Monday, March 1, 2010

Shocking news: Paul Ryan misleads on Obamacare

Deficit chickenhawk Paul Ryan's star turn during the health care summit set tongues wagging in the right wing blogosphere, including this guy, and Wingnutty Investors Business Daily smirked that no one had refuted Paul Ryan's arguments.

That may be because Paul Ryan's critiques, while dishonest, are indisputably well crafted.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has that response that so many on the right were waiting for:
To sum up, then, Ryan makes some good points about the true cost of the bill and realities of the federal budget. But he purposefully omits any mention of the bill's expected savings, disingenuously attaches the price tag of a broken Republican policy onto the health-care reform bill, and selectively stops extrapolating trends when they don't fit his points. It's a presentation designed to make the bill look less fiscally responsible than it really is.

But don't listen to me. Robert Reischauer is the head of the Urban Institute. He's also one of the CBO's most revered former directors, in no small part because his relentlessly honest cost estimates helped doom Bill Clinton's bill in 1994. I reached him earlier today and asked whether he thought this bill made fiscal sense. "Were I in Congress and asked to vote on this," he replied, "I'd vote in favor." The bill isn't perfect, he continued, "but it at least has the prospect for creating a platform over which more significant and far-reaching cost containment can be enacted."

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