"0ne of those pathetic bloggers who tries to make a living out of attacking other bloggers and media folk in an effort to illicit a reaction and draw traffic to his site." -- Owen Robinson of Boots and Sabers
Paul Ryan, the purported deficit hawk who provided a critical vote for the deficit busting Medicare Part D under President George W. Bush, has managed to embarrass himself twice in no more than 48 hours.
Being unable to identify a single spending cut in an interview would be a good week for everyone's favorite pseudowonk. But Paul Ryan went a step further, as the GOP has decided to not count the cost of repealing health care reform as part of their new pledge not to raise spending without cuts. "It's full of gimmicks," Ryan cries, though, as the CBO notes, it will cut spending significantly the farther out you look.
Matt Bai has an odd piece in the New York Times making the absurd case that, if the GOP takes the House, Flimflam man Paul Ryan could emerge as some grand dealmaker to reach a compromise with the administration to remake the social net. Please. Bai's GOP comrades have no interest in putting Paul Ryan's Road Map to Ruin at the centerpiece of their agenda in the run up to the 2012 election. The only thing they want to do is push deadend bills to repeal health care reform, cut taxes for the rich, push for war with Iran, and launch endless investigations into how Obama is oppressing white people. And Paul Ryan, who has consistently votes to bust the budget, will go right along.
Christian Schneider, of the rightwing think tank Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, joins the bum rush of Paul Ryan fluffers in the latest issue of the surely ironically named Wisconsin "Interest."
Titled "Rebel Without A Pause" we learn -- guess what -- that Ryan is a deep thinker, he's a rising star, he's humble, he's just a regular guy. He also likes Thai food.
OK, perhaps it's unfair to expect journamalism breakthroughs from Schneider, he who has candidly admitted he hopes unemployment stays high. But to give him credit, he does produce some bonafide howlers.
Such as this:
Ryan began to garner national attention in 2003, during the debate over President Bush’s proposal to expand prescription drug benefits to seniors through Medicare. Ryan is proud of the free market programs he inserted into the final bill (Medicare Advantage, Health Saving Accounts), and believes those are the “seeds” to a future overhaul of federal entitlement programs.
Actually what it laid the groundwork for was bigger deficits, with former comptroller general David Walker calling it "the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s." And, as Bruce Bartlett notes, it was more expensive than Obamacare -- and unlike ACA it didn't include dedicated financing, offsets or revenue raisers. It was just tacked on to the budget. Plus the way it was passed made the Corhusker Kickback look like a goo-goo's wet dream.
Christian -- where's the research?
It's tough to outdo that risible work, but Christian struggles mightily when he describes Ryan "challenging" the president at the health care summit.
So when cameras turned to Ryan, he began systematically dismantling the Democrats’ rosy cost estimates. He pointed out that much of the cost was hidden, as it raised taxes for ten years to pay for six years’ worth of spending. He exposed the fact that the $371 billion “doc fix” (a plan to reimburse doctors more through Medicare) had been separated from the bill and considered as standalone legislation to keep the price tag down. “Hiding spending does not reduce spending,” he said.
As Ryan spoke, the cameras would occasionally make their way back to President Obama, who was glaring icily at Ryan.
“I wanted to throw a match on this thing,” Ryan remembers thinking.
Perhaps the icy looks are explained by the fact that Ryan, as is his wont, was trying to pass off bullshit as revelation. As Ezra Klein noted:
But he purposefully omits any mention of the bill's expected savings, disingenuously attaches the price tag of a broken Republican policy onto the health-care reform bill, and selectively stops extrapolating trends when they don't fit his points. It's a presentation designed to make the bill look less fiscally responsible than it really is.
But don't listen to me. Robert Reischauer is the head of the Urban Institute. He's also one of the CBO's most revered former directors, in no small part because his relentlessly honest cost estimates helped doom Bill Clinton's bill in 1994. I reached him earlier today and asked whether he thought this bill made fiscal sense. "Were I in Congress and asked to vote on this," he replied, "I'd vote in favor." The bill isn't perfect, he continued, "but it at least has the prospect for creating a platform over which more significant and far-reaching cost containment can be enacted."
Did Schneider and Ryan learn to do "research" at the same place?
If Republicans adopt the Road Map as their basic ideological blueprint, it offers them the prospect of a landslide in the midterm election this year, followed by victory in the presidential election in 2012.
This despite the fact Republicans aren't champing at the bit to join Ryan's crusade.
Nick Schweitzer, in comments, sets McIlheran straight on Ryan's lack of credibility as a fiscal messiah:
That's right... Rep. Yes!
He voted YES to the Auto Bailout! He voted YES to TARP! He voted YES to Medicare Part D!
He voted YES to create the very problem he now wants to "solve". Paul Ryan only believes in Small Government when he is writing op ed's for newspapers. He believes in Big Government when he votes in Washington, which is the only time that counts.
