Why does anyone listen to Paul Ryan? Paul Krugman has a theory (with thoughts from E. J. Dionne Jr. and James Surowiecki)

"The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate. . . .

"The 'centrists' needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated [Mr. Ryan, "an ordinary G.O.P. extremist, but a mild-mannered one"] for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations."

-- Paul Krugman, on the president's denunciation of the Ryan budget as a "Trojan horse," in the column "The Gullible Center"

by Ken

In a swell column today, "Obama levels straight shots at Supreme Court and Ryan budget," the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr. celebrates the president's recruitment to the cause of emphatic pushback against right-wing ideological extremism with all its lies and delusions.

Conservatives are not accustomed to being on the defensive.

They have long experience with attacking the evils of the left and the abuses of activist judges. They love to assail “tax-and-spend liberals” without ever discussing who should be taxed or what government money is actually spent on. They expect their progressive opponents to be wimpy and apologetic.

So imagine the shock when President Obama decided last week to speak plainly about what a Supreme Court decision throwing out the health-care law would mean, and then landed straight shots against the Mitt Romney-supported Paul Ryan budget as “a Trojan horse,” “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country,” and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

Obama specifically listed the programs the Ryan-Romney budget would cut back, including student loans, medical and scientific research grants, Head Start, feeding programs for the poor, and possibly even the weather service.

Romney pronounced himself appalled, accusing Obama of having “railed against arguments no one is making” and “criticized policies no one is proposing.” Yet Romney could neither defend the cuts nor deny the president’s list of particulars, based as they were on reasonable assumptions. When it came to the Ryan budget, Romney wanted to fuzz things up. But, as Obama likes to point out, math is math. . . .

E.J. does a fine review of the real history of judicial activism, going back to Franklin Roosevelt's determination to remove the then-conservative Court's tradition of legislating from the bench on behalf of the Right.

The United States, FDR insisted, could not afford “to sacrifice each generation in turn while the law catches up with life.” He spoke with a sense of urgency in the midst of the Great Depression. “The millions who are in want,” he said, “will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.”

FDR lost the court-packing fight but won the larger battle over the right of the democratic branches of government to legislate on behalf of the common good.

Progressives would be wildly irresponsible if they sat by quietly while a conservative Supreme Court majority undid 80 years of jurisprudence. Roosevelt wasn’t a wimp, and Obama has decided that he won’t be one, either. Conservatives are unhappy because they prefer passive, intimidated liberals to the fighting kind.

PAUL KRUGMAN ON "THE PAUL RYAN PHENOMENON"

Krugman makes clear that yes, he means "the phenomenon, not the man."

Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the last two Congressional Republican budget proposals, isn't especially interesting. He's a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.

No, what's interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan -- and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can't seem to let go of their fantasy.

PK has of course devoted way more time and column space than he wishes to debunking wacko pseudo-"economics" (you really have to put "economics" in quotes) that pour forth from the Sage of Wisconsin like really bad diarrhea, and he does a bare-bones version of it in today's column, focusing on the $4.6 trillion worth of tax cuts called for over the next decade ("which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent"), overwhelmingly favoring the wealthy, despite which Ryan calls his plan "revenue neutral," insisting --

that he would make up for the lost revenue by closing looholes. But he has refused to specify a single loophole he would close.

Since Howie wrote has been faithfully chronicling the Ryan Travesty, including just last week "Is Paul Ryan Not Merely A Flimflam Man, But A Fraud As Well? (raising once again the issue of why the institutional Democratic Party does nothing to pry the lout out of his congressional seat, unlike Blue America, with our strong support of progressive Democrat Rob Zerban), I haven't felt any recent need to jump into the fray. I was tempted, though, to call attention to a withering takedown of the Ryan budget by The New Yorker's intrepid "Financial Page" columnist, James Surowiecki, in the April 9 issue, "Call That a Budget?"

JAMES SUROWIECKI ON RYAN THE EXTREMIST IDEOLOGUE


One of the things that's interesting about Surowiecki's takedown is that as far as I'm aware no one has successfully slapped any ideological label on him. Indeed the progressives I know harbor deep animus against him. I love him, because he just about always makes such good sense of matters that I'm often foggy about. Here's how he begins this piece:

Last week, when House Republicans passed Paul Ryan's budget resolution, Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, said that Congress had a "moral obligation" to get the country's finances under control, and that the vote was a necessary response to a looming "debt-driven crisis." What he didn't mention was that it was also a vote to gut the federal government.

Because Ryan presents himself as a reasonable technocrat who's just making the tough choices that other politicians shirk, that may sound like an exaggeration. But the simple truth is that his plan is not an evenhanded attempt to solve America's long-term budget problems. It's a profoundly radical document, its proposals skewed by ideological biases. Raising taxes, of course, is out of bounds. The same goes for using federal power to hold down Medicare costs, which will be the key driver of future budget deficits. Instead, House Republicans would cut spending on almost everything else the government does. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, the Ryan plan would, by 2050, reduce federal spending to its lowest point, as a percentage of G.D.P., since 1951. And since an aging population, with rising health-care costs, means that a hefty chunk of government spending will be going to retirement and health-care benefits, hitting Ryan's target would require drastically shrinking everything else.

