Oct 20 2012  Romney continues to fail tax plan math  One of the
extraordinary but little remarked comments that Mitt Romney made
during the second debate was when, asked specifically what
deductions he would eliminate in order to pay for his tax cuts
(that would cost $5 trillion over ten years), he again avoided
being specific but said:   What struck me was the casual “I’ll
pick a number”. Two weeks earlier, he mentioned a figure of
$17,000, again seemingly off-the-cuff. He seems to think that
tax policy is something that can be done on the fly, by picking
random numbers, depending on the occasion.  But at least these
were definite figures and so the Tax Policy Center had something
to work with and ran the numbers for both these deductions
limits. They found that the $25,000 cap on deductions would
increase revenues by only $1.27 trillion, less than a third of
the amount required, while the $17,000 cap would raise $1.66
trillion, or almost exactly a third.  Romney must have picked
the number $25,000 because t