Paul Krugman has made it clear: he really, really doesn't like Paul Ryan's budget.
"The Ryan budget is full of -- is full of magic asterisks, too. It's not a real budget. It's a fake document. I mean, I'm amazed that people haven't gotten that. You know, we're now a couple of years into the Ryan thing, and the fact that he doesn't actually present real budgets," he said on Sunday.
His comments came in the middle of a heated debate on ABC's This Week's roundtable discussion.
Krugman said he blamed the lack of a fiscal cliff deal on Republicans' failure to provide a comprehensive plan to match that offered by the White House.
"Republicans are unable to actually make concrete proposals," he said. "If you actually look, all that talk we just heard about, you know, deficits and China and Greece, which is all nonsense, but all that talk about how we need to deal with this and ask, what is the Republican Party currently proposing? What have they actually put on the table? They put down some numbers, but what specifics?"
The specifics they did offer, he said, are "almost nothing."
"How is the president supposed to negotiate with people who say, "Here's my demands. By the way, I can't give you any specifics. Just make me happy"?
This hardly the first time the New York Times columnist has criticized Republican budget plans for being nonspecific. In the past few months, he's called the Ryan budget flimflam, "a set of assertions", and "not a serious policy proposal."
Watch the full clip above, courtesy of ABC.
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