More on Ryan: he has failed at both his pretended goals and his real goals. He pretended to be a champion of fiscal responsibility, convincing naive centrists that he really meant it; but his legacy is one of bigger deficits 1/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) April 11, 2018

Krugman has always been good on Paul Ryan, the so-called policy wonk. From November, 2017:

It is amazing to watch this chaotic horror show play out at the highest levels of a great nation’s government. But this is what you have to expect when you hand the reins of power to a con man, whose whole career has been based on convincing naive marks that he’s a brilliant deal maker, but turns out to have no idea how to actually govern.

Oh, wait — did you think I was talking about Donald Trump? I’m talking about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, an obvious phony who nonetheless convinced the rubes — that is, much of the news media and the political establishment — that he was a brilliant fiscal expert. What we’re witnessing now is the end of the charade.

Thursday, House Republicans unveiled a tax “reform” bill after the same careful deliberation they exercised when unveiling their attempts to repeal Obamacare. With years to prepare, they waited until the last minute to throw something together, without hearings or serious analysis.

Budget wonks are frantically going through the legislative language, trying to figure out what it would do, but they can take comfort in the fact that the bill’s authors are almost equally in the dark.

OK, some things are clear: The bill would give huge tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, while opening vast new opportunities for tax avoidance. Think of the big tax cuts as having been custom-designed to benefit the Trump family...