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Farewell to the Spectator
December 16, 2011 | 8 comments
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Tentative Praise for Ryan’s New Bipartisan Medicare Plan
December 15, 2011 | 3 comments
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The Day Ahead: Thursday, December 15
December 15, 2011 | 0 comments
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Examiner for Romney, National Review Against Gingrich
December 14, 2011 | 39 comments
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Paul Ryan to Introduce New Medicare Plan with Democrat Ron Wyden
December 14, 2011 | 4 comments
The Spectacle Blog
Paul Krugman’s latest New York Times column, in which he calls Rep. Paul Ryan a charlatan and his Roadmap for America plan a fraud, is unusally partisan even by Krugman’s standards.
Krugman’s main criticism of the Roadmap is that it does not raise the revenues that Ryan says it will.
Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes…. 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.
And Krugman goes on to cite a Tax Policy Center analysis that found that Ryan’s plan wouldn’t raise the revenues assumed in the Roadmap.
What Krugman leaves out is that the Roadmap is intended to be a plan for achieving long-run fiscal solvency by cutting spending, and that it assumes a certain level of revenue. If the plan as specified doesn’t bring in as much revenue as projected in the initial Roadmap, it will be adjusted, and rates would be raised, to bring revenues back to roughly 19 percent of GDP — as Ryan has made clear.
Stepping back a bit, Krugman’s charge that the Roadmap won’t bring in enough tax revenue is a little absurd. The challenge facing U.S. policymakers is how to rein in entitlements — not how to raise taxes. We do not need a Roadmap on how to raise tax revenues.
Krugman also includes some specific problems he has with Ryan’s entitlement-reduction measures. For instance:
The only way the Ryan plan could save money would be by making those [Medicare] vouchers too small to pay for adequate coverage. Wealthy older Americans would be able to supplement their vouchers, and get the care they need; everyone else would be out in the cold.
Know what else would leave poor older Americans out in the cold? An economic collapse brought on by a debt crisis. Ryan’s plan is the only one that the CBO has forecast to prevent such a scenario.
JimH| 8.6.10 @ 8:14AM
If Ryan is attacked by Krugman he must be doing something right. Sometimes one is best judged by who ones enemies are.
Jethro Lungfish| 8.9.10 @ 5:35AM
Circular reasoning is circular.
timb| 8.6.10 @ 9:29AM
Uh, this sentence is completely made up: "Ryan's plan is the only one that the CBO has forecast to prevent such a scenario. "
There is no debt crisis. There is a revenue crisis, exacerbated by conservatives who want wars and tax cuts they cannot pay for, but US debt as a percentage of GDP is not that high, the bond rate continues to be low, and American debt is snatched up by investors as soon as it offered. I understand it the purpose of this blog to prop up the extremely wealthy, but quit trying to scare people with bs lines like "looming debt crisis" when one does not exist.
Tim notb| 8.6.10 @ 10:37AM
timb, if the statement is false, then name another plan that does so. It is very simple to disprove a positive statement. Since you failed to do so, we can only assume that you can't until you do.
US debt as a percentage of GDP is around 100% if you count only normal budgetary debt. If we include unfunded entitlement liabilities, that debt ratio explodes to about 750%. America is fortunate that borrowing continues to be plentiful and cheap, but that won't last forever. Perhaps a more exact term would be "looming entitlement crisis", but don't you agree that's really just semantics? The effect is the same either way.
Jethro Lungfish| 8.9.10 @ 5:37AM
"Unfunded liabilities," eh, Tim? Like Medicare Part D, the single largest unfunded liability passed in my lifetime? Where were the Republicans when that was passed? Oh, right, it was their baby.
SteveAR | 8.6.10 @ 10:52AM
No debt crisis? Apparently you've never read the government numbers that showed revenues increased greatly after the tax cuts. But because spending was higher than the increase in revenue, there were deficits and this added to the debt.
So now Obama is in charge, revenues are down due to unemployment, and spending has increased at an even greater rate than under the Bush years, you say there is a revenue crisis? I don't think so. It is this huge expanse of spending that is exacerbating the very real debt crisis.
Maybe you should argue with facts instead of liberal and Democratic talking points.
Bruce Berger| 8.6.10 @ 1:10PM
timb,
Actually there in no revenue crisis. There is, however, a spending crisis. The Ryan plan tries to address that. Obama, and his supporters, want to "scare people" into thinking there is a revenue crisis so they can increase the size of government's share of GDP.
Crystal| 8.6.10 @ 9:40AM
American Spectator can't stand it when facts demolish ideological fantasies, as Krugman's do here. So it gets dismissed as a "partisan attack," without a shred of actual argument being made against Krugman's analysis, since that is how the AS does things. Please. Paul Ryan's flim-flam is out there for everyone to see, and Krugman is but one observer who has pointed out the truth.
ncatty| 8.6.10 @ 10:01AM
Hey Crystal, you forgot to call Ryan a racist as we discussed on Journolist this morning.
