Getting the Paul Ryan they deserve

The late, oh, so lamented Doghouse Riley, used to often begin his most righteous screeds with something along the lines of, "Look, I know it's Slate and Michael Kinsey's experiment in double-reverse back flip of mid-level account rep libertarian contrarianism..."  But, really, is there anyone more of a forlorn fool than William Saletan?

Yes, Republicans are obsessed with poverty

Poor, poor Jackie Calmes.  Six years in and she still thinks the president can come to terms with "leading conservative intellectuals" in the House over things they both care about.  Like poverty.

WASHINGTON — More than he might have imagined just a month ago, President Obama has an opening with Tuesday’s State of the Union address to advance his argument to Congress that the rising inequality of economic opportunities is America’s “defining challenge of our time.”

Leading Republicans have responded with their own expressions of concern — and seeds of ideas. Previously the party mostly ignored Mr. Obama’s periodic speeches about trends that show the United States trailing Canada, France and Germany on measures of upward mobility and seven out of 10 Americans born into poverty likely to stay there.

The best-known Republicans speaking out on poverty and opportunity have presidential ambitions, among them Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Influential conservative economists and columnists have spoken up as well.

Yes, Paul Ryan has a real obsession with the poor.  Via K-thug.

Mr. Ryan blames Mr. Obama’s talk of “class warfare” and Republicans’ own message mistakes — but not their policies — for his party’s image deficit.

“We have just not done a good enough job of explaining why our ideas and our principles are good for everybody and how they restore upward mobility,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview.

Why, oh why, can't we have a better press corps?

The priest knows when you have committed a sin

Odd, Paul Ryan seems to have a Catholic problem.  First, American nuns, now American Jesuits.

No matter, I guess.  They're part of the takers, not the makers.

And yes, I know, this guy likes him.

Rage this

Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine's guitarist, has this to say about his biggest, most awesomest fan, the Zombie Eyed Granny Starver (ZEGS):

Ryan claims that he likes Rage's sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

I wonder what Ryan's favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of "Fuck the Police"? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!

Don't mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta "rage" in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he's not raging against is the privileged elite he's groveling in front of for campaign contributions.

You see, the super rich must rationalize having more than they could ever spend while millions of children in the U.S. go to bed hungry every night. So, when they look themselves in the mirror, they convince themselves that "Those people are undeserving. They're . . . lesser." Some of these guys on the extreme right are more cynical than Paul Ryan, but he seems to really believe in this stuff. This unbridled rage against those who have the least is a cornerstone of the Romney-Ryan ticket.

Fauxhawk

Scott Lemieux reminds us of a terrific Jonathan Chait profile -- from April -- of the fantasy versus the reality Paul Ryan.

For a virtuoso display of this principle in action, return to another vintage Ryan moment: his Dave profile from last year, where he awed a swooning reporter by opening up the budget to a random page and fingered a boondoggle. The item Ryan pointed to was the Obama administration’s reform of the student-loan industry. “Direct loans—this is perfect,” Ryan said. “So direct loans, that’s new spending on autopilot, that had no congressional oversight, and it gave the illusion that they were cutting spending.”
The exchange is so perversely revealing that it rewards explanation. For decades, the government helped make college more affordable through “guaranteed loans”—it encouraged banks to lend money to students by promising to repay the banks if the students defaulted. Banks were making billions of dollars in profits at virtually no risk. The General Accounting Office, a kind of in-house fiscal watchdog for the federal government, issued sixteen reports over the years noting how the government could save money simply by issuing the loans itself and cutting out the middleman.

It was the simplest, no-brainer pot of savings you could find—ending pure corporate welfare, just like in the movie Dave. The cause attracted support from think tanks, as well as the moderate Wisconsin Republican Tom Petri, an eclectic reformer who is sort of the real-life version of the Paul Ryan character who appears on television. Two National Review editors endorsed eliminating guaranteed loans in an article advocating a new reform conservatism.

The banks lobbied fiercely to protect their gravy train. Among the staunchest advocates of those government-subsidized banks was … Paul Ryan, who fought to protect bank subsidies that many of his fellow Republicans deemed too outrageous to defend. In 2009, Obama finally eliminated the guaranteed-lending racket. It could save the government an estimated $62 billion, according to the CBO.

Not everything in Ryan’s career, and possibly nothing at all, is quite so undeniably venal. You could pluck any other single example out of Ryan’s long history of strident conservatism and he would be able to defend it, at the very least, on ideological grounds. A tax cut for the rich, a hike in military spending—all those could be explained as a blow for the cause of Reaganism. This was an almost astonishingly unlucky break, an instance where he lacked even ideological cover—standing up for higher spending at the behest of a powerful lobby lacking any plausible rationale for its subsidy.

At the moment the page opened to that unfortunate item, Ryan’s heart must have stopped. Here was a reporter trying to cast him as a movie-hero outsider, and he was performing on cue. Yet the book opened to a page that, cruelly, just happened to expose the gap between Ryan’s image and the reality more clearly than anything else possibly could have.

