Tuesday night on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne said Mitt Romney’s plan to cut taxes, increase defense spending and lower the deficit did not add up.

He told Maddow the fact that people were so focused on the Republican presidential candidate’s line regarding Sesame Street character Big Bird “underscores the things that weren’t picked up in what Romney said.”

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“Romney said in the debate, I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people,” Dionne continued. “That’s exactly what George W. Bush said in the 2000 debate. You can cut rich people’s taxes by a whole lot of money and still have them pay the same share of the total. So that’s what he was really saying. Ge said he’s going to cut everybody’s taxes by 20 percent, and then he said in the debate, we’re not going to have tax cuts that add to the deficit.

“If this is math, it’s math on meth. It just doesn’t add up at all, and I think that’s the issue that has to be raised over and over again.”

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