I just don’t know how to respond to information like this. Matthew O’Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic covering business and economics, and he’s plugged Romney’s 2010 tax returns into House Republican Paul Ryan’s budget plan to see what Romney would have paid that year if the Ryan budget plan had been law. It turns out that “Romney would have paid $177,650 out of a taxable income of $21,661,344, for a cool effective rate of 0.82 percent.”

Meanwhile, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, House Republican Paul Ryan’s budget plan would raise taxes on the bottom 30% of earners.

Now we can begin to understand why the Democrats discovered that people simply refused to believe pollsters who described the Ryan Budget to them. How could the House Republicans, under Paul Ryan’s stewardship, propose to raise taxes on the lowest income people while effectively zeroing out Mitt Romney’s tax rate?

Now, in fairness to Romney, he himself pointed out that wiping out the taxes on capital gains, interest, and dividends would zero out his taxes and would not be fair. But he picked Paul Ryan as his running mate anyway.

At a minimum, I think this puts in stark relief what the president has been dealing with. He suggests that the tax cuts on the very wealthy be eliminated so that we can pay down some of the debt we incurred by running the government with low taxes during a time of two wars and a massive recession. The Republicans respond by saying, “people like Mitt Romney shouldn’t pay a 13% effective tax rate, they should pay less than a 1% effective tax rate.”

And, remember, this is supposed to be done in the name of deficit reduction. If Romney paid 13% on 21 million dollars in 2010, then he paid around $2.7 million in taxes. Under the Ryan Budget he would have paid $177,650. So, we will reduce the budget deficit by giving Mitt Romney a $2.6 million tax break every year?

Who could propose such a thing? No wonder voters refuse to believe it.