Pink slime may be disgusting but, unlike Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget that House Republicans passed last week, at least it has some nutritional value, writes The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

The “empty promises,” in what Krugman calls the “most fraudulent budget in American history,” don’t.

Not only is the Republican budget “almost inconceivably cruel” in its priorities, slashing taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy, writes Krugman, but Ryan promises to erase the deficit with “a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public.”   

You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid. Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

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