Better Late Than Never

Paul Krugman (inadvertently) explains to his moron readership why the CBO numbers for the health-care deform bill were bogus.

[Update a while later]

More on Paul Krugman’s ignorance (and by implication, that of anyone who pays any attention to him):

Last night, a few of us were discussing Paul Krugman’s apparent erroneous belief that Paul Ryan should have gotten the CBO to score the revenue side of his plan, but didn’t because he was attempting to put one over on the American people. As far as I know, scoring tax bills is still the job of the Joint Committee on Taxation, not the CBO–but no one bothered to blog it because, as far as I can tell, we all assumed that we must be misreading Paul Krugman.

But no, I didn’t misread; Krugman has two follow-up posts on the topic. It seems as if he’s really not aware that the JCT, not the CBO, typically handles the official scoring of tax legislation; “CBO” is not, in any of the policy circles I’ve run in, some sort of shorthand for the JCT (especially since there’s–ahem!–some rivalry there).

I haven’t read the work that got Krugman the Nobel prize, but those who have tell me he deserved it. I sure don’t know what he’s done since then that was worth a damn.

5 thoughts on “Better Late Than Never”

  1. I guess I was wondering what you thought about Elon doing (or proposing, at any rate) heavy lift. You’ve been pretty dismissive of the need for an HLV for a while now.

    Do you think it’s an attempt to derail the Constellation funding or a revival of Ares V, or serious engineering? And if serious, what does that say about the future of fuel depots?

  2. There is nothing new about Elon proposing heavy lift. If he can do it in an affordable way, I have no objections. My objection to heavy lift is that the way the government will do it, it will cost so much that there will be no money for payloads for it.

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