Not that there was ever any doubt in my mind that deficit spending is only bad when Democrats do it, but William K. Black put up an interesting essay on Monday. As an economist (both practical and academic), he points out:
There is, of course, no Ryan plan. There cannot be a Ryan plan because mathematicians are not like historians. The cruel joke about historians is that while God himself cannot change history; historians can. It is perhaps because they can be useful to God in this regard that he tolerates their continued existence and frequent errors. Mathematicians are useless to God, at least in the non-exotic realms of mathematics relevant to budgets, because they are so good at exposing errors and when they do so the error is beyond dispute. (Econometricians are God’s favorites among the quants.) No budget plan could meet all (or even most) of the policy constraints Ryan and Romney have promised they would obey. It is mathematically impossible. Romney and Ryan’s primary lie is that they have a secret plan to cut taxes, cut the deficit, and increase military spending.
He then lists some of the lies made in service of their secret plan to balance the budget and simultaneously heal the economy, and why they clearly don't believe them. But then he comes up with a quote from Governor Romney, made within a few days of the famous "47% video", showing the full extent of Romney's duplicity:
But the ultimate kicker is that if Ryan actually had a plan to cut substantially the budget deficit Romney would oppose it. Romney explained why in his May 23, 2012 interview with Mark Halperin in Time magazine.
“Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
[Apologies for posting and running...]