The illusion of substance: The Paul Ryan story

The illusion of substance: The Paul Ryan story

by digby

Get a load of the This Week roundtable this morning. Headache inducing:

Watching the very, very slooow Rand Paul lecture Paul Krugman about economics is too much for me on a hot Sunday morning. "Roads don't create business success" Oy vey ...

And Cokie, Cokie ... Has there ever been a bigger font of conventional wisdom, much of it pressed into the conversation as a non-sequitor?

But this made it worth sitting through:

BOOKER: I want to attack this idea, the certainty for small businesses. This is a president who has cut taxes on small businesses 18 different times. He’s done enough to target incentives to small businesses, everything, to hire our men and women coming home in addition to the fact to giving them breaks for investment.
So I disagree with that on small business. But I think it’s more important, and I really want to call the question that Paul Ryan left wide open, is, how can you call for $5 trillion worth of tax cuts, give us no specifics?
This is Paul Ryan who used to be a man of substance, who put up plans, I may disagree with some of them, but with great levels of specificity. Now they’ve said they’re going to cut $5 trillion in taxes, increase spending in the military, and somehow not dig us into a deeper deficit budget… deficit.

ROBERTS: This is Bill Clinton and arithmetic. That was a good one.

KRUGMAN: I’m going to disagree, respectfully, he was never a man of substance. This is who he always was. That was always an illusion.



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