Paul Krugman: From American Conservatives, Voodoo Economics

Thursday 2 June 2011

So Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, recently gave a big speech defending his budget plan — and demonstrated, in case you were wondering, that there’s no “there” there (and there never was).

Remember how everyone declared that Mr. Ryan was a serious person, truly willing to face up to the United States’ deficit problem? Well, now he’s out there denouncing the way “the budget debate has degenerated into a game of green-eyeshade arithmetic” — in other words, enough with all these numbers.

And his answer to the deficit now is that we have to grow our way out.