Paul Ryan’s Most Shameless Lie Ever
By Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/paul-ryans-most-shameless-lie-ever.html
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Shamelessness is the primary feature of Paul Ryan’s public persona (the secondary feature being a woundedness he displays when his shamelessness is pointed out). Yet it is possible that nothing in Ryan’s long and distinguished career in the field of shamelessness has ever exceeded his comments in yesterday’s New York Times on the Obama budget. Ryan’s complaint is that Obama’s economic policies have exacerbated the gap between the rich and the poor. “The Obamanomics that we’re practicing now have exacerbated inequality,” he claims. “They’ve exacerbated stagnation. They’re made things worse. The wealthy are doing really well. They’re practicing trickle down economics now.”
What gives Ryan’s comments a veneer of plausibility is that income inequality has increased continuously, punctuated by a few short reversals, for more than three decades. Economists have extensively studied and debated the cause of rising inequality for years, clustering about multiple theories: the decline of labor unions, technological change, the growth of finance, and so on. None of the theories blame Obama’s economic policies.
We also do not yet know at this point whether the current recovery will produce the sort of rapid growth that lifts incomes in the middle and bottom, like the economy did at the height of the 1990s boom, or whether it will fail to do so, as happened during the previous recovery. It is worth pointing out that, comparing the previous two economic cycles, the one that followed the economic policies advocated by Ryan at the time, the Bush recovery, yielded stagnant incomes for middle- and working-class Americans, while the Clinton recovery, the one that favored higher taxes on the rich, bitterly opposed by Ryan, yielded much greater success. This contrast does not prove that the Democratic agenda necessarily produces stronger growth than the Republican agenda, but it certainly undercuts Ryan’s belief that the opposite is true.
What can be proven beyond a doubt is that, even if underlying economic trends have increased inequality, Obama’s economic policies have reduced it sharply. The stimulus included tax cuts for low-wage workers, and the Affordable Care Act was financed in part by higher taxes on the rich. Back when conservatives were lambasting Obama for stealing hard-earned money from the rich and handing it out to the unworthy poor, rather than pretending to worry about inequality, they were happy to make this perfectly clear.
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