Krugman: Paul Ryan Is A Con Man

"The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, 'scored' by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified. His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the 'centrists' saw what they wanted to see." - Paul Krugman, in a New York Times "public service reminder."