Ryanpalooza

There's been a lot of clamor for more stuff on Paul Ryan. He gave a speech last night at the Republican convention. More blogging on this to follow, but start with some good stuff from Yglesias. In general, I'd bet low information voters (and plenty of high information ones) use heuristics and rules which do not readily allow for matters of degree to make a difference. Things like: Debt bad! Taxes bad! Spending cuts bad! This sort of thinking is very bad for politics, since circumstances are complicated to begin with and change all the time AND it's not like we ever got anything exactly right in the first place. It's important to keep things in perspective.