the high life

TPM: Rep. Paul Ryan, a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare, spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis.

…Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday when she saw the label on the bottle Ryan’s table had ordered … it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house…

Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage.

“We were just stunned,” said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter …After ending their meal and paying the check, Feinberg decided to give Ryan a piece of her mind. She approached the table and asked Ryan “how he could live with himself” sipping expensive wine while advocating for cuts to programs for seniors and the poor…..

The clash became especially heated when Feinberg asked the men if they were lobbyists. “F—- her,” one of them replied and stood up in a menacing way, according to Feinberg’s account…

… The one major aspect of the story in dispute was the topic of conversation at Ryan’s dinner table. Feinberg said all three men were “droning on loudly during the evening that liberals think that if you’re a millionaire, you have done something wrong.”

Full article here

Thanks Fred – and Susan Feinberg 😉

‘house gop budget cuts would destroy 700,000 jobs’

Greg Sargent (Washington Post): A Republican plan to sharply cut federal spending this year would destroy 700,000 jobs through 2012, according to an independent economic analysis set for release Monday.

The report, by Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, offers fresh ammunition to Democrats seeking block the Republican plan, which would terminate dozens of programs and slash federal appropriations by $61 billion over the next seven months.

….Zandi will of course be dismissed in some quarters because he has aggressively defended the stimulus. But this is the second outside analysis to reach this conclusion. Last week Goldman Sachs, in a confidential report to clients, concluded that House GOP budget cuts would be a drag on the economy and cut economic growth by roughly two percent of GDP.

More here