John Kerry, President Obama’s Romney-impersonating debate prep partner, had some tough words for Mitt Romney’s tax plan and the budgetary math that ostensibly doesn’t add up on MSNBC this morning.

It’s time to get really serious about what’s on the table here with this choice. I’m perplexed. I look at — Mitt Romney, first of all, last night, in my judgment, was petulant. He was characteristically, expediently misleading. And I’m going to tell you exactly how. And I think people really need to stop. And you, Joe, you’re, you know, I listen to your show. You career was based on trying to do something serious about the deficit. Mitt Romney is perpetrating a fraud on the American people. His centerpiece plan… You have a man running for the presidency of the United States of America on the central issue of our time, and he’s not being straight with the American people.

Don’t get me started on “expediently misleading,” but okay — if you want to “get really serious,” let’s get serious. President Obama has time and again echoed this same talking point about Mitt Romney having no serious plan, while hitting us all over the head with his own plan of hiking taxes on those making more than 250K/year as a means of closing the deficit. The only problem is, to hear President Obama tell it, his tax hikes sure are meant to pay for a whole lot of things — rolling back defense cuts, education initiatives, Medicare, blah blah blah, forget about paying down the deficit. His plan is about as fundamentally unserious as it gets; as the WFB points out, Obama “asking the wealthy to pay a little more” (even though we have a graduated income tax, and they already pay more) will not “pay down the debt”:

Obama incorporated these desired tax increases (about $1.8 trillion over 10 years) in his most recent budget proposal, which was panned by independent analysts for failing to address the country’s long-term debt problem. …

By the White House’s own estimates, the president’s budget, including his tax increases, would produce $10.6 trillion of new gross debt.

That is because the president’s proposed tax hikes would not go towards debt reduction, but rather to fund a dramatic spending increase over the next decade—about $1.4 trillion above the current budget baseline.

Federal spending under Obama’s budget would rise from $3.8 trillion this year to $5.8 trillion in 2022, an increase of 53 percent.

Somebody is sure as heck perpetrating a fraud on the American people, and hint: It isn’t Mitt Romney. How galling is it that Team Obama and the Democrats feel free to use fabricated math to accuse Mitt Romney of something that President Trillion-Dollar-Deficits-And-Only-Increases-In-Sight is already guilty?