Paul Ryan And The Audacity Of Dopes

Wall Street never keeps all its eggs in one basket. While the bankster community was making certain Democrats-- think Rahm Emanuel, Harold Ford, Jr, Charlie Rangel, Steve Israel, Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman for example-- financially invincible enough to keep anti-bankster elements in the Democratic Party in check, it was also finding champions in the GOP to move the ball forward on the field of world domination. Among the Republicans singled out for special Wall Street love-- Members whose upward career trajectories they agreed to finance-- are the new senator from Illinois, Mark Kirk ($5,104,216), the former and current chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus ($4,644,824), the Majority Leader of the House Republicans ($4,643,385), the new senator from Missouri, Roy Blunt ($4,470,664), the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner ($4,190,440), the new senator from Ohio Rob Portman ($3,622,738)... and relatively young up-and-comer from Wisconsin they have pegged as a future governor, senator, vice-president... but who sits as the head of the Budget Committee today, Paul Ryan ($2,229,897).

Ryan has already taken more money from the banksters than anyone in the history of Wisconsin politics. Fellow Wisconsinite, David Obey, who retired as Chairman of the House Appropriations last year, was already in Congress when Ryan was born. Obey's total haul from the banking sector was $691,893 (and that's ten times more than the banksters gave Peter Barca, Ryan's immediate predecessor as the Representative for WI-1). No, Wall Street has Ryan's future very much in mind. We should too. As Blue America has been warning and the Washington Post confirmed yesterday, Ryan-- an ignorant and intellectually immature Ayn Rand acolyte-- poses an existential danger to America's middle class. In a swipe at even stupider teabagger freshmen, Ryan is preaching Wall Street's message that Social Security and Medicare need to be dismantled. Offering no details or specifics, he "will propose fundamental changes to Medicare and Medicaid, the giant health care programs that cover 100 million Americans."

House Republicans will "lead with our chin" and offer politically explosive cost curbs this spring on programs like Medicare, Medicaid and perhaps Social Security, the party's point man for curbing crippling budget deficits said Thursday.

...Ryan has been calling for big changes to the social safety net for years. Known as "the roadmap," his approach calls for individuals to take on more of the financial responsibility for retirement, including the costs of health care. The government would provide a floor of protection for everyone, particularly the poor and those in failing health, but middle-class people who desire more than a basic plan would have to pay extra.

He's also proposed allowing younger workers to divert part of their Social Security taxes to personal investment accounts, an idea that's lost currency among other Republicans given President George W. Bush's failed 2005 Social Security overhaul and the recent swoon in the stock market.

The plan Ryan rolled out last year for Social Security would gradually increase the full retirement age, from 67 to 70. It would also reduce initial benefits for middle- and high-income retirees.

Ryan said Social Security is the easiest entitlement program to fix - though it is the most dangerous politically to touch-- and he was disappointed that Obama didn't address it in his budget proposal.

"Give me a cocktail napkin and I can write you a plan on the back of it," Ryan said. "It's not that hard."

Under the roadmap, Medicare would be converted into a voucher system that offers seniors a fixed payment to pick their coverage from a range of private insurance plans overseen by the government. Today's Medicare recipients and those nearing retirement would remain under the current system, in which the government determines what's covered and sets payments for providers.

...Republicans this week conceded that the government's budget can't be balanced this decade without cutting into current retirees' Medicare and Social Security benefits, something they've indicated they're unwilling to do. But many tea-party activists and junior lawmakers still believe the red ink can be reduced to zero with just a bit more pain, according to Ryan.

"They literally think you can just balance it, you know, (by cutting) waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid and NPR (National Public Radio)," Ryan said. "And it doesn't work like that."

But as economics professor and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has pointed out again and again, Ryan's ideological mania shows a keen lack of basic understanding of economics. The only actual job the spoiled Ryan ever had was as a so-called "marketing consultant" in his grandfather's construction business, Ryan Incorporated Central. In a column that slapped Ryan down badly last August, The FlimFlam Man, Krugman comes right out and calls him a charlatan

One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.

Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Mr. 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.

Krugman is hardly the only economist blowing the whistle on the ideological fervour that has incubated in the oven of Ryan's intellectual dishonesty. Even if the Wall Street-financed DCCC has given Ryan a 100% pass on every single reelection bid-- despite the fact that WI-1 is a traditionally Democratic district that was won in 2008 by Obama-- the Center For American Progress has kept a wary eye on Ryan. They've warned about his schemes and the harm they would do to the economy:

• Block-granting Medicaid (as the Road Map does and GOP governors want) would cost three million jobs.

• Voucherizing Medicare (as the Road Map does) would raise Medicare premiums more than thirty percent by 2021.

The political reawakening in Wisconsin is likely to sweep Republicans out of office in that state. It would be tragic if Wall Street and their partners at the DCCC are once again able to protect Paul Ryan's seat. It's time to end his pretense and his political career and send him back to the family construction business in Janesville... where because of the policies he's supported for years, there isn't much construction going on. This is the most recent ad Blue America ran against Ryan in his district. We have plans to tread quite a lot between now and November 2012... in places where the DCCC has been unwilling to ever go. Americans need to hear what Paul Krugman wrote, even if the DCCC (and Obama) refuse to care: "The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future."