Heritage Foundation's "Analysis" of the Ryan Plan - Perspective.

Heritage, instead of addressing the concerns of its various critics, chooses to go after only Krugman. Why? My guess is that, given Krugman’s liberal leanings, the path of least resistance for Heritage is to simply point at him — to the exclusion of all others — cry “liberal with an agenda,” take their ball and go home. Simply put, Krugman’s the low-hanging fruit. After all, Macroeconomic Advisers’ critique is much more thorough, detailed, and scathing than Krugman’s (“We believe that the main result — that aggressive deficit reduction immediately raises GDP at unchanged interest rates — was generated by manipulating a model that would not otherwise produce this result, and that the basis for this manipulation is not supported either theoretically or empirically. Other features of the results — while perhaps unintended — seem highly problematic to us and seriously undermine the credibility of the overall conclusions.”); why not take them on? Because this exercise is simply not about the facts, the data, or arguing on the merits (or lack thereof) – it is about labeling one’s opponent an ideologue and hoping that’s good enough to discredit him and end the argument.
---Invictus