Paul Ryan's deficit-cutting mania: the real agenda

Tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich; budget cuts for Medicare and Medicaid – how cynical can the congressman be?

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 March 2012 12.43 EDT

If you want to see House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan sanctimoniously excuse himself and his friends for missing the most predictable economic crisis in the history of the world, you now have the opportunity. In a YouTube video produced by his staff, Ryan tells viewers that the crisis called by the collapse of the housing bubble caught "us" by surprise.

Well, it didn't actually catch us by surprise. Some of us had been warning about the potential damage caused by the collapse of the bubble since 2002. We repeatedly tried to warn of the dangers of the housing bubble in whatever forum we had.