“Republicans and Democrats have junked up the tax code with so many giveaways and special-interest tax breaks.”

That was Paul Ryan on Fox News Sunday, making it sound easy to find junky tax breaks to eliminate, in order to pay for the 20 percent tax cut he and Mitt Romney have proposed. You’d think if the tax code were such a cornucopia of giveaways, Mr. Ryan might reach in and pull one out for public examination. Just one deduction he’d be willing to eliminate.

But Mr. Ryan apparently had a busy schedule yesterday, because he said he didn’t have time to provide the public with even a crumb of a detail.





“It would take me too long to go through all of that,” he told Chris Wallace, who made an earnest but futile attempt to pin down Mr. Ryan. That’s about the same level of respect for the public’s intelligence that Mr. Romney paid last month on Meet the Press, when he also refused to name a single loophole he would close. When asked for the specifics, he answered in his own special, dizzying way.

“The specifics are these, which is, those principles I described are the heart of my policy,” he said.

If Mr. Romney tries that kind of sputtering obfuscation at the debate on Wednesday, even his best spinners won’t be able to help him. All but the most ideological voters have learned to be skeptical of politicians who claim that the most clearly monumental tasks — like rewriting the tax code — will be easy.

That’s the core of the ticket’s pitch: An economic turnaround can come with a snap of the fingers, unaccompanied by hard choices. Mr. Ryan had plenty of time to sell that message, and even appeared to have done some math.

“Look, our pro-growth tax reform, it cuts tax rates by 20 percent, higher take-home pay for middle class, pro-growth economic policy,” Mr. Ryan said. “That right there creates about 7 million jobs.”

Seven million — isn’t that specific enough for you? Except it’s an entirely invented figure premised on the idea that slashing taxes magically produces growth—which ignores the fact that President George W. Bush’s cuts failed to achieve that result.

Mr. Wallace asked how much all these tax cuts would cost, and Mr. Ryan responded: nothing. The cuts will be free, “revenue neutral,” offset by eliminating all those terrible breaks he had no time to list. (Mr. Bush, at least, admitted his tax cuts would cost at least $1.3 trillion.)

Mr. Ryan blithely dismisses the experts who say he can’t keep his “revenue neutral” pledge because there aren’t enough deductions to eliminate. He’ll have a harder time ignoring a Heritage Foundation study that actually gives examples of the deductions at stake, including the tax-free status of interest on cash-value life insurance and municipal bonds. Making that interest taxable would raise $45 billion a year for the treasury, but would madden the insurance lobby and every city in the country that relies on municipal bonds to raise money.

The campaign has apparently decided it is better to insult a large group of voters by not providing specific information than it is to infuriate smaller groups with actual proposals. The poll numbers give a pretty good indication of how that strategy is working out.