Dean Baker asks, "Does Paul Ryan Know What's in His Budget?"

The folks at Center for American Progress Action Fund have produced a report that includes this infographic (click to enlarge it) showing, as The Progress Report put it today, "how much Romney and Ryan will rob your retirement to pay for new tax breaks for themselves."

"Does Representative Ryan really think it is a good idea to end the federal government's role in building and maintaining infrastructure, in financing education, in funding basic research in health care and other areas, in maintaining our national parks, federal courts, the FBI? His budget says that this is what he thinks . . . .

"If reporters do their job, they have a simple question to put to Mr. Ryan. 'Your budget would put an end to everything the government does, except for Social Security, health care and defense. Is this really what you want to do?' "

-- Dean Baker, in a recent post,
"Does Paul Ryan Know What's in His Budget?"

by Ken

I've been meaning all week to write about the post of economist Dean Baker's about Paul Ryan's so-called budget from which I've extracted the above quote, and I guess each time I tried to do it, I finally threw up my hands and figured what's the point? By now anyone who doesn't know that every word that comes out of Ryan's [thanks, John!] mouth is either a flat-out lie (either for his convenience, as when he's flip-flopping on matters like his worship of Ayn Rand, or in service to the 1%-ers who find him such a useful tool, as with his yeoman's service toward the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare) or an expression of ideological psychosis as extreme as anything that has ever been uttered in the American political circus either isn't paying attention or just doesn't want to know.

The famous Ryan budget, Dean writes,

implies that after three decades the federal government will have no money to spend on health research, education, highways, airports, and other infrastructure, the Food and Drug Administration and most other activities that we associate with the federal government. His budget has money for Social Security, Medicare and other health programs and the Defense Department. That's it. This is not a vicious anti-Ryan attack coming from hyper-partisan Democrats. This is what the analysis of his budget by the non-partisan CBO shows. It's right there in the fifth row of Table 2.The table shows that in 2040, Representative Ryan would allot an amount equal to 4.75 percent of GDP to all these other areas of government including defense spending. By 2050, Ryan's allocation for these areas, including defense, falls to 3.75 percent of GDP.

And as Dean goes to great lengths to demonstrate, walking us through the process that CBO goes through when asked for analysis by its employers, Congress, "CBO did not blindside Representative Ryan with a half-baked analysis they did in the middle of the night."

It is important to understand that CBO tried to accurately present the implications of the budget that Representative Ryan gave them. CBO works for Congress. These are career civil servants. They cannot be easily fired, but if CBO's staff deliberately misrepresented a budget proposal from a powerful member of Congress like Paul Ryan, that is the sort of thing that could get them put out on the street.

BUT WHAT ARE WE TO THINK WHEN A GUY WHO'S
BEEN WRITING A NYT COLUMN FOR UMPTEEN YEARS . . .

. . . says, in all apparent seriousness, "I don’t see how anybody can say that Ryan is unserious when, unlike most national pols, he actually has a budget detailed enough for C.B.O. to score."? Okay, the guy is David Brooks, who we know isn't bright, or well plugged into reality, but still, you figure that somewhere, somehow he's held to a certain minimum standard of factuality, but no, as Dean Baker had to explain in a Wednesday night post, that no, this isn't at all what PRyan did.

The CBO report explains at the top, Dean tells us, that the calculations prepared at the request of Representative Ryan --

do not represent a cost estimate for legislation or an analysis of the effects of any given policies. In particular, CBO has not considered whether the specified paths are consistent with the policy proposals or budget figures released today by Chairman Ryan as part of his proposed budget resolution.

The amounts of revenues and spending to be used in these calculations for 2012 through 2022 were provided by Chairman Ryan and his staff.

"In other words," Dean tells us, "Representative Ryan did not give CBO a set of tax and spending proposals to be scored. He told them to write down a spending and revenue path."

The difference is that the former would require that Ryan indicate specific spending cuts and tax increases that he was proposing.

For example, if Mr. Ryan was actually writing a budget for CBO to score, he would tell them that he wants to cut spending on Head Start by 50 percent over the next decade, spending on medical research by 30 percent, and spending on education by 40 percent. On the tax side, he would tell CBO that he wants to eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction over the next decade, phase out the deduction for employer provided health insurance over the next two decades, and immediately eliminate the charitable interest tax deduction.

The point is that he would hand CBO specific policy proposals like these and then have CBO show what the budget looks like. This is absolutely not what Ryan did, as CBO tried to say as clearly as it possible could.

Instead, Ryan told CBO to write down specific numbers for broad categories of spending. This means he told them to write down that spending on non-health care, non-Social Security spending will be 4.5 percent of GDP in 2040. He told them to write down specific numbers for tax revenue.

Since CBO works for Congress, it does what powerful members of Congress want it to do. Thus it wrote down the numbers that Mr. Ryan instructed them to write down. However CBO was honest and clearly stated that it had just written down numbers given to it by Mr. Ryan and his staff. Unfortunately David Brooks is either too confused to understand what CBO wrote, or alternatively is deliberately trying to mislead NYT readers into believing that CBO scored a Ryan budget when it did not.

IT'S NO SECRET TO DWT READERS THAT THE
MYTH OF PRYAN'S SERIOUSNESS IS JUST THAT

It's a myth. He's a liar, a crackpot, and at his most fragrant a crook. As Howie has pointed out here, he has no shame in distancing himself from his ideological twin Todd Akin, even though his position on rape and abortion isn't virtually the same, it's identical, and is based on the right-wing article of faith that with the exception of that tiny category of "forcible rapes" -- which poor Todd referred to so infelicitously as "legitimate" rapes -- there are no rapes. It's all just those damn slutty wimmins who wuz probly askin' fer it and jes' got what they all deserved.

Which still leaves the question of how someone who intellectually is, from any standpoint, the flightiest of flyweights, maintains a reputation for "seriousness." One answer is suggested in Dean Baker's Wednesday piece on DBrooks's love affair with PRyan --

PER DBROOKS, YOU CAN ONLY COMMENT
ON CANDIDATES YOU'VE INTERVIEWED

After picking apart the DBrooks's nonsensical notion that PRyan is so serious that he was able to submit an actual budget to the CBO for scoring, Dean writes, "There is one other issue worth beating up on Brooks for in this piece."

At one point he says: "I have enormous respect for Ryan and I regard most of the commentary I've read about him by people who've never even interviewed him to be ludicrous."

Huh? What planet is this guy on? It's wonderful that Brooks has had the opportunity to interview Paul Ryan. Most of us will not have that opportunity.

In David Brooks Land that apparently means that we don't have the right to comment on Ryan's positions on issues. That might be true in David Brooks eliteland, but we still have pretensions of having a democracy in this country. That means that we all get to say whatever we damn well please about Representative Ryan, even if we never interviewed him. If that troubles Brooks, then perhaps he can find some dictatorship where speech is regulated more to his liking.

Let me come out and say what Dean has tactfully merely indicated: that media whores like DBrooks were born to be coopted. It's the insidious Curse of Insiderness. DBrooks has come away from his Encounter(s) with PRyan blanketed by the same snowjob as The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza in his repellent puff piece on PRyan: Ooh, ooh, he talked to me! I must be somebody really important!

Au contraire, DBrooks. If you had the tiniest grain of either intelligence or integrity (and one or the other would probably do it), you would announce, "I have belatedly realized that I am too stupid and dishonest to live, let alone pass myself off as a commentator, and I realize how simply I can solve both problems. Th-th-that's all, folks!"

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