Add to the Ryan errata watch Mitt’s mate misplacing Ronald Reagan’s killer line from a 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter to the GOP convention.

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” the Gipper asked voters back then, and now Paul Ryan is out claiming to remember it as a ten-year-old and, as usual, getting it wrong.

Whatever. The question deserves serious answering, and Democrats are giving it a try.

If your eyes don’t glaze over, you can see one about the Reagan era with charts and graphs here and another with 2008 headlines here, but the best may be an economist’s rebuttal to journalists who take the question seriously:

“Suppose your house is on fire and the firefighters race to the scene. They set up their hoses and start spraying water on the blaze as quickly as possible. After the fire is put out, the courageous news reporter on the scene asks the chief firefighter, ‘Is the house in better shape than when you got here?’

“Yes, that would be a really ridiculous question…”

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