Hahaha| 8.6.10 @ 11:17AM
I love this comment. Thank you.
cbritton| 8.6.10 @ 1:02PM
Beautiful!
Jethro Lungfish| 8.9.10 @ 5:39AM
Cool, so now when I'm losing an argument all I need to do is claim that the other guy was *going* to call me a racist in an alternate reality, and I win! How spiffy is that?
Tim notb| 8.6.10 @ 10:47AM
Crystal, what do you mean? The statements on Ryan's website to which the author links are quite clear and specific. Did you bother to look there? The evidence for which you seek is easily found there, or at least references to it. If Ryan's work is "flim-flam", tell us why it is. This article seems to answer a number of Krugman's points quite effectively.
Also, read this excerpt: "What Krugman leaves out is that the Roadmap is intended to be a plan for achieving long-run fiscal solvency by cutting spending, and that it assumes a certain level of revenue. If the plan as specified doesn't bring in as much revenue as projected in the initial Roadmap, it will be adjusted, and rates would be raised, to bring revenues back to roughly 19 percent of GDP -- as Ryan has made clear." This IS an argument, which you claimed to be missing in your post. Wrong again.
Furthermore, Ryan's plan IS out there for all to see. That's more than we can say for the health care bill's regulations, or the financial services bill's regulations, etc., much less the lack of transparency that fostered these gargantuan bills to passage. Perhaps Ryan should have simply stated that we'd have to pass the Roadmap to see what's in it!
monty.crisco| 8.6.10 @ 4:54PM
Crystal, you sad little troll, can you read? Did you even READ the damn article above or ANY of Paul Ryan's roadmap? Does Paul really pay you - his army of retarded minions - THAT well?!?!
Jethro Lungfish| 8.9.10 @ 5:42AM
monty.crisco, there are two Pauls in this story, Ryan and Krugman. (We're omitting Rand and Ron for the purposes of this discussion.) So your uber-burn about "Does Paul really pay you - his army or retarded minions" comes off as a little ... unfocused ... maybe even insulting to your own partisans ...
ggoblue| 8.6.10 @ 9:54AM
88 days until you liberals experience a lack of votes crisis....
600,000 more people voted on the republican side than the democrat side in tuesdays primary....and that was in michigan alone.
88 days, tic tic tic....
Warrior | 8.6.10 @ 9:54AM
I wonder how much Krugman's advice helped Enron?? He is a partisan hack. Obviously his disciple timb has as much economic sense as the Nobel prize winner. Just by saying there is no debt bomb will not make it go away. Again, you do not pay for tax cuts, that is an oxymoron. You can blame the neocons for the wars all you want, but the liberals have had over four years now to defund them. At what point do we stop pointing fingers at the neocons and demand responsibility be taken by the democrats who have doubled down on all these same problems they promised to solve?
riograndevalleygirl| 8.6.10 @ 10:31AM
Krugman is a wah-wah baby.
Crying that his beloved Keynesian economics are a fraud, crying that Paul Ryan, of the Plain Folk, makes mincemeat of all the Elite Ivy-credentialed Economic Thinkers living in Elite Ivy-Fantasy World, crying about his own looming irrelevance....and crying that his place in history will be next to all the nimrods of the past who have caused humanity unnecessary pain and suffering.
Wah, wah, wah.
Ellis Wyatt| 8.6.10 @ 11:13AM
I'm sure Ryan is really doubting himself after a failed economist like Paul Krugman attacks him in a leftist echo chamber like the NY Times. Krugman is a cartoon of the left. I love when he tells us the reason this experiment into Kenynesian economics has failed is because the government has not spent ENOUGH money.
Ryan's proposals are not new, but they have been tried and have been successful everytime they have been done. That is indisputable. That is far more than Krugman can ever say.
jrs| 8.6.10 @ 11:36AM
I hate Krugman probably more than the average conservative, but I've got to admit, his analysis is first rate (assumptions are questionable, but not the analysis of the assumptions). I remember checking out the roadmap and the corresponding CBO analysis. Unfortunately, I didn't take much time in reading the framework but quickly skipped to the summary. While the cuts are likely too drastic for much of America to stomach (we all favor cuts, until the cut relates to a service we utilize), his proposal served as a good first step. Unfortunately, when you dig a little deeper, Ryan basically points out the inevitable (though not his intention) that to cure our deficits we can't rely on spending cuts alone.
cambrian jacobus| 8.6.10 @ 11:38AM
"... Ryan's plan is the only one that the CBO has forecast to prevent such a scenario. "
Since the CBO hasn't scored Mr. Ryan's entire plan, I'm unclear how the author can come to this conclusion. Even if the CBO had scored the entirity of Mr. Ryan's plan, that score would not indicate the plan's worthiness for preventing an economic collapse brought on by a debt crisis.
