Putting the Con in Reformicon

[n2doc]

Paul Krugman-

Brad Delong does a chart of the “reform conservative” wonks cited by Sam Tanenhaus in his “party of ideas” piece; basically, it’s all Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru. So what do we know about these would-be reformers?

Well, I went searching for what they said about Paul Ryan, which is kind of my touchstone, and both did indeed strongly defend his smoke-and-mirrors budgets. But what I found especially interesting was the back-and-forth between Levin and Jonathan Chait on a topic I know a lot about, austerity. Chait pointed out that Republicans in general, and Ryan in particular, went all in both on expansionary austerity and on doom at 90 percent, and therefore took a serious credibility hit when both Alesina/Ardagna and Reinhart/Rogoff pretty much collapsed.

Levin’s response was interesting, in the worst way. He could have defended the position he and Ryan took, or he could have acknowledged having gone somewhat off track. But what he actually did was to deny that he and his associates had in fact done what they did, complaining that Chait

assumes that what Paul Ryan or I or others on the right argue for is a version of European austerity, which it plainly isn’t, and that conservative fiscal worries were based on the particular finding of a particular paper by two Harvard economists that has been shown to have had some data errors.

OK, that’s just being dishonest. Go to the big JEC report “Spend less, owe less, grow the economy” (pdf) and you’ll see that it heavily features both Alesina/Ardagna and Reinhart/Rogoff.

So we have a problem. It’s one thing to get a major issue wrong, and rely on the wrong research. It’s something else, and much worse, to pretend after the fact that you did no such thing. If this is what new thinking on the right looks like, let’s just say that it’s not a good sign.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/putting-the-con-in-reformicon/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=re-share&_r=0

[merrily]

1. "some data errors" LOL!