The fact that Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Social Security might ultimately lead to a federal bailout caught the Brawler's eye nearly two years ago. And it caught the CBPP's as well ... and Ryan's response suggests the celebrated wonk has no idea of the implications of his bill.
Cost of the Social Security Guarantee
Ryan’s Assertion : Ryan challenges our statement that his requirement that the Treasury bail out private-account holders for stock-market losses could cost $2.9 trillion and that this cost is not reflected in the CBO report on his plan. He claims that CBO explicitly estimated this cost and included it in its projections of his plan.
Our Response : Once again, Rep. Ryan is mistaken and our statements are accurate. We wrote, “These potential bailout costs — like the cost of the plan’s very large tax cuts — are not reflected in the CBO estimates that Rep. Ryan cites when touting the plan’s fiscal responsibility.” We confirmed the accuracy of this statement with CBO before issuing our report. CBO conducted separate analyses of the proposed benefit guarantee, but CBO’s budget estimates reported in Appendix II of the Ryan plan do not include the cost of the guarantee. Moreover, the $2.9 trillion cost estimate does not come from us, as Rep. Ryan implies. Our report clearly states that it is the estimate of the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration, based on an earlier version of Rep. Ryan’s plan and taking stock-market risk into account.
In today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel we learn that Paul Ryan is "praised" for his alternative health-care plan.
Who's doing the praising? A guy from the Heritage Foundation and a former McCain advisor.
Shocking that two rightwingers would praise Ryan.
The story says:
Ryan's proposal, part of what he calls "A Roadmap for America's Future," would replace the existing Medicare benefit for people under 55 with a voucher that could be used to buy private insurance. The payment, which Ryan has said would initially average $11,000 a year, would be adjusted for inflation and tied to income.
That would lessen the fiscal challenges facing the Medicare program because health care spending outpaces overall inflation. But at the same time, it could lower costs by putting pressure on doctors and hospitals to become more efficient.
Deficit chickenhawk Paul Ryan's star turn during the health care summit set tongues wagging in the right wing blogosphere, including this guy, and Wingnutty Investors Business Daily smirked that no one had refuted Paul Ryan's arguments.
That may be because Paul Ryan's critiques, while dishonest, are indisputably well crafted.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has that response that so many on the right were waiting for:
To sum up, then, Ryan makes some good points about the true cost of the bill and realities of the federal budget. But he purposefully omits any mention of the bill's expected savings, disingenuously attaches the price tag of a broken Republican policy onto the health-care reform bill, and selectively stops extrapolating trends when they don't fit his points. It's a presentation designed to make the bill look less fiscally responsible than it really is.
But don't listen to me. Robert Reischauer is the head of the Urban Institute. He's also one of the CBO's most revered former directors, in no small part because his relentlessly honest cost estimates helped doom Bill Clinton's bill in 1994. I reached him earlier today and asked whether he thought this bill made fiscal sense. "Were I in Congress and asked to vote on this," he replied, "I'd vote in favor." The bill isn't perfect, he continued, "but it at least has the prospect for creating a platform over which more significant and far-reaching cost containment can be enacted."
While some silly people continue to claim we should be grateful for introducing a slippery plan to fix some of our country's "systemic ills," Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times takes a look at Paul Ryan's Roadmap.
He finds the Paul Ryan roadmap to be "pure bilge."
Social Security comes in for particular abuse. Ryan states that "Social Security's shrinking value and fragile condition pose a serious problem. . . . To maintain the program's significant role as a part of the retirement security safety net, Social Security's mission must be fulfilled . . . without bankrupting future workers."
One doesn't want to be picky about an elected congressman's words, but with all due respect, these words are pure bilge. They come straight from the talking points of Social Security's historical enemies: conservatives who have never believed that the government should play such an important role in people's retirement planning, and mutual fund and insurance companies that hanker for the business generated by millions of Americans looking for a profitable place to park their retirement assets.
Social Security's value to the average American isn't "shrinking" -- it’s expanding. In 1962, it accounted for 30% of the income of Americans aged 65 and older; in 2007 that figure was 36%. (These numbers come from the Social Security Administration.) Given what's happened to most families' financial assets since 2007, the percentage probably is even higher today.
Its "fragile condition"? Social Security runs an annual surplus and has done so since 1983; no other government program can make that claim.
By the way, even when the program starts paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll tax, that's not a "crisis," as it's often portrayed -- it's the expected outcome of changes implemented after 1982, when the tax was raised sharply to provide a cushion against the coming wave of baby-boomer retirements. The accumulated surplus in the program's trust fund at the end of 2008 was $2.4 trillion.
Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who called the stimulus a "wasteful spending spree" that "misses the mark on all counts," wrote to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis in October in support of a grant application from a group in his district which, he said, "intends to place 1,000 workers in green jobs." A spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan said the congressman felt it was his job to provide "the basic constituent service of lending his assistance for federal grant requests."