What Will Happen To Paul Ryan If The GOP Really Does Provoke A Revolution?

This post comes from a much longer one at DownWithTyranny today. And, among other things, it deals with an assertion by Paul Ryan ally Jim Jordan (R-OH) that “It would be difficult” to win passage of a supercommittee plan that includes more taxes. “If it’s a net tax increase, this is the most fundamental principle within the Republican Party,” Jordan said. “This is a sacred trust I think we as Republicans have with voters.”

Sacred? Really? Sacred? Can you even be a Republican these days without absolutely loathing the message of Jesus Christ? I can't see how it would be possible to embrace Jesus and the GOP message. Their actual object of worship-- Ayn Rand and her adolescent philosophy of selfishness and greed-- is the basis of the religion of Republicanism and... Christianity it's not. Paul Ryan, more than most, has been willing it publicly embrace it-- and it's reflected in his hate-the-poor legislative agenda.



In yesterday's Washington Post moderate Ezra Klein examined Ryan's latest thrust against ordinary working families on behalf of those who have financed his political career and have promised to make him president. Klein views Ryan's "Inequality Report" charitably and treats it as a serious policy statement-- even finds some worthwhile points.

But more broadly, Ryan’s paper tries to create a false choice between reducing income inequality, encouraging economic mobility and accelerating growth. Toward the end, Ryan actually says the debate over inequality breaks down into two groups:

1. Is the problem simply that some households make more than others, in which case policymakers should be focused on closing this income gap by any means at their disposal, indifferent as to whether government policies aimed to close relative inequality result in lower absolute levels of income?

2. Or is the problem that incomes for households in the middle- and lower-quintiles are not rising fast enough, in which case policymakers should focus first and foremost on creating the conditions for income growth and job creation?

If there actually is anyone out there who believes we should be focused on closing the income gap no matter the cost to growth, I’ve never met them. Conversely, there actually are people who focus on what they think to be pro-growth policies without heed to the income gap. People like, say, Paul Ryan.

In 2010, the Tax Policy Center released a detailed analysis of the tax provisions in Ryan’s Roadmap for America. If you were in the top 1 percent, they found, Ryan’s plan would save you $350,000 a year. If you were in the middle of the income distribution, it would cost you $152 a year. And if you were in the bottom 20 percent, it would cost you $393 a year. That would undoubtedly increase inequality.

And there’s good evidence that increasing inequality is, ultimately, bad for growth. Over at the International Monetary Fund, Andrew Berg and Jonathan Ostry recently published a paper looking at the relationship between inequality and growth across the world. In a sense, they were testing Ryan’s proposition exactly. “Some dismiss inequality and focus instead on overall growth-- arguing, in effect, that a rising tide lifts all boats,” they write.

Berg and Ostry found that “high ‘growth spells’ were much more likely to end in countries with less equal income distributions.” Moreover, “the effect is large .?.?. closing, say, half the inequality gap between Latin America and emerging Asia would more than double the expected duration of a ‘growth spell.’?” And it was robust: “Inequality seemed to make a big difference almost no matter what other variables were in the model or exactly how we defined a ‘growth spell.’?”

Ryan also plumps for his Medicare reforms as a solution to inequality. As you’ll remember, his budget proposes converting Medicare into a voucher system where seniors would be given a check and sent into a regulated private market to purchase insurance. The plan saves money because the check would grow at the rate of inflation, while health-care costs often increase three times faster than inflation, so, quite quickly, the check would cover only a small portion of an individual senior’s costs.

For rich seniors, this wouldn’t much matter. They could easily afford the cost of private insurance. For middle-income seniors, or lower-income seniors, it would be a disaster. Ryan offers them some subsidies, but not nearly enough. The cost of coverage would quickly outpace the resources many of them have to pay for it.

I mention this because Ryan’s paper emphasizes the difference between “absolute” and “relative” inequality. “A century ago,” Ryan writes, “the average American lived a life that was dramatically different, in terms of what he or she could experience and obtain, from an elite like Rockefeller. In many important respects, the difference between ultra-elites and average Americans is less pronounced today.”

But that difference is less pronounced in large part because of programs like Medicare, which ensure that poor and middle-class seniors have access to health care of similar quality to that of richer seniors. So where Ryan’s analysis suggests the need to means-test Medicare and control health-care costs to ease inequality, the core of his health-care plan, the very plan he touts in the conclusion to his paper, would dramatically increase absolute health-care inequality for seniors.

So it’s good that Ryan has started thinking hard about inequality. But it would be better if he thought harder about what policy could do to address it, or at least to avoid making it dramatically worse.

As for the rest of us, it's time-- past time-- to start thinking seriously how we're going to stop this dangerous threat to America and to social harmony in our country. Replacing him with Rob Zerban one year from now is the most obvious-- and least stressful-- way.

