Paul Ryan's Crazy Budget Graph

More

I'm still reading the Republicans' alternative budget (pdf), but I did want to highlight this graph from Republican Paul Ryan's Wall Street Journal op-ed on the subject, because it's pretty stupid:


paul ryan budget.gif

This graph supposedly compares "Democratic Budgets" and the Republican Alternative based on spending as a percentage of GDP between 1980 and 2080. As you can see, Democratic spending is, as they say, off the charts after about 2060.

Now I think it's perfectly fine for Paul Ryan and the House Budget Committee's Republican staff to make whatever crazy assumptions they want about Democratic spending. No one has to take them seriously. But I don't think they can say that this is "based on CBO's Long-Term Alternative Fiscal Scenario" unless the CBO has actually done an analysis that runs through 2080. As far as I can tell, the Congressional Budget Office hasn't done any such analysis. But they have scored the Obama budget through 2019, and it looks like this:


500 cbo on revenue.jpg
As near as I can tell, Paul Ryan and his staff just took the CBO projections that ended in 2019 and drew a random line, extending upward at about a 45 degree angle, until 2080. There's no real attempt to make it look scientific.

Jump to comments

Conor Clarke is the editor, with Michael Kinsley, of Creative Capitalism. He was previously a fellow at The Atlantic and an editor at The Guardian. More

Conor Clarke is the editor, with Michael Kinsley, of Creative Capitalism, an economics blog that was recently published in book form by Simon and Schuster. He was previously a fellow at The Atlantic and an editor at The Guardian. He is also on Twitter.
Get Today's Top Stories in Your Inbox (preview)


Elsewhere on the web

Join the Discussion

After you comment, click Post. If you’re not already logged in you will be asked to log in or register. blog comments powered by Disqus

Video

Miami: The Next Big Start-Up City?

How the city became a center for innovation

Video

Video

A Brief History of Romantic Comedies

From The Atlantic's Chris Orr

Video

Life in 'the New Arctic'

A moving portrait of a fading landscape

Video

Video

The Rise of New York City

A fascinating look at Manhattan in the 1940s

Video

What Is Methane Hydrate?

"Flaming ice" is a vast natural energy source

Video

NASA's Time-Lapse of the Sun

Now with epic dubstep music

Video

Shaken Not Tuned: Cocktail Experiments

Can a tuning fork improve a cocktail?

Video

Video

Is He Cheating? A 1950s Guide

'That little blonde secretary from the office?’

Video

New Yorkers: Vintage Vacuum-Tube Amps

Risking electric shock to restore old amplifiers

Video

The DIY Piano-Bicycle

Everybody needs a hobby

Writers

Up
Down

More in Politics

In Focus

Photos of Tornado Damage in Moore, Oklahoma