Flim Flammed

Paul Krugman
NYT blog

Last year, when I described Paul Ryan as a flim flam man, many Beltway types were deeply annoyed. They had decided that he was serious and sincere — worthy of receiving fiscal responsibility awards — and did not want to hear any negatives.

And even after the cracks in the House budget proposal became apparent, much of the commentariat clung to the view that whatever you might think of Ryan’s priorities, he really is serious and sincere.

But he isn’t.

Jon Cohn points out that the real question about the Ryan plan isn’t whether it reduces the deficit in the right way; it’s whether it reduces the deficit at all. And Cohn doesn’t even take on the giant magic asterisk on the tax part of the plan: Ryan claims that he will keep revenue at 19 percent of GDP despite large tax cuts, by closing loopholes — but has said nothing at all about which loopholes would be closed. The truth is that this is almost surely a deficit-increasing plan, not a deficit-reducing plan.

(More here.)