Via Digby, Paul Krugman's latest column entirely dismembers and debunks Paul Ryan's Republican plan for the economy and the deficit -- as well as the villager meme that Ryan is somehow a fiscal genius.
Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce. [...]
And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”
But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.
Very serious deficit hawk! The desperation on display at the Post and other old media outlets to find a "smart, reasonable" Republican is hilarious. It used to be frustrating, but it's just laughable to watch them prop up these morons-in-disguise. Ryan is aligned with Glenn Beck and the wingnut right, and his plans for the economy are, as Krugman writes, a "fraud."