"Charlatans and Cranks Forever" by Paul Krugman at the NY Times

[applegrove]

Charlatans and Cranks Forever

by Paul Krugman at the NY Times

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/charlatans-and-cranks-forever/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=re-share&_r=0

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Back when Paul Ryan released his first big-splash budget — the one that had the commentariat cooing over its “seriousness” — it included a link to an absurd Heritage Foundation analysis claiming, among other things, that the plan would drive the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent. (Heritage then tried, unsuccessfully, to send its nonsense down the memory hole and pretend it never happened.) Ryan defenders tried to claim that the plan didn’t actually rely on that Heritage stuff; but as some of us tried to explain, the plan actually didn’t add up, relying on a multi-trillion-dollar magic asterisk on tax receipts. And we predicted that sooner or later Ryan would embrace magical theories about how tax cuts increase revenue.

And here we are.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/paul-ryan-declares-war-against-math.html

One disturbing effect if Republicans take the Senate, by the way, may be that the Congressional Budget Office becomes a purely partisan operation — effectively a department of Heritage.



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