NYTimes.com: "[Rep. Paul] Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”Krugman goes on to show how this "plan" involves unspecified cuts of 25% in non-defense spending as well as privatizing Medicare. Oh, and it raises taxes on the lower 95% of Americans to give whopping tax cuts to the top 1%.
But it’s the audacity of dopes."
I think Krugman's analysis of why Rep. Ryan's sham-plan in getting attention is also worthwhile:
So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes. [emphasis mine]
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