Ryan doesn't exactly hide his hostility to government, but he's adept at downplaying the impact that his proposed cuts would have on people's lives. Thus the part of the plan titled "Repairing the Social Safety Net" in fact calls for huge cuts in spending on Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, and so on -- all of which will unquestionably damage the social safety net and make life harder for millions of Americans. This is about as disingenuous as calling a company's downsizing initiative "Boosting Our Labor Force." Reforming the welfare state is a reasonable goal. But when Ryan explains that he's doing things like cutting Medicaid in order to help "the less fortunate get back on their feet" one hears echoes of Judge Smails, in "Caddyshack," explaining that he sentenced young criminals to death because "I felt I owed it to them."

Often when we look at today's right-wing extremists we face the question whether they're truly as ignorant and/or deranged as their rhetoric or whether they're just pathological or otherwise-impelled liars. In Ryan's case we don't have to choose. It does seem clear to me that he actually believes in some of his Randian gibberish. Score that in the "imbecile" column. But it's every bit as clear that much of his famous budgets of the last two years are built on knowing fabrications, and pretty much every word of his defense of those pernicious declarations of ideoloigcal hoolignism has been a knowing, calculated lie.

Surowiecki pokes at the case of defense spending, one area that the Ryan budget would increase.

Any doubt that Ryan's choices are dictated by ideology rather than economics vanish when you look at one area of spending that he wants to increase: the defense budget. If you're genuinely interested in fiscal responsibility, this is an untenable position. Annual defense spending has risen more than a hundred per cent since 2001, and it already constitutes more than half of all discretionary government spending. Countless analysts -- including members of the military -- have shown ways that the defense budget could be substantially cut without endangering national security. And the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provides a good opportunity to do so: after the Korean War, President Eisenhower cut defense spending by twenty-seven per cent; after Vietnam, Nixon cut it by twenty-nine per cent; and, after the end of the Cold War, the defense budget was cut by twenty per cent.

But Ryan will have none of this. And, despite his rhetorical obsession with "efficiency" elsewhere, he doesn't even offer a substantive justification for why defense should get a free pass, or why national security requires us to spend four hundred billion dollars more each year than we did a decade ago. Instead, he relies on overblown rhetoric -- cuts would "devastate" the military -- and bad historical analogies. He argues that defense spending is smaller -- as a percentage of G.D.P., and as a percentage of federal spending -- than its Cold War average. That comparison makes no sense: we are no longer facing the might of the Soviet Union, and the major threats of today are not ones that new aircraft carriers and joint strike fighters are designed to combat.

The result, Surowiecki shows, is that using Ryan's own numbers, all non-defense functions of the federal government would have to be financed out of an amount that represents 0.75 percent of GDP.

This is a derisory number—in the entire postwar era, it has never been less than eight per cent. In practical terms it would make most of what the federal government does—from maintaining infrastructure to air-traffic control, environmental regulation, and crime fighting—unaffordable. Ryan’s path to prosperity, in other words, is a path that ends with the federal government spending its money on health care, Social Security, and the military, and little else.

Surowiecki understands that the Ryan budget "will never become reality; after all, the electorate likes most of the programs that House Republicans want to kill." But as "an act of political theatre," he argues, "a way for Republicans to demonstrate what they stand for,"

what [Ryan's] plans tell us is that there’s very little the federal government has done over the past hundred and fifty years, apart from fighting wars, that the House Republicans approve of. In that sense, the Ryan plan is not about fiscal responsibility. It's about pushing a very particular, and very ideological, view of the proper relationship between government and society. The U.S. does need to get its finances in order. It just doesn't need to repeal the twentieth century to do so.

SO WHY, KRUGMAN ASKS, DO "CENTRISTS" DEFEND RYAN?


We get a strong hint in the title of today's column, "The Gullible Center." It's one thing for the assorted crackpots of the Far Right to sing hymns of praise to Ryan's imbecilic blithering. But the key to what PK calls "the Ryan cult" is the signing on of a chorus of self-styled "centrists." And before offering his theory of why they're rising to his defense, it's necessary first to "ask yourself the following: What does it mean to be a centrist, anyway?"

It could mean supporting politicians who actually are relatively nonideological, who are willing, for example, to seek Democratic support for health reforms originally devised by Republicans, to support deficit-reduction plans that rely on both spending cuts and revenue increases. And by that standard, centrists should be lavishing praise on the leading politician who best fits that description -- a fellow named Barack Obama.

But the "centrists" who weigh in on policy debates are playing a different game. Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties -- even if these reasonable people don't actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.

So why do the "centrists" need to prop Ryan up? Well, if they were to maintain the pose of "bringing together reasonable people from both parties,"

they needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated [Ryan] for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations.

So you can see the problem these commentators face. To admit that the president's critique is right would be to admit that they were snookered by Mr. Ryan, who is the same as he ever was. More than that, it would call into question their whole centrist shtick -- for the moral of my story is that Mr. Ryan isn't the only emperor who turns out, on closer examination, to be naked.

Hence the howls of outrage, and the attacks on the president for being "partisan." For that is what people in Washington say when they want to shout down someone who is telling the truth.

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