Wisconsin congressman and former GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan has spent much of the past week backtracking after claiming on a right-wing radio show that "culture" was to blame for poverty in America's "inner cities." While Ryan's had his defenders in the media — the usual right-wing suspects, along with Slate's Dave Weigel — one of America's most influential liberals, a frequent critic of Paul Ryan, is not one of them.

That's right: Paul Krugman is going after the GOP's chief fan of Ayn Rand. Again.

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In his latest column for the New York Times, Krugman slams Ryan for his controversial remarks, describing them as a "racial dog-whistle" intended to pander to white voters who think liberals are primarily interested in taking their hard-earned money and giving it to undeserving minorities. Mocking Ryan's subsequent claim that he was simply "inarticulate," Krugman sarcastically writes that the House GOPer "even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites."

"Oh, wait," Krugman jokes.

Although he gets his shots in at Ryan, Krugman's column takes a broader view of the relationship between race and redistribution in conservative politics. Calling race the "Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics," Krugman argues that Ryan's "inarticulate" comments were simply indicative of the whole right-wing worldview.

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But one of the many problems with the right's understanding of race and politics, Krugman writes, is that it's locked into unthinking assumptions about the state of the American economy — i.e., conservatives assume there are good jobs for minorities to have, if they weren't too lazy to find them, when the truth is that jobs are scarce and wages are stagnating.

Krugman writes: