Chait on Ryan's Budget Adventures

Jonathan Chait comments on Paul Ryan's faux wonkishness in his latest budget proposal in New York Magazine.

Paul Ryan’s budget proposals are not mere compilations of proposals, but grand vision statements. The classic versions relied on sweeping ideological pronouncements (i.e., “it is built on the enduring truths from which America’s Founders established this great and exceptional Nation.”) that would be perfectly at home in a Glenn Beck monologue. This year, Ryan has dramatically changed course. He has prefaced his budget with a review of the scholarly literature of the entire range of federal anti-poverty programs. In the place of grandiose, Randian lectures, Ryan ventures outside the world of right-wing pseudo-scholarship and actually attempts to engage with mainstream economic analysis.

This decision is very much to Ryan’s credit. On the other hand, it turns out to have been a gigantic mistake.

Basically everything in Ryan’s report turns out to be wrong. The Fiscal Times contacts a number of researchers whom Ryan cites, and they all report that Ryan knows nothing of their work...Meanwhile, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a longer list of the errors, distortions, and omissions in Ryan’s report. Even libertarian economist Tyler Cowen concludes that Ryan’s report presents “only a marginal command of the scholarly literature, and it is a good example of how the conservative movement is still allowing the poverty issue to defeat it and tie it up in knots."

Chait's piece ends hilariously and appropriately with the scene from Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" in which Allen summons Marshall McLuhan to dress down a pseudo-intellectual for misrepresenting his work.