"Well, there you have it. Mitt Romney’s not going to balance the budget by raising taxes or by cutting spending; we’re going to have presto-chango-magico growth. Exactly the way that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush “balanced” the budget by projecting magical growth rates.
As far as his tax plan is concerned, the fiction here is even more extreme. First of all, Romney is explicitly disavowing the key study he’s been citing to justify the math in his proposal. Remember, Romney votes to lower rates by 20 percent; to do it without raising middle class taxes or touching a bunch of tax preferences he supports; and to remain revenue neutral. The numbers say that can’t be done — there simply aren’t enough deductions to eliminate for the wealthy to recover the money lost from lower rates, and so Romney would have to violate one of his principles. Martin Feldstein basically provided an out for him, as Stephanopoulos noted (and good for him for this one), by defining “middle class” as income under $100,000, although if he adopted Feldstein’s version Romney would be endorsing a massive tax increase on those between $100,000 and $250,000 income in order to fund tax breaks for the very rich. But whatever the merits of that trade-off, Romney is rejecting it, too."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/romneys-magical-thinking-about-the-deficit/2012/09/14/353c8a92-fe7b-11e1-98c6-ec0a0a93f8eb_blog.html?wprss=rss_plum-line
It's the usual Republican model. Assume growth rates that exist only in dogma to bale out faulty arithmetic in reality. This may be Reagan, but it is not Thatcher - Thatcher believed in good housekeeping. "Some say I preach merely the homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlour," she said. "But I do not repent. Those parables would have saved many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_GDP.png
Really, Clinton nailed the issue. One word. Arithmetic.
I assume Feldstein will now decide not to help so much.
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