Department of "Huh?!"; or Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?
Clive Crook toadies to Republican Representative Paul Ryan:
More on Taxes: The charge that conservatives have no ideas on fiscal reform certainly does not apply to Paul Ryan. His Roadmap for America is nothing if not radical. It proposes a complete overhaul-in effect, the dismantling-of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. On the tax side, it slashes taxes on the wealthy and proposes a broad-based consumption tax. [Paul] Ryan is a good thing, and his Roadmap is very interesting. He is grappling with specific proposals, and his plan for long-term entitlement reform deserves a serious look. Note, though, that on plausible assumptions, it is not a deficit-reducing proposal: revenues would fall even more than spending...
The problem is that Paul Ryan claims that his roadmap is a deficit-reduction plan:
Executive Summary | A Roadmap for America's Future: Putting the Nation on a sustainable fiscal course may be one of the greatest domestic challenges in America’s history. But it is also an extraordinary opportunity to restore a national character rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship, and opportunity – and to transform the Federal Government to the realities of the 21st century...
Since 1979 Republicans have regularly been offering deficit-exploding plans while claiming that they are deficit-reducing plans. Paul Ryan is simply the latest in a 31-year tradition of fiscal policy three-card-monte--and yet Clive Crook still praises it.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me for thirty-one consecutive years...
