Digby finds Paul Ryan, winner of an award for fiscal responsibility, saying, well, something:

RYAN: Let’s review for a moment the path we are on, where we stand right now. It pains me to say this, but it’s become clear that the president has committed us to the current path: higher taxes, more dependency, more bureaucratic control, inaction on the drivers of our debt — just not even dealing with it — and painful austerity, the kind you see in Europe.

So unless Obama agrees to sharp spending cuts, we’ll be forced into austerity? What?

Wait, it’s worse: just the other day, Ryan and colleagues were praising European-style austerity; they bought into the “expansionary austerity” thesis just as it was collapsing intellectually.

On a somewhat related note, John Quiggin reads the original Alesina/Ardagna paper on expansionary austerity, and finds that they got all the facts about Australia wrong. Most notably, they depict a decline in spending on unemployment benefits that was the result of an economic expansion as an expansionary spending cut. Geez.