Some Stuff From Dr. Krugman

Here are a couple of posts from Dr. Paul Krugman -- just some more stuff to make Republicans uncomfortable:

(please follow link to original)
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Wisdom From the Enema Man

So I see that Alan Simpson is still giving us wise advice. What does it take for someone to stop being regarded in Washington as a wise man?

The Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dog stuff is actually the least of it. I turns out that Simpson has been telling us how to fix Social Security, yet he doesn’t know the most basic facts about the program, and when confronted with data from the Social Security Administration, he insists that they’re left-wing talking points.

Adding Simpson’s name to a document goes a long way to undermining that document’s credibility.
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Do Do That Voodoo

So Paul Ryan gave his big speech defending his plan — and demonstrated, in case you were wondering, that there’s no there there (and there never was).

Remember how everyone declared that Ryan was a serious person, truly willing to face up to our deficit problem? Well, now he’s out there denouncing the way “the budget debate has degenerated into a game of green-eyeshade arithmetic” — in other words, enough with all these numbers. And his answer to the deficit now is that we have to grow our way out.

There’s a name for that: voodoo economics.

And in fact almost his whole speech was standard supply-side boilerplate. Low taxes are the secret to growth, nobody ever solved a deficit problem by raising taxes (Clinton, anyone?). He even denounced austerity. The only original things he had to say, if you can call them that, involved health care costs and monetary policy.

On health care costs, he declared that “Our plan is to give seniors the power to deny business to inefficient providers.” Remember, what the plan actually does is hand out vouchers whose value will fall well short of the cost of coverage. So how much power do those Americans who can’t afford decent health insurance have right now in their dealings with providers? If you think people who don’t get coverage through their employers have the upper hand, you believe that the Ryan plan is empowering.

And then there’s the claim that hard money is the key to growth. Milton Friedman turned over in his grave.

Basically, again, what we’re getting here is standard right-wing voodoo. Ryan turns out to be an empty suit, parroting the usual line. What’s remarkable is that for a year or so this empty suit was hailed — by self-proclaimed centrists as well as the right — as a brilliant, brave champion of fiscal responsibility.
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Apparatchiks

Via Mark Thoma, Brendan Nyhan catches the Tax Foundation trying to disappear some apparently accidental honesty.

The story goes like this: the Wall Street Journal had a deeply dishonest editorial claiming that taxes on the rich can’t help with out budget problems. (Are you surprised?) There were actually multiple problems with the editorial; Jonathan Chait pointed out that it repeatedly compared apples with oranges, that if you actually read the numbers straight the editorial disproved its own point. None of this was surprising.

What was surprising was that the Tax Foundation, which normally produces a fair bit of disinformation itself, actually published a blog post pointing out that the chart accompanying the editorial was a classic case of how to lie with numbers. Was the Tax Foundation actually taking a stand for intellectual honesty?

Well, guess what: the blog post has now vanished — although not before a number of people cached it. As the people at Heritage could have told them, memory holes just don’t work like they used to.

Obviously someone at the Tax Foundation forgot what their job was: they’re movement conservatives, and they’re supposed to serve the movement, not point out inconvenient facts.

And in a way we should be grateful for this episode, which clarifies what the Foundation is really about for anyone who might have been confused.