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I covered the Center for Tax Justice’s analysis of the Ryan Ripoff, the top House GOP budgeter’s plan to reduce tax revenue while raising taxes on ninety percent of Americans, this morning. Now the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has a new analysis of the same plan out that adds some important points. For example, you’ve probably heard that Ryan’s plan will balance the budget and reduce the national debt, but the reality is quite different.

The CBO score that people are relying on to reach that conclusion doesn’t actually estimate how much revenue Ryan would raise, instead it just takes Ryan’s word for it that his ideas would raise 19 percent of GDP. That’s because the CBO doesn’t score tax issues, that’s done by the Joint Committee on Taxation. But if you look at what Ryan’s ideas would actually do, the truth is rather different:

So that’s the Ryan Ripoff in a nutshell—much lower taxes for the rich, higher taxes for ninety percent of Americans, and no balanced budget. All in the name of balancing the budget!

Not a dumb-ass tea-party slogan - a Republican candidate for Senate. Seriously.

A fascinating chart of the various income levels of adherents of various religions from Good.com . Click here for the full chart and here for the interactive chart. Hindus and Jews have the largest proportions of the wealthiest; Jehovah's Witnesses and historically black Christian churches have the highest proportion of the poorest.

From Flowing Data:

FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.