, clocking in at a cost of more than $10.7 trillion over the next decade and reducing revenue to a paltry 15 percent of GDP, according to Linden. Balancing the budget on those terms, as Romney claims he will do, would be next to impossible.

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Credit: Wall Street Journal

Among the predictable Republican reactions to the President's proposed 2013 budget is the refrain that "Obama has failed to keep a 2009 promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term." Just days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told a CPAC audience that President Obama "said he'd cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term," ABC's Jake Tapper dutifully announced "Obama's broken deficit promise." And today, the RNC debuted a new ad in which a supposedly betrayed voter warns, "President Obama, you broke your promise. I'll never forget that."

Of course, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that in 2004 President George W. Bush promised - and failed - to halve the federal budget deficit by 2009. As it turns out, Bush broke his pledge even before the economic cataclysm of 2008 that triggered the TARP bank bailout, sent government revenues plummeting, and required President Obama's rescue programs that saved the U.S. from "Greet Depression 2.0."

As he faced reelection in 2004, George W. Bush famously committed to cut the deficit in half by 2009. As it turned out, the budget Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama didn't even get close to that target. The FY 2009 budget Bush proposed in February 2008 called for a deficit of roughly $400 billion, almost identical to the result in 2004. But that January 2004 promise, as the Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times among others noted at the time, was premised upon two parallel frauds. As Perrspectives explained four years ago:

First, Bush's pompous prediction used as its baseline a wildly inflated White House deficit forecast of $521 billion, well above the CBO's estimate and the actual figure of $413 billion. More importantly, President Bush conveniently chose 2009 as his finish line, the year before his tax cuts were set to expire. Making them permanent (which he and all of the GOP presidential candidates endorse) would blow another $2.2 trillion hole in the federal budget by 2014.

(It's also worth noting, as the Obama administration has this week, that Bush's budget plans always understated the real deficit, because they routinely failed "to account for the costs of the wars in Afghanistan, the cost of preventing cuts to Medicare doctors, and the price of staving off an expansion of the alternative minimum tax.")

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Let's just get this out of the way up front: The administration acknowledges that President Obama's promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term will not happen. So yes, it's a broken promise. Blame Wall Street for that.

Via Washington Post:

In a written message to Congress, Obama issued a passionate election-year call for increased spending to bolster domestic manufacturing, lure jobs back from overseas, hire teachers, retrain workers and rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. He drew a sharp contrast with his Republican opponents, arguing that his approach “rejects the ‘you’re on your own’ economics” that envision tax cuts for the rich and a frayed social safety net for everyone else, and “have led to a widening gap between the richest and poorest Americans.”

The President's budget proposal calls for big investments in infrastructure, education, and jobs programs with cuts to discretionary spending. It is, however, a two-pronged approach. His call for passage of the Buffett rule, taxation of dividends at ordinary income rates, and other tax increases for the wealthy are part of a separate tax reform initiative unrelated to the budget outlined by the White House.

Ezra Klein has more wonky details, comparing Obama's budget to Mitt Romney's proposals:

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Credit: ThinkProgress

When President Obama on Tuesday declared that decades of Republican trickle-down economics "never worked," conservatives were predictably apoplectic.

But for all of their protests of "class warfare", "socialism" and worse, Obama was being kind to the Republican ideologues. After all, as the historical record shows, from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance and just about every other indicator of the health of American capitalism, the modern U.S. economy has almost always done better under Democratic presidents. Despite GOP mythology to the contrary, America generally gained more jobs and grew faster when taxes were higher (even much higher) and income inequality lower. And while the U.S. recovery from the Bush recession remains painfully slow, most economists - including the nonpartisan CBO and some of John McCain's own 2008 advisers - believe President Obama saved it from the abyss.

(Click a link below for the details on each.)

• Job Creation and Economic Growth
• The Stock Market
• Income Inequality
• National Debt
• The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Job Creation and Economic Growth

To be sure, George W. Bush provided the perfect bookend to era of modern Republican economic management ushered by Herbert Hoover. The verdict on President Bush's reign of ruin was pronounced even before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times on January 24, 2009 featured an analysis ("Economic Setbacks That Define the Bush Years") comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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Back in August, Americans learned that among Rick Perry's miserable grades in college was a "D" in "Principles of Economics." Now we know why. His contribution to the GOP's flat tax one-upsmanship not only fails to simply the U.S. tax code. As it turns out, Governor Perry's "Cut, Balance and Grow" scheme would undermine Social Security, produce mountains of debt and require draconian spending cuts, all while ensuring a massive windfall for the wealthy.

On that last point, the Texas Governor is honest and untroubled. At a time of record income inequality, Perry told CNBC's John Harwood he was unconcerned that the richest Americans would receive "hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars" as a result of his tax plan:

"But I don't care about that. What I care about is them having the dollars to invest in their companies."

And to be sure, Rick Perry wants to ensure that the wealthy have more dollars - a lot more. His optional 20% flat tax rate would allow the top income earners to pay Uncle Sam at a much lower rate than the already low 35% level they pay currently. And Perry would not merely eliminate the estate tax, he would zero out the capital gains tax as well. As the Washington Post recently explained, "For the very richest Americans, low tax rates on capital gains are better than any Christmas gift":

While it's true that many middle-class Americans own stocks or bonds, they tend to stash them in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, where the capital gains rate does not apply. By contrast, the richest Americans reap huge benefits. Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.

While Perry's plan delivers a gargantuan payday for the gilded class, it fails in its supposed objective to simplify the tax code. After all, by "giving Americans a choice between a new, flat tax rate of 20% or their current income tax rate," taxpayers need to figure out their own return twice in order to decide which options benefits them most. And the lower payments they would choose to make, combined with the loss of revenue from the estate tax, the capital gains tax and a corporate tax slashed from 35 percent to 20 percent, means that Rick Perry's would literally drain trillions from the U.S. Treasury in the decades to come.

But like his windfall for the wealthy, that's OK with Rick Perry, too.

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On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner took Barack Obama to task for the President's claim that he had not yet seen a jobs plan from Republicans. "I want to make sure," Boehner lectured the President, "you have all the facts."

As it turns out, this is one of those rare occasions where John Boehner is right. After all, that same day Boehner's Republican colleagues in the Senate introduced their own GOP jobs plan titled the "Jobs Through Growth Act." Of course, President Obama could be forgiven for assuming the GOP had nothing new to say on the subject of the economy. Because as a quick glance reveals, John McCain's new "Jobs Through Growth Act" like Eric Cantor's "House Republican Plan for America's Job Creators" is just a cynical rehash of the same tried and untrue policies the GOP has been pushing for years.

That the Senate Republicans' ersatz plan is a merely a repackaging of a years-old Republican wish list is apparent from the description on John McCain's web site. It's not merely a litany of existing GOP legislation; the call for upper class tax cuts, cutting federal regulations and tort reform could have come straight out of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign playbook. And the demands for steep spending cuts, a balanced budget amendment, 25% tax rates for individuals and corporations and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act are just a copy and paste from the Republicans' Ryan budget, the GOP "Pledge to America", the Tea Party "Contract from America" and other recent conservative manifestoes mercifully consigned to the dustbin of history.

Of course, if you think you've heard this story before, that's because you have.

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If nothing else, Herman Cain is a man who is very sure of himself. This week, Cain once again declared God told him to run for President. But on the same day Senate Republicans continued their unprecedented obstructionism by blocking President Obama's jobs bill, Cain's own 9-9-9 plan finally started to come under scrutiny. As it turns out, Cain's simple scheme -like virtually every other recent GOP proposal - would produce mountains of debt and massively shift the tax burden to middle class Americans as the wealthy received yet another windfall from the U.S. Treasury.

Of course, you'd never know from Cain's confident prediction during Tuesday night's Bloomberg GOP presidential debate. His prescription?

Two things. Present a bold plan to grow this economy, which I have put my 9-9-9 plan on the table, and it starts with throwing out the current tax code and putting in the 9-9-9 plan.

Secondly, get serious about bringing down the national debt. The only way we're going to do that is, the first year that I'm president and I oversee a fiscal year budget, make sure that revenues equals [sic] spending. If we stop adding to the national debt, we can bring it down.

The former pizza magnate might want to check his math. Because even Herman Cain never cut a slice so big.

To "make sure that revenues equal spending," Herman Cain would have to cut roughly $1.8 trillion (or 47 percent!) from the nation's $3.8 trillion budget. Because as Bloomberg News explained, Cain's two-step plan to blow up the current income tax, end both the capital gains and estate taxes and replace them with flat 9 percent individual, corporate and sales tax rates would unleash new rivers of red ink:

Following the broad contours of Cain's plan, the U.S. would have collected almost $2 trillion in 2010, according to a Bloomberg News calculation based on data from the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. The U.S. actually collected almost $2.2 trillion that year, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget...

Using 2010 figures, Cain's plan would have collected $922.1 billion in revenue from the national sales tax with no exemptions, $912.7 billion at a 9 percent individual income tax with few deductions or other tax benefits, and $127.7 billion from a 9 percent tax on U.S. corporate income with no deductions.

The federal government in 2010 actually collected $898.5 billion from individuals, including levies on capital gains; $191.4 billion from the corporate income tax; $864.8 billion from Social Security and retirement taxes; $141 billion in other taxes, such as estate and gift taxes; and $66 billion in excise taxes. This doesn't include the taxes levied by states on retail sales and property.

If anything, Bloomberg's analysis understates the magnitude of the revenue problem. For example, in pre-recession 2007, total tax revenue was $2.6 trillion. The Center for American Progress estimated Cain's 9-9-9 plan would have brought in only $1.3 trillion and thus "cut federal revenue in half." It's no wonder CAP's Michael Linden concluded President Cain's would be "bigger than any deficit since WWII, including the deficits of the past three years."

But that's hardly the only poison in pizza man Herman Cain's secret sauce for Americans.

As Center for American Progress Vice President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger put it:

"[Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan] would be the biggest tax shift from the wealthy to the middle-class in the history of taxation, ever, anywhere, and it would bankrupt the country."

Because Cain's 9 percent national sales tax makes no mention of a personal exemption, as economists including former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett:

This means that the 47 percent of tax filers who now pay no federal income taxes will pay 9 percent on their total income. And elimination of the payroll tax won't even help half of them because the earned income tax credit, which Mr. Cain would abolish, offsets both their income tax liability and their payroll tax payment as well.

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