Despite the inexplicable praise it's gotten from some moderate quarters -- including this delicious, if inadvertent, parody of David Brooks by Jacob Weisberg -- the Ryan budget plan is just remarkably bad. It is an attack on the poor and lower middle class premised -- as Paul Waldman points out below -- on utterly ludicrous assumptions. As Jonathan Chait says, it "contains so many bad Republican economic proposals in one place you don't even know what to say about it." But to take on one really bad idea that has received relatively little attention so far, consider this element of the Ryan plan:
He would eliminate the alternative minimum tax, as well as taxes on unearned interest, capital gains and dividends.