Wisconsin' Biggest Embarrassment Tries To Debate Ezra Klein-- But Not Ayn Rand

As Paul Krugman famously declared late last year "the Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." Sincere and intrepid reporter that he is, Ezra Klein keeps giving him the benefit of the doubt and has kept up a running dialogue with Ryan for over a year. Possibly exasperated by Ryan's deceitful nature, today he recognized he's not going to ever get anywhere with Ryan's churlish, self-serving retorts.

This is basically a dodge. First, he changed the countries: He moved to Canada and the United Kingdom rather than the examples I mentioned. And Canada and the United Kingdom, though more successful than we are, are not particularly successful health-care systems. But even so, Ryan’s wrong to draw an equivalence between our costs and theirs. In 2008, Canada spent about $4,000 per person, per year, on health care. The United Kingdom spent a bit more than $3,000. We spent about $7,400. They want to get their health-care costs down and we want to get our health-care costs down, but suggesting that we’re all facing the same sort of pressure is flatly wrong. ...

nd saying this is all about “who should make the decision” is too simple by half, or perhaps by three-fourths. Under Ryan’s plan, the relevant decisions are made by whether you have the money to pay for what you need, whether your insurance provider says “yes” or “no,” and whether Congress decides to increase or decrease the size of the subsidies. As he says elsewhere in his response, his plan is all about making Medicare less generous, about finishing off the open-ended, fee-for-service model he believes is driving costs.

Similarly, there are a mix of people making decisions in, say, the French system. You can purchase whatever you want if you have the money. If you don’t, you’re somewhat at the mercy of private insurers because there’s a lot of supplementary private insurance. The government plays a big role financing basic care and bargaining down prices. And, as we’ve seen, the result is a system that the French people quite like, that holds costs down much better than ours does, and that gets similar or better outcomes.

In both of his major arguments, Ryan focuses on the wrong numbers. When defending Medicare Part D, he argues that it came in cheaper than expected, ignoring both the reasons behind that performance and the fact that growth in the program was nevertheless much faster than his plan could bear. When attacking the systems in other countries, he cherrypicks numbers to demonstrate they want to save money in the health-care systems but ignores the numbers showing that they spend half as much as we do. The result is that he gives people the wrong impression of both Medicare Part D and health systems across the world.

The reality is that if Ryan’s plan held growth to the same rate as Medicare Part D, it would implode, while if it closed 50 percent of the gap between our system and the Canadian system, it’d be a wild, unmitigated, unbelievable success. But unhelpfully for Ryan, that points to the fact that the approach he’s trying has never controlled costs as dramatically as he suggests, while the approach he’s eschewing has working in a dozen other countries. As he says in his introductory remarks, we both agree that controlling health-care costs is an urgent priority, that maintaining and improving quality a necessary task, and that none of this will be easy. But that just underscores how important it is for us to be realistic about what we can do, clear-eyed about what has and hasn’t worked elsewhere, and open to ideas that don’t fit with our philosophical preferences.

Ryan had a good couple of weeks when Wall Street and GOP p.r. were lionizing him as "courageous" and "brilliant." Now, only other Ayn Rand acolytes take him seriously-- and, of course, men who worship the ground he walks on. And as Eric Sapp pointed at at Huff Po this morning, the Republican Party is going to have to chose between two irreconcilable world views, Ayn Rand's and Jesus Christ's. They can't have it both ways. Ryan openly admits she was the inspiration for his interest in politics. Her adolescent novels are also the inspiration for his dystopian budget-- what he calls his "cause." Christian conservatives have started recognizing what that really means.

Chuck Colson is one of the lions of the Christian right and the head of Prison Fellowship, which, all politics aside, is the best thing coming from the Christian right and a powerful ministry to a segment of society even progressives often ignore. But Colson condemned the strong support of Rand in Republican and conservative circles and urged his followers not only to stay away from the new film of Rand's book Atlas Shrugged, but to "stay away from anyone who intends to watch the film." Colson goes on to say Rand and her followers were precisely the types of "cranks" and "crypto-cultists" that his friend Bill Buckley had fought to purge from conservative ranks. He says the "real problem with Rand is the world view her novels and other writings sought to inculcate in her readers... it's hard to imagine a world view more antithetical to Christianity."

So what is Colson talking about? A week before his statement, American Values Network released a damning memo with a large number of Rand quotes where she says she is out to destroy the Church and Judeo-Christian morality. She argued that people had to choose between following her teachings or those of Christianity and other religious traditions. Rand said religion was "evil," called the message of John 3:16 "monstrous," argued that the weak are beyond love and undeserving of it, that loving your neighbor was immoral and impossible and that she was out to undermine the idea that charity was a moral duty and virtue.

Ryan's gal: