Beautiful headline from Business Insider:
In his column this morning, headlined “Republicans Against Reality,” Paul Krugman writes that “the modern G.O.P. is lost in fantasy, unable to participate in actual governing.
One example from last week, per Krugman: “House leaders announced plans to hold a vote cutting spending on food stamps in half.”
But House leaders did no such thing.
The Republican plan is actually a 5% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps), up from the 2.5% cut they were seeking previously.
Krugman seems to have taken the $40 billion in cuts that Republicans are proposing over a 10-year budget window and mistakenly applied them to a single year — thus turning a 5% cut into 50%.
Krugman may have missed this because he’s been misled by his own paper’s coverage of the issue. He links to an August 1 Times article about the new Republican proposal, which has a headline saying Republicans want to “Slash Food Stamps,” and which doesn’t provide the context that the $40 billion cut would be off a spending baseline of about $780 billion.
It is no surprise to anyone paying attention to reality that the esteemed Nobel Laureate is a bit of a clueless tool. Barro’s last point provides an example of why.
Progressives have no real world frame of reference, they only have each other. Opposing viewpoints are not only never listened to but systematically shamed and purged from any progressive, um, discourse. So they fact check against misrepresented or wholly fabricated facts that are created to fit one of their fantastical predetermined conclusions.
When you put all the real dumb kids in an isolated sandbox, they feel better about themselves.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member