Ryan probably knew, even in that split second, that he stood little chance of exposure. (The overlap between television news reporters and people with a detailed understanding of the federal budget is quite small.) Yet a lesser politician might have panicked, or hesitated, or possibly tried to flip to a different page. In that moment, Ryan revealed the qualities that have propelled him to his current position. As cool as can be, and as winsome as ever, he said, “This is perfect.”

 In the great tradition of the intertoobz, read the whole thing.

Portrait of a centrist

The Ryan/Romney juggernaut staggers forward, ensuring permanent unemployment for millions.

Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people are desperate for new skills to pull them back into the job market, but when they visit a job-training center, they are often turned away. As Motoko Rich reported in The Times on Monday, Seattle’s seven centers had money to train only 5 percent of the 120,000 people who came in last year seeking new skills, and the numbers are similar elsewhere.

The reason: drastic cuts to federal spending on training over the last six years, including $1 billion since the 2010 fiscal year. Even though training programs are already harder to get into than Ivy League universities, Republicans in the House want to put them even further out of reach.

Last month, the House passed a 2013 budget written by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin that would reduce spending in the category of Education, Training, Employment and Social Services by $16 billion from the previous year, or 22 percent, on top of all the cuts forced by Republicans over several years. The cut in that category is typical of a budget that savages precisely the kind of domestic spending, like job training and Pell grants, needed to help people get off social-safety-net programs, while slicing open the net itself, through big reductions in Medicaid and food stamps (all while generously lowering taxes for the rich).

Mr. Ryan lacked the courage to provide the details of how sharply his budget would affect popular programs like job training or state aid to education. That task, he says cynically, will be left to the appropriating committees in Congress. When a critic like President Obama tries to point out which programs will inevitably suffer when a broad category is sharply cut, Mr. Ryan’s allies, including Mitt Romney, rush in to claim that no such cut was specified in the budget. They want it both ways: to win support from those who don’t care about social programs, without ever having to detail the pain the cuts would cause. 

A very unserious man, or, Lord of the Flies

Kevin Drum is correct -- Paul Ryan's plan is not "brave" or "serious."  In fact his plan is not a budget plan at all, it's a political one.  Whether he hopes to be on the Romneybot 2.0 ticket or has higher aspirations for national office, his annual hat tip to the wealthy and defense contractors is intended to position himself as the green-eye shade wearing, intellectual leader of the Republican party.

And I can pretty much clear things up for Ezra Klein.

As I said at the top; I don't take this as evidence that Paul Ryan wants to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. I take it as evidence that, given the set of commitments Republicans have made to their base, he didn't really have a choice. It was the only way to make his numbers work.

No, it's not evidence that Ryan wants to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, because his plan will not balance the budget.  Ever.   But it does signal to conservative voters that he, like Mitt Romney, doesn't "care about the poor."  Whereas, not long ago we had a Republican candidate that ran on "compassionate conservatism," we now have Republican leadership who push each other out of the  way to preeningly exhibit their disdaining of the poor (and the young) bona fides.

"This is not a budget; this is a cause."

Gary Gutting sorts through the facts versus the convictions about Medicare.

Putting it this way, it became clear to me that everyone agreed that either plan, if implemented, would significantly reduce government spending on medical care. The debate was about each plan’s further consequences. Roughly, critics of Ryan’s plan claim that it will require seniors to pay far too much for their medical care, while critics of Obama’s plan claim that it will keep seniors from receiving needed medical care.

At this point, it seemed that the debate was over empirical questions: What would be the effects of each of the policies? In principle, such questions should be answerable by objective economic analysis. So I began reading Congressional Budget Office reports, articles in The Economist, and opinions by columnists from Ross Douthat to Ezra Klein. My expectation was that I would find a stalemate, with strong arguments on both sides off-setting one another. But as it turned out, my judgment was that the empirical probabilities supported Obama over Ryan. Of course others as or more qualified than I have concluded otherwise.

More importantly, I realized that the relevant economic facts were soft (relatively malleable). Even if they pointed in Obama’s direction, they did not decisively refute Ryan. Economists with strong (relatively inflexible) convictions about the privileged role of markets and the dangers of government regulation could develop alternative interpretations of the facts that supported Ryan’s position. Such strong convictions would be irrelevant if they were ungrounded prejudices. But there is clearly a higher level of economic discussion on which the free-market economists as well as their opponents have developed what they see as a powerful historical and even philosophical case for their convictions. Paul Ryan was, perhaps, gesturing to this level of conviction when he said, “This is not a budget; this is a cause.”

The moral of my story is that understanding and effectively taking part in a debate requires awareness of the level at which we and our opponents are operating at any given point. When we are arguing from the facts, there is a reasonable possibility of convincing one another. When we find ourselves arguing about convictions, the ordinary point-counterpoint of political debate becomes ineffective. We can and should argue about convictions, but this can seldom be done fruitfully in the context of specific policy disputes. Once we’ve pushed the debate on Medicare or any other policy matter to the point where convictions become the sole basis of disagreement, it is time to vote.

Indeed, it is.

Paul Ryan's sinister plan

Not the one to end Medicare -- which his ideological soulmates are walking away from (and now walking back the walking away from...GOP "policy 'debates'" are so darned confusing) -- but the one that has, according to Patrick Caldwell, completely changed the terms of the debate on Medicare.