He is a lifelong adherent to the doctrines of Ayn Rand ...
Paul Ryan is a thoroughgoing fraud. He went through high school and most of college on Social Security survivor benefits after his father's death.
How does someone who benefited from a government social insurance program turn around and embrace the exact opposite, as exemplified by Ayn Rand's philosophy?
Did you see that wide-eyed fellow standing behind Paul Ryan when he announced the budget plan?
Turns out he's James Lankford (R - Ok), member of the Budget Committee.
From 1996-2009 he was the student ministries and evangelism specialist for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, and was director of the Falls Creek youth programing at the Falls Creek Baptist Conference Center in Davis, Oklahoma.
He attended the University of Texas, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Secondary Education. He then attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and received a master’s degree in Divinity.
The new GOP budget unveiled by Paul Ryan is a wildly cruel document.
UPDATE: Annie Lowrey in Slate, discussing alternatives to Ryan:
The fiscally responsible choice is to raise taxes while also reforming entitlements, as any of the half-dozen more feasible and less cruel plans floating around do.
... it would be more fun if Andrew showed his work. What math are we referring to?
As I’ve noted previously, you can do a combination of tax increases (not too much, just nudge them back up to Clinton-era rates) and defense cuts and you don’t even have to voucherize Medicare or implement a millionaire’s tax and just like that you have yourself back on the right fiscal trajectory through 2030. (...)
A lot of people are saying things like “The ball is in Obama’s court” and what-have-you. The problem is that the ball has never really left the Republican court. Until Republicans agree to tax increases, why should Democrats agree to spending cuts? Why should Democrats take Republicans seriously at all if Republicans are completely unwilling to repeal the Bush tax cuts?
Just guessing here, but I suspect that Sullivan was never good at math. He rarely ever puts out numbers in his posts. He's gifted with words, but quantitative stuff doesn't engage him.
When reviewing the Ryan budget plan. Frum has been off the reservation for some time now, and almost sounds like a Canadian socialist, or something.
The real message of the Ryan plan is: Upper-income tax cuts now; spending cuts for the poor now; more deficits now; spending cuts for middle-income people much later; spending cuts for today’s elderly, never.
Jobs first, deficit later is actually the right timing of priorities. But the upper-income tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 markedly failed to translate into higher incomes for ordinary Americans. The Ryan plan offers no reason to hope that another round of the same medicine will deliver better results.
As politics, the message is even worse than the economics. Cut Medicaid and Medicare to fund tax cuts? Isn’t that the issue that returned Bill Clinton to the White House in 1996? Don’t all the polls show that Medicare and even Medicaid are popular, and that more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are not? Isn’t this a formula for a GOP bloodbath in 2012? And if the plan did somehow become law, is it not a formula for an economy in the 2010s that will underperform for most people in the same way that the economy of the 2000s underperformed for most people?
In the New York Times editorial that is critical of Paul Ryan's budget proposal, we read:
The blueprint does not call for any specific changes to Social Security, but, without explanation, it assumes a reduction of $1 trillion over 10 years in the program’s surplus. That would weaken the program by hastening the insolvency of Social Security.
What is that? A plan to dishonor $1 trillion in bonds held by the Social Security Trust? It will be worthwhile to examine this part of Ryan's proposal.
Extremely close. Which, considering the recent turmoil following governor Walker's actions (and that of the Republican-held state senate and assembly), is rather dispiriting.
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.
If you can get past the fuzzy math and sheer indifference to the poor, it's possible to discern a coherent conceit in the Ryan plan: that the burden of maintaining a modern welfare state has become too great to bear.
Which is what you'd expect an Ayn Rand disciple to think: Welfare state. Bad!
Is must reading. So much so, that here is a big chunk of it: (emp in original)
Andrew Sullivan says that Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget is a Very Serious budget and if liberals don’t like it, well what’s the alternative? So just for fun, I hopped over to the New York Times’ budget calculator to try my hand at fixing the impending fiscal nightmare and saving the world from certain financial doom. Here is what I did.
I really didn’t cut any of the small potato stuff like government jobs or salaries. I didn’t reduce subsidies to farms (even though I don’t think that’s a bad idea) or touch any other discretionary spending except defense.
On defense, I reduced spending on nuclear programs, reduced troop levels to pre-Iraq levels, reduced the Navy and Air Force fleets, canceled weapons programs, and reduced the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013.
I ignored malpractice reform and didn’t increase the retirement age one bit. I did reduce the tax break for employer-provided insurance because that’s one of the major hurdles to fixing our broken healthcare system. I didn’t raise the Medicare eligibility age. I didn’t ‘voucherize’ Medicare or turn Medicaid into a slush fund for state governments. I did means-test Social Security, but it wasn’t necessary. You could take it or leave it really.
Then I returned tax rates to the historically low Clinton-era levels. I returned estate, capital gains, and income rates back to the Clinton-era levels. I raised the cap on payroll taxes on incomes above $106,000.
I skipped over the millionaire’s tax (though we certainly could impose one, we don’t need to) and decided to follow some of the advice of the Bowles-Simpson plan by removing loopholes in the tax code. I did not, however, lower rates as they suggested. Rates are low! Removing loopholes makes sense, but we don’t need lower taxes.
Nor did I remove the mortgage deduction or implement a national sales tax (though I think a national sales tax coupled with a millionaire’s tax makes a lot of sense, and would raise a lot of money). Instead, I opted for a carbon tax and a bank tax because I think we should put a price on carbon and on the risks bankers have been taking with our money.
And just like that, I closed up the deficit by 2015 and also by 2030. I didn’t have to fire a single teacher or privatize a single government program to do it either.
Basically, cutting back the military to pre-Bush levels, and reverting back to the Clinton-era tax rates is all you need to do to fix the deficit. There’s some tinkering you can do here and there to make it more sustainable, but that’s all in the margins. A national sales tax would be more recession proof, but we don’t need one. Fixing healthcare would be great, but it’s going to take a lot more than the Republican idea of gutting entitlements and leaving the poor out in the rain to fend for themselves.
Raise some revenue, cut some defense spending, and call it a day.
The rest is just fearmongering and tax cuts for the very, very rich at the expense of middle-class and working Americans. Surely we can do better than this Very Serious budget proposal.
For basically being uninvolved, especially regarding the budget. Key excerpt:
The conventional wisdom is that Obama is being given a great gift this week by Ryan, whose budget proposes to privatize Medicare and slash Medicaid. But the conventional wisdom might be wrong: Ryan is beginning the debate far to the right. He won’t get everything he wants, but if he gets 50 percent of what he wants, or even 35 percent, it’ll be the most dramatic victory that conservatives have scored against the social safety net in a generation — larger, at least in dollar terms, than anything done to welfare in 1996.
And it ignores that Ryan was also given a great gift: the opportunity to set the budget conversation virtually on his own.
There has been virtually nothing from the White House in recent weeks establishing markers on the budget. Or defending programs within the budget. Which means the Republicans get the face time to moan about the debit and the need for "hard choices".
