Ryan’s Derp 0
Paul Krugman wonders how Paul Ryan got a reputation amongst the political media as being a “policy wonk.” An excerpt:
Look, the single animating principle of everything Mr. Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy or in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor?
And his “deficit reduction” proposals were always frauds. The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from “magic asterisks”: extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs. He’s been a flimflam man all along.