"Paul Ryan In Wonderland"

March 12, 2013

PAUL RYAN IN WONDERLAND: CHAPTER SIX

John Cassidy

Having wandered back into writing about U.S. politics for the past eighteen months or so, I sometime wonder how the full-time Washington correspondents, the lifers, do it: cover the same old junk year after year. The key to career longevity and job satisfaction, I suppose, is to buy into the notion, assiduously promoted by the politicians and their flaks, that what they are doing is serious. Budgets, national security, energy policy, health policy—these things matter. So get yourself a tape recorder, a Twitter account, and a piece of plastic from the Senate Press Gallery, and hop in a cab up to Capitol Hill. Write down what the elected representatives are saying, and try hard to keep a straight face.

Sorry folks. After watching Representative Paul Ryan launch his much-anticipated budget for the fiscal year 2014, I can’t keep up the pretense. The plan is a joke. It’s dead on arrival, and nobody should pay much attention to it, except as another exhibit in the indictment of latter-day Republicanism. Ryan’s numbers don’t add up. His proposals—cutting domestic programs, converting Medicare to a voucher program, returning Medicaid to the states, reducing the top rate of income tax to twenty-five per cent—were roundly rejected by the voters just five months ago. And the philosophy his plan is based upon—trickle-down economics combined with an unbridled hostility toward government programs designed to correct market failures—is tattered and shopworn.

The contents of Ryan’s plan aren’t new, or nearly new. Give or take a few minor details, it’s a rehashed version of the budget he put out twelve months ago, which itself was a retread of the budget he issued the year before that, which was based on his 2010 plan. In fact, he’s been trotting out this pablum for six years now. Back in 2008, he unveiled his original budget under the workmanlike name “Roadmap for America’s Future.” As my colleague Ryan Lizza pointed out in an informative piece on Ryan last year, the blueprint, which proposed replacing Medicare with a voucher program, attracted just a handful of Republican votes and didn’t make it out of committee. But Ryan didn’t give up on his clunker, he just gave it a more uplifting name: “The Path to Prosperity.” (Give the Wisconsin cowlick credit for one thing: he appears to have studied his Orwell, as well as his Ayn Rand.) This year again, the same moniker appears on the budget’s front page. A more realistic title would be: “Paul Ryan in Wonderland: Chapter Six.”

About the only argument you can make for Ryan’s budgets (or roadmaps, or pathways) is that they aren’t budgets at all: they are political manifestos. A few years ago, well before he was chosen as a Vice-Presidential candidate, I asked Grover Norquist, who knows a thing or two about Republican politics, what function Ryan performed in the G.O.P. and why, even then, he was taken seriously by pundits and party elders. “Ryan’s role is to point to the Promised Land,” Norquist replied. As leaders of their respective caucuses, workaday pols like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have to get involved in the messy business of tangling with the White House over actual legislation. Ryan can float above it all, working out in the House gym, speaking to Republican policy retreats, and updating Rand’s message for the twenty-first century.

In a more just world, Ryan and his visionary shtick would have been jeered off the stage after last year’s Presidential campaign, when, apart from ensuring that Mitt Romney didn’t face any blowback from the right at the convention in Tampa, his presence added virtually nothing to the G.O.P. ticket, and, arguably, handicapped it. Almost immediately after Tampa, he was dispatched, Dan Quayle–style, to secondary television markets, where he was placed under strict instructions not to bring up anything controversial, like his plans to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid. (He did have the gall to join Romney in criticizing the Obama Administration for planning to cut seven hundred billion dollars from the Medicare budget over the next decade.)

Since November, Ryan has been as quiet as a cardinal in the Sistine Chapel. Word was he was toiling on a revolutionary new fiscal plan, which would balance the budget by 2023, but that can’t have been right. As I said, today’s document contains hardly anything novel. Rather than reworking his assumptions, coming up with a big new policy idea, or specifying how he would make up for the big drop in revenues his tax plan would entail—introducing a consumption tax? eliminating the mortgage-interest deduction and other tax breaks?—Ryan simply updated last year’s fantastical figures and assumed that economic growth, and therefore tax revenues, would be a higher than previously thought. Presto! His budget shows a seven-billion-dollar surplus in 2023.

I’ll largely leave it to others to eviscerate the details. In the coming days, number crunchers at the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere will detail the impact that the plan would have on specific programs, inequality, and the overall fiscal position. But I can’t let a few things pass without comment.

Ryan’s proposal to reduce the top rate of income tax to twenty-five per cent would be a huge giveaway to the rich. How big? We can get a reasonable estimate by looking at Ryan’s 2012 budget, which Bob Greenstein, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, aptly described as “Robin Hood in reverse—on steroids.” According to the center’s analysis, people earning more than a million dollars a year would each gain, on average, $264,970. Workers in the middle of the income distribution would gain about a thousand dollars, and those earning less than thirty thousand dollars would see their post-tax incomes decline slightly.

Make no mistake: Ryan is proposing austerity. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, he described the spending cuts he is proposing as modest, and pointed out that, overall, federal spending would continue to rise at a rate of 3.4 per cent a year. But that ignores inflation, which the Congressional Budget Office reckons will average about 2.3 per cent. After adjusting for inflation, the spending growth comes down to roughly one per cent a year, which is about equal to the annual growth in the population. On a per-capita basis, then, spending wouldn’t go up at all under Ryan’s budget. But we know for sure that spending on entitlements is going to rise substantially. As interest rates return to more normal levels, the cost of servicing the national debt is likely to increase, too. And Ryan is calling for the Pentagon budget to be increased by five hundred billion dollars. Put all these things together and they add up to one thing: big cuts in unprotected programs, particularly those that help the poor.

But in terms of sheer political cynicism, it’s hard to beat Ryan’s attitude towards Obamacare. On the one hand, he wants to repeal large parts of it, including the insurance exchanges and the subsidies for middle-income families. But in seeking to balance the budget over ten years, his plan retains the Medicare tax increases on high earners that Obamacare introduced, and the seven hundred billion dollars in Medicare savings—yes, the very savings that Ryan lambasted during the Presidential campaign. That’s right. He wants to roll back much of the Obamcare spending on expanding health coverage, but he wants to keep the tax increases and Medicare cuts that were introduced to pay for it! If he hadn’t included this bit of trickery, his budget wouldn’t be balanced at all.

Before you start ranting and raving at the iniquity of it all, remember what I said at the beginning: it ain’t going to happen; it’s a joke. But at a time when the G.O.P. is supposed to be at least going through the motions of trying to reinvent itself as a more user-friendly organization, it’s not a particularly funny one.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/03/paul-ryan-in-wonderland.html#ixzz2NRYbuQl5