Does Wisconsin Have Something Ready For America Even More Dangerous Than Joseph McCarthy Was? Absolutely-- Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan, who has already taken in more legalistic bribes ($2,127,615) from Wall Street than any congressman in the history of his state of Wisconsin, is only 41 years old, just 3 years older than Billie Joe Armstrong, lead singer of Green Day (and Pinhead Gunpowder). I have no way of knowing if Ryan has ever heard Pinhead Gunpowder's cathartic cover of "Big Yellow Taxi"-- Joni literally and joyfully pogo-ed around her house when I played it for her for the first time-- but according to Jon Ward Ryan is a fan of Green Day's music. Walking back and forth between the Capitol and his office in Longworth, he listens to "Brain Stew/Jaded" on his iPod. "It's a good song," he told the reporter.

Funny that Ryan, whose staff has worked furiously to try to build an image for him around the organizing principles that he's "brainy" and even intellectual and serious, would pick a song with the word "brain" in it. Nobel laureate and Princeton Professor Paul Krugman has been making a point for some time that Ryan's pretensions for having one-- or at least using one-- are a sham. That was way back last summer, when it was becoming apparent that Wall Street darling Ryan was likely to become chairman of the House Budget Committee and pose an actual danger to American working families. At the time Krugman marveled in the NY Times at how the media was just accepting the p.r. spin about Ryan being "an innovative thinker." Krugman took a look and noticed the would be emperor was stark naked. He used the word "charlatan" as an apt descriptor-- although "fraud" would have work equally well.

Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, the Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts-- period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.

And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible-- which you shouldn’t-- the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.

Finally, let’s talk about those spending cuts. In its first decade, most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Mr. Ryan doesn’t say.

After 2020, the main alleged saving would come from sharp cuts in Medicare, achieved by dismantling Medicare as we know it, and instead giving seniors vouchers and telling them to buy their own insurance. Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the same plan Newt Gingrich tried to sell in 1995.

And we already know, from experience with the Medicare Advantage program, that a voucher system would have higher, not lower, costs than our current system. The only way the Ryan plan could save money would be by making those vouchers too small to pay for adequate coverage. Wealthy older Americans would be able to supplement their vouchers, and get the care they need; everyone else would be out in the cold.

In practice, that probably wouldn’t happen: older Americans would be outraged-- and they vote. But this means that the supposed budget savings from the Ryan plan are a sham.

So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power-- the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.

But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.

Blue America has been shouting this message about Ayn Rand's most devoted congressional zombie for several years now, while the DCCC has studiously refused-- ever-- to take on Ryan. The ambitious congressman represents a Democratic-leaning swing district in southeast Wisconsin that Obama won in 2008. But Ryan has never had a serious opponent-- not once. Armed with millions from Big Business he usually fights off a poor soul with less than $5,000 in his war chest-- and zero backing from the DCCC. We'd like to change that in 2012 when Obama tops the ballot again. Can you help us recruit a good candidate and make sure it isn't another fight between someone in a tank against someone with a water pistol?

Ryan was the perfect empty suit for the GOP response to President Obama's well-crafted State of the Union address the other night. Please watch the discussion between Rachel Maddow and Frank Rich Wednesday night:



And then Krugman takes us away from thoughts of Green Day and into a more REM direction-- Shiny Lazy People. He focuses on one of the many deceptions that made up Ryan's superficially shiny but amateurish speech:

"Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody."

Imagine yourself in Ryan’s position. You’ve been chosen by one of America’s two great political parties to respond to the president of the United States. That’s a fairly awesome responsibility. And you’re going to make some blanket assertions about world events. Wouldn’t you make at least some effort to check whether those assertions are right?

Actually, if your whole public act is based on your supposed knowledge of the importance of fiscal responsibility, wouldn’t you long ago have made sure that you actually know something about the fiscal crises now taking place in Europe?

But no. I suspect that Ryan is honestly unaware that Ireland, far from being a spendthrift, was seen as a fiscal role model before the crisis. And that’s not hyperbole: in 2006 George Osborne, now Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared that

Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking, and that is why I am in Dublin: to listen and to learn.

And I also suspect that Ryan is honestly unaware that the UK has not, in fact, experienced a debt crisis.

How can he be unaware of these things? The only explanation I have is intellectual laziness-- why check the facts when you already believe that you have The Truth?

Let me also highlight another point from that passage: Ryan warns that if we don’t deal with our fiscal problems, we’ll have to raise taxes and cut benefits for seniors. So what can we do to reduce the deficit? Well, government spending is dominated by the big 5: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest payments; you can’t make a significant dent in the deficit without either raising taxes or cutting those big 5. Defense is untouchable, says the GOP; so that leaves the entitlement programs. And 2.7 of the three entitlement programs are benefits to seniors (70 percent of Medicaid spending goes on seniors).

So let’s see: to avoid cuts in benefits to seniors, we must … cut benefits to seniors.

I’m reasonably sure that Ryan hasn’t thought any of this through.

And this is after a column, The Ryan Response, asserting that it had been "as bad as you might expect. Lots of breast-beating about deficits; you’d never know that no leading Republican, Ryan very much included, has offered a serious proposal to cut the deficit. Some cooked statistics about federal spending."

Ryan may look like a joke-- or even benign-- but he's probably the gravest danger facing ordinary American working families today. Big Business and Wall Street interests are determined to push him as far as they can. Dismantling Social Security and Medicare is their dream-- and his.