Paul Krugman Is Now Full Driftglass 24/7

From the New York Times:

Trillion Dollar Fraudsters

MARCH 20, 2015

...

The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.

So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.

Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.

...

So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.

...I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.

...

Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.

Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.

March comes in like a lion, and leaves like a lamb.

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman came in like a mild-mannered economist, and is, well, not "leaving" but certainly lecturing like a Liberal blogger.

Because (he said, repeating himself on purpose) like that tiny band of despised Liberal outsiders at the edge of the wilderness have been reporting for years, the monsters aren't coming.

They're already here, tearing us to pieces every day.

And the entire apparatus of our incredibly powerful, unimaginably profitable, First Amendment protected political media is single-mindedly devoted to job of enabling the monsters by pretending there are no monsters

No wonder K-Thug is laying aside the currency conversion tables and picking up the whammy stick.

Because facts don't work any more.