During Tuesday night’s debate Mitt Romney was asked if numbers in his tax plan add up.

“Well of course they add up,” Romney replied, testily. He then listed all the budgets he’s balanced—running the Olympics (with help from the federal government), running Massachusetts (with help from the federal government) and running Bain Capital (with help from the federal government).

Of course, no study has proven that the numbers add up.

Despite insisting the numbers add up, Romney began brainstorming the actual numbers later in the debate, “And so, in terms of bringing down deductions, one way of doing that would be say everybody gets — I’ll pick a number — $25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use. Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.”

The Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan group sometimes cited by the Romney campaign, looked at Romney’s new plan and discovered… the math doesn’t add up. At the most Romney’s new plan would pay for $1.7 trillion of the $5 trillion in cuts he proposes. And the cuts would mostly benefit high-income taxpayers, of course.

Under Romney’s (modified) “middle class” tax cut, middle quintile gets $722 tax cut. Top quintile gets $12,182. Top 1% gets a $104,563 cut.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) October 17, 2012

According to Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center, “…Romney will need to do much more than capping itemized deductions to pay for the roughly $5 trillion in rate cuts and other tax benefits he has proposed.”

The math doesn’t add up. Just don’t expect Mitt Romney to ever admit that.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon