US Rep. Paul Ryan, who I am profiling in the March Progressive magazine cover story, was labeled a "flim-flam man" by Paul Krugman a while back because of the trick economics employed in his disastrous plan called "The Roadmap for America's Future."
Krugman caught Ryan at it again today's NY Times column, noting how Ryan–now House Budget chair–tried a flimsy trick on Fed Chair Ben Bernanke:
But Mr. Ryan is sure that the dollar is being debased and won’t take no for an answer. In an attempt to create a gotcha moment, he waved a copy of a newspaper bearing the headline “Inflation Worries Spread” at the Fed chairman. But the gotcha actually went the other way. As Mr. Bernanke immediately pointed out, the article was about inflation in China and other emerging markets, not in the United States. And the Fed chairman declared, correctly, that “inflation made here in the U.S. is very, very low.”
Advantage Bernanke. But the facts don’t matter, because conservative hard-money mania, the demand that the Fed stop trying to rescue the economy, isn’t really about inflation fears.
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