Twenty-four hours later, the conservative reaction to a devastating report about Mitt Romney’s tax plan is proving almost as interesting as the report itself.

The report, published by the Brookings-Urban Tax Policy Center, demonstrated that Romney’s plan, if implemented, would reduce taxes for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans but increase taxes for everybody else. It's one part of a larger agenda that would likely require, thanks to a proposed cap on federal spending, deep cuts to key government programs touching everything from health care to education to law enforcement.

As I said yesterday, if you’re like most Americans, this is a plan to undermine your government services and stick you with a higher tax bill, all so Romney and his pals in the penthouse suite can keep more of their money.

So how did Romney and his allies respond to this report? The initial reaction, delivered via Romney policy director Lanhee Chen and several conservative commentators, was to impugn the source. It turns out that one of the report's three co-authors, Adam Looney, was a staff economist in the Obama Administration. But one of the other co-authors, William Gale, was a staff economist in the (George H.W.) Bush administration. And the Brookings-Urban Joint Tax Center has an impeccable reputation for reliability. As TPM's Benjy Sarlin has noted, the Romney campaign itself has cited the Center as a source of “objective, third-party analysis.”

A more creative, and interesting, response to the report came from Daniel Halper, online editor for the Weekly Standard, who pointed out that Obama’s own budget would raise taxes on 27 percent of taxpayers—or, as the Standard's blog headline put it, “one in four taxpayers.” That’s true, according to some estimates, including one from the very same Tax Policy Center. But it’s not the shocker that Harper makes it out to be.