Reddit reviews Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan

I think it really goes back to the Bush tax cuts. Here's a May 2001 column:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/opinion/reckonings-the-big-lie.html

> So how did the conferees manage to preserve almost the whole Bush tax cut despite a budget resolution that should have forced a substantially smaller cut? They lied.

> Now in a way this is nothing new. Throughout the selling of this tax cut, its advocates have engaged in a disinformation campaign unprecedented in the history of U.S. economic policy -- misrepresenting who would benefit from the plan (pretending that a tax cut mainly for the rich is actually aimed at the middle class) and understating its effects on revenue. Indeed, the pretense that taxes can be sharply cut without undermining the fiscal integrity of the nation has been maintained via financial fakery that, if practiced by the executives of any publicly traded company, would have landed them in jail.

> Still, the fraud perpetrated late Friday night takes fiscal chicanery to a completely new level.

He even wrote a book.

You'd think it's simplistic, right? Seems almost too good to be true. But Krugman has been saying this for decades, and even wrote a book about it before the Bush tax cuts in the 2000s, predicting essentially exactly what would happen: http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Math-Essential-Guide-Bush/dp/0393339467

He's been spot-on for a long time now.