Is the argument that the plan would prevent a debt crisis, or that it would prevent an economic collapse, or the specific combination of the two? Could he please clarify?
Brian B| 8.6.10 @ 11:58AM
Krugman etal aren't worried that Ryan's roadmap won't put us on a sustainable, prosperous course.
They're terrified that it will.
riograndevalleygirl| 8.6.10 @ 12:00PM
I see some of the bitter Krugman acolytes have wiped their tears and are now busy scouring the web for opportunities to exact revenge for Krugman's recent and complete humiliation on his own blog at the hands of his own commentors. ;-)
Oldefarte| 8.6.10 @ 2:19PM
Krugman is a typically radical liberal and Obama/Democrat ars-kisser! Being specifically unfamiliar with Ryan's plan, I would guess that I agree with most of his government spending ideas and desagree with some of his tax cut ideas [at least initially until the economy is stablized]. These radicals neve want to talk about taking away the governmental goodies from the Democratic Party constituents, which is crucial to their quid-pro-quo of benefits for votes mantra. No sane person would deny government benefits to the poor, but the reality is that SOMEONE ALWAYS HAS TO PAY FOR SAME [and that 'someone' is you. me and all other TAXPAYERS]. Government benefits are not some free manna from heaven bestowed by in this case EL CHOSEN ONE. Government social benefits/spending simply has to be cut or in some cases eliminated, as it is no longer affordable [unless one desires the bankruptcy of this country]. Liberals always want to put tax hikes on the table as the solution to budgetary deficits, and never spending cuts. Why, because they want the votes from the benefit receivers in return fro granting government benefits!!!!
Jim| 8.6.10 @ 4:13PM
The key crisis is that of unemployment. We don't have a 'debt' crisis. The term itself is non-sensical: society cannot be in debt to itself. Cheney was right - deficits don't matter. (For those interested, I discuss this point at length under the heading Functional Finance.)
Jim
commentsongpe.wordpress.com
Joe Friday| 8.7.10 @ 8:55PM
Hurrah for Krugman. As usual, he is correct on the facts. Congressman Ryan's document is a plan, far from reducing the deficit, for increasing it. Plus it is a operation manual for the rich to rob the middle class blind.
We don't need a deficit commission. We need a jobs commission. Where are the jobs going to be? You say small business? Doing what? What are these jobs going to be doing? Don't speak in platitudes. The sad thing is, the American Ruling Class has made average American obsolete. Congressman Ryan's document is just to seal the government to doing anything to help them.
In case anybody thinks Krugman is an Obama boot licker, you haven't been reading his notes. He has been as tough on Obama as he has on Bush. Read his blogs and columns before you say I am wrong.
Bruce Berger| 8.9.10 @ 1:12PM
Joe Friday,
Yeah, let's get government on the case of creating jobs. That is sure to succeed.
cantlvr| 9.22.10 @ 2:57PM
Joseph Lawler and Paul Ryan are IDIOTS. Ryan was wholly unable to defend Roadmap against distinguished, nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) analysis, which incorporated CBO findings and found CBO's report on Roadmap was misinterpreted. Lawler does not even understand substantial inherent uncertainties and grave financial consequences, which numerous radical elements of Roadmap would produce. Both are purveyors of long-disproved and failed right-wing propaganda, touting such fallacies as the belief that even modestly higher taxes on the rich and benefits for the less well off would drastically undermine incentives to work, invest, and innovate and high marginal tax rates discourage work effort, saving, and investment, and promote tax avoidance and tax evasion; a reduction in high marginal tax rates would increase federal revenues, boost long term economic growth, and reduce the attractiveness of tax shelters and other forms of tax avoidance. Even David Stockman, Reagan's budget director from 1981-1985, wrote in The New York Times, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse," published: July 31, 2010, ties today's ballooning debt and deficits to the GOP's "embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts . . . the debt explosion is "not from big spending by the Democrats." A deficit hawk, Stockman called it a "delusion" to say that tax cuts will get the economy to grow and narrow the deficit. The 1980s, he complains, "hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts."
Stockman got in trouble with his boss, President Reagan, for spilling the beans to reporter William Greider that Reagan's 1981 tax cuts were "always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate" - meaning the rate for the richest. As a result, Stockman was forced to resign in 1985.
Stockman says Republicans have done enormous damage to the nation's economy by increasing trade deficits, by vast war spending, and by the "vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector" and "the hollowing out of the larger American economy." All told, the tax increases Reagan approved ended up canceling out much of the reduction in tax revenue that resulted from his 1981 legislation.