Obama, Ryan, and the Shape of the Planet

Oh, but just wait for Fox News to gin up the true-believers with every sort of phoney-baloney, false dichotomy talking point in the bag of tricks - in order to eliminate any reasonable middle-ground. They’ll also be taking up the burning brands in search of all the evil socialist agendas that supposedly lurk in the details of any plan other than Paul Ryan’s ….

-maven

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

I’m already hearing some people saying, “Why don’t you subject Obama to the same kind of criticism you leveled at Ryan?’

The answer is, because Obama doesn’t deserve it.

Any budget proposal will have things you don’t find convincing. I’d certainly like to know more about Obama’s proposed elimination of tax loopholes; I’d like to know how we’re going to manage with the low levels of domestic discretionary spending envisioned.

But Obama isn’t proposing to somehow make $3 trillion in tax cuts revenue neutral. He isn’t proposing to shift from Medicare paying 70 percent of bills to vouchers worth only 30 percent. He isn’t claiming that we can shrink government outside the major social insurance programs — but including defense — to Calvin Coolidge levels.

What the complainers want is for me to do “Shape of the earth: views differ” analysis — to pretend that Republican nonsense has an equal and opposite Democratic counterpart. But it’s not true. Obama’s budget proposal really is wonk-tested, in a way Ryan’s never was; trust me, I know the wonks! (And Ryan’s wonks are the people who projected 2.8 percent unemployment, plus higher revenue from tax cuts.)

If you want false equivalences, go somewhere else.