In honor of Paul Ryan being chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate–a big event no matter what your political leanings–here is a record of a Twitter discussion I had about Paul on July 27, some handicapping in the last few days of whether he would be Mitt’s pick, and my selection from the Twitter traffic about Paul today. The other participants are Noah Smith, Adam Sulewski, Matt Bruenig, Matt O'Brien, Mike Konczal, Casey Thormahlen, and indirectly, Howard Gleckman, Ezra Klein, Andrew Levine, Mike Sax, Jonathan Bernstein, Matt Williams, John Podhoretz, Betsey Stevenson, Josiah Neeley, Matt Stambaugh, Evan Soltas and Brad DeLong among others.

Don’t miss the discussions of long-run fiscal policy and health care. The video of Paul begging Congress to pass the bank bailout (TARP) that I link to at the end shows that he met an important test of seriousness. The bank bailouts are not popular now, but they were necessary in order to avoid a much worse economic outcome than the scathing economic outcome that we have actually had.   

In my mini-bio at the sidebar, it says

Politically, Miles is an independent who grew up in an apolitical family. He holds many strong opinions—open to revision in response to cogent arguments—that do not line up neatly with either the Republican or Democratic Party. 

In these Twitter discussions, you will see me considering and responding to arguments and coming out of the discussions in a different place than where I entered them–on several dimensions.   

To untangle the different discussion threads, I had to depart from chronological order.