Ryan's smoke and mirrors revealed

Anybody who actually has paid attention to Paul Ryan knows that his budget plan is very much smoke and mirrors.  Tom Edsall does a great public service by diving into it and determining just how all these smoke and mirrors work.  It’s good work.  Even better, Drum provides a succinct summary:

…where’s the slush bucket where Ryan hides all the cuts he doesn’t want to fess up to in public?

Answer: Function 920. Over the next decade, this magic asterisk line item contains about $100 billion per year in spending cuts that are completely unspecified. So if you claim that Ryan’s budget would cut FEMA or veterans benefits or whatever, you can never prove it because the line items for those things don’t include any cuts. No matter what you say about his budget, he can say he’s not cutting it. He just dumps all the cuts into Function 920 and refuses to say what programs they’ll end up affecting.

We already knew all this, of course, but Edsall advances our understanding of the smoke and mirrors behind the Ryan budget by pinpointing the exact location of the slush fund for us. His whole piece is worth a read.

I think we’re getting there, but hopefully the so-called liberal media will finally figure out what a fraud both Ryan and his budget are.  Will be interesting to see what Obama and Biden try and do with this in the debates.

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