Griper Blade: The Republican Party Keeps Up the Good Work

Last week, Republicans released a budget without numbers. This turned out to be a bad idea, since the very first thing anyone reporting on it did was point out that the GOP's "alternative budget" wasn't actually a budget at all. It was a stunt to grab headlines and in that sense it succeeded. The only problem is that they weren't good headlines and the whole thing turned out to be the political embarrassment of the week.

Details -- important stuff like, say, figures and projections -- would come out the next week, we were told. And yesterday, on April Fools Day, they did.

Kind of.

It turns out that many of those figures and projections are best described as "made up." The author of this document, Wisconsin's own Rep. Paul Ryan, took a shot at explaining why the economy's going down the tubes. The problem was that his explanation, laid out in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, didn't make any sense at all.

Instead of doubling the debt in five years, and tripling it in 10, the Republican budget curbs the explosion in spending called for by the president and his party. Our plan halts the borrow-and-spend philosophy that brought about today's economic problems, and puts a stop to heaping ever-growing debt on future generations -- and it does so by controlling spending, not by raising taxes. The greatest difference lies in the size of government our budgets achieve over time.

A housing bubble? Credit default swaps? Toxic assets and a lack of common sense regulation of the financial sector? Pfffft! Liberal claptrap. What caused the economic downturn was the fact that the federal government is spending too much money.

This is not the best way to impress people with your grasp of basic economic principles... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]