I’ll be writing about Paul Ryan this weekend-but the folks at Esquires blog have sized him pretty well:
We are in an age dominated on one side by the New Politics of Sadism. Hurtful policies are enacted, not because of any logical benefit they might bring, but specifically because they hurt people the Republicans want to hurt. The thoroughgoing abandonment of the notion of a political commonwealth, cheered on by degrees since the elevation of Ronald Reagan and whatever ideas people could cram into his empty head, has reached the point among American conservatives where it is now the kind of faith you find in the most unshakable of perversions. It manifests itself everywhere. It’s expressed politely by people like that intolerable foof, David Brooks, who’s never taken a position in his life that cost him so much as a dinner invitation. On the radio, and on cable news, it’s expressed crudely by people who are far more honest about their contempt for their fellow citizens.
And the sadism is running now through the institutions of government. We have made our peace with torture to the extent that support for it now is as much a litmus test for being a Republican as opposition to abortion is. (The Democrats, of course, choose to deplore it without condemning it.) The Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the recent Thompson V. Connick decision — delivered, fittingly enough, by Justice Clarence Thomas, the walking Freudian petri dish who once opined that he saw nothing wrong with chaining inmates to a post in the hot sun — pretty much advises a man who was stuck on death row for fourteen years because of egregious prosecutorial misconduct to stop wasting the Supreme Court’s time and be grateful his sorry ass wasn’t fried a decade ago.
And, in the Congress, there is Congressman Paul Ryan, who is angling right now to make a career out of political sadism.
I’m going to write about the Ryan plan again, probably this afternoon. And I really don’t want to because I just did it a few weeks ago. But it needs to be addressed in terms of what I see as the coming Teapublican fiscal and political disaster. On the other hand, I’m as bored of writing about the Canadian election as the 50% of my readers from outside the country must be reading it.
I like Paul Ryan. I think that he’s a smart and sincere guy, and maybe the only halfway serious person left in the United States. But there’s a logical disconnect between’s Ryan’s plan and his rhetoric.
If, as Chairman Ryan suggests, President Obama is pushing the country into the abyss now, it decidedly follows that a plan that doesn’t make any serious cuts in entitlement spending for fifteen full years after enactment and leaves Social Security alone altogether is wildly insufficient. Entitlements and defense, the two big-ticket fiscal disaster items, are left alone for a decade and a half while Rome burns. That doesn’t allow for anything approaching a balanced budget for nearly twenty years.
That assumes that you can bring the budget into balance based only on spending cuts, which I’m pretty sure you can’t. Canada had a similiar crisis in the early to mid 90s, which led to cuts far more drastic than anything being discussed in the U.S now, and there would have been no balance without the revenue that came from Free Trade and a national consumption tax. Period. The math doesn’t work any other way, particularly if you want to fix the problem before it’s too late.
Turning Medicaid into a block grant for the states might not be a bad idea, although doing it to welfare (AFDC) in the 90s almost bankrupted the states. But the Medicare reform is almost designed not to work. If you assume that the health care crisis is due to insurance premium inflation, a federal subsidy credit won’t do anything about that without recreating the same problem you have now. It certainly not enough to cover the massive inflation that putting the elderly into the private insurance pool would create.
But the ultimate problem is that there isn’t a single fiscal hawk in America that’s asking anyone to sacrifice anything now. No one was even willing to give away their Bush tax cuts, let alone cut defense or current Social Security and Medicare benefits. Everyone is focusing on 17% of the federal budget and can’t even find much there to cut.
And that tells me that there aren’t any fiscal hawks in the United States at all. Sure the rhetoric makes it sound like there are, but there aren’t.
Oh, there will be, but not until well after it’s too late and the IMF starts making the truly brutal choices for you.
Hey, maybe I don’t need to write about this at my place after all!
Well you won’t like my take on Ryan-he’s a fuck bubble who needs to be beaten severely for having the balls to even think about this plan.
There are options to balance the budget in the short term and reduce spending over the long haul. But they can’t come at the expense of those who are ill equipped to deal with the inevitable upshot in poverty and the rationing of health care among a demographic that is sure to need it.
Ryan’s plan is just a gift to rich people, big pharma, greedy insurance companies and will eventuall screw the assholes in the Tea Party. Not that they don’t deserve to be raked over the coals-but I as a man in his mid 50’s who will need benefits I spent 30 years paying into-have no desire to be made collateral damage.
I look forward to reading your insights. But as I mentioned above, I see no plausible way that you get out of a debt hole like that without very serious reforms to the fastest growing parts of the federal budget. Further, I listed my concerns with the Ryan plan’s effectiveness at my place (linked above.)
As I mentioned in my earlier comment, my country went through something like this sixteen years ago and the cuts were brutal. In many ways, the provinces and cities are still recovering from them. And the only reason that those cuts worked was because there were massive revenues raised from policies implimented between 1988 and ’91 by the then-Conservative government.
Even the Ryan plan doesn’t do anything close to what the Canadian Conservative and Liberal governments did between ’88 and ’95. Not even close. And you’re going to need something very close to that in the very near future.
The reason I respect Ryan is that he’s pretty much the only person in America who’s proposing much of anything at all. I don’t think it will work for any number of reasons, but he’s not out on the goddamn Mall with a “Government hands off my Medicare” sign while demanding spending cuts that really amount to nothing.