by Tom Gallagher
Jonathan Chait unpacks another incredible claim made by Catholic Republican Paul Ryan that "the Obamanomics that we're practicing now have exacerbated inequality."
"They've exacerbated stagnation," Ryan told The New York Times. "They're made things worse. ... The wealthy are doing really well. They're practicing trickle-down economics now."
For Ryan, the Republican Party's federal budget guru, there's no end to what he'll proclaim as "fact" about President Barack Obama. Chait, however, quickly debunks Ryan's claims.
"What can be proven beyond a doubt is that, even if underlying economic trends have increased inequality, Obama's economic policies have reduced it sharply," Chait writes.
Meanwhile, it's Ryan's own budget policies that would have redistributed massive amounts of income from the poor to the rich, Chait says. After marching through several charts, Chait concludes:
In addition, Ryan flamboyantly advocated a sweeping budget plan that would have eliminated coverage expansions for the poor, layered on hundreds of billions of dollars in additional cuts in programs benefiting the poor, and in general produced "the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation's history)."
And now Ryan is claiming Obama's policies increased inequality! There seems to be literally no limit at all to his shamelessness.
