Krugman: Ma! He’s Looking At Me Funny! Watch (and a response to David Brooks' column)

Oh, my: apparently the new line on the right is that the economy is weakening because Obama, that nasty man, said bad things about Paul Ryan.

I am not making this up. In fact, I don’t think I could have made this up.

I’ve been getting requests that I respond to my colleague David Brooks’s column today. Actually, I’ll just outsource it. Read Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and Jonathan Cohn. The bottom line is, sorry, the evidence is indeed dispositive: decentralized, “consumer-based” health care is worse, and far more expensive, than universal systems run by the government.

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Which brings me to one last point: it’s really time to stop pretending that the Ryan plan is an intellectually sound expression of a philosophical viewpoint. Even from its own ideological perspective, it’s a piece of incompetent junk; all you had to do was spend a little while poking through the assumptions, and it became clear that it was nonsense. I know this is a hard thing for people who gushed about the plan to accept, but it’s the simple truth.