Not only is Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan using basically the same general premium-supported exchange design that Obama’s health care revision does for the uninsured under 65, but both Ryan’s budget and “Obamacare” are nearly totally reliant on almost the same pathetic accounting trick of using poorly indexed caps on federal health care spending in the distant future to produce the bulk of their supposed deficit reductions.

Paul Krugman spent Wednesday combing through the details of Tea-GOP genius Paul Ryan’s budget and in a series of blog posts utterly destroyed the Ryan budget’s phony math, implausible assumptions and unicorn forecasts. Kudos to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for picking this up.

Krugman once called Ryan a “flim flam” man, a virtual con artist, and yesterday, he proved it. Let us count the ways.

President Obama can’t match big words with action on taxes for the rich.

We definitely needed another greybeard panel to tell us all to sacrifice to “get our fiscal house in order.” And that’s what we got today, with the Domenici-Rivlin Bipartisan Policy Center report on debt reduction. Pete Domenici is the former Republican Senator from New Mexico who at the end liked to walk around Congress in his pajamas; Alice Rivlin is the deficit scold Democrat who’s a member of the Catfood Commission, providing a report that is basically similar to the Bowles-Simpson report.

Rivlin has waited for much of her professional life for this moment to cut Social Security benefits. Imagine if that was your life’s goal. You’d want to do or say anything to reach an agreement, too.

Despite distrusting Mike Allen’s version of events at all times, there’s no question that the Administration resurrected a deficit panel that the Senate killed, and the President staffed it with a number of people who would be open to Social Security benefit cuts. And that set of decisions is bearing fruit on the panel, according to the Wall Street Journal. This one deserves a close reading.

Brookings Institute’s Alice Rivlin’s latest opinion piece on Social Security, “The Right Reason for Saving Social Security,” makes the case for why she and the other members of the Catfood Commission are the wrong people for the job.

Alice Rivlin and Alan Simpson are willing to exploit workers to protect their friends.

Alice Rivlin is the chief wonk appointed by President Obama to the debt commission, and has long supported cutting Social Security benefits as a way to address the country’s financial woes.

Alex Lawson caught up with Rivlin and asked her about her plans right after his famous interview with Alan Simpson when the commission met two weeks ago, and she didn’t want to talk about it.

But it appears Rivlin’s ideas are gaining important support.