Krugman writes: "Look, Ryan hasn't 'crunched the numbers'; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense."
Portrait, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, 06/15/09. (photo: Fred R. Conrad/NYT)
The Ryan Role
13 August 12
ark Kleiman points us to a lamentable but revealing column by William Saletan, which illustrates perfectly how the essentially ludicrous Paul Ryan has gotten so far - namely, by playing to the gullibility of self-proclaimed centrists, who want to show their "balance" by finding a conservative to praise.
Saletan writes:
Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn't just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.
OK, what? Where is that coming from? Did Saletan miss the whole discussion when the Ryan plan came out? Did he miss the point where even Jacob Weisberg apologized for his initial praise, admitting that
I reacted too quickly and didn't sort out just how laughable Ryan's long-term spending projections were. His plan projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050. Defense spending alone was 4.7 percent of GDP in 2009. With numbers like that, Ryan is more an anarchist-libertarian than honest conservative.
Look, Ryan hasn't "crunched the numbers"; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.
So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he's doing - and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done - is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he's a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman's, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.
What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.
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Yeah, he's ONLY going to be VP ... like Dick Cheney was ONLY the VP.
You'll be looking back with nostalgia at the restraint practiced by Cheney/Bush.
Rep. Ryan does see a disaster coming, but because he sees it doesn't make it so. And let's just say he is correct and the potential for disaster does loom. Upon what line of reasoning is implementing the solution for an individual family in the same situation the right answer for a nation? A sovereign nation's wealth is the sum of the wealth of all families inside that nation. A sovereign nation obtains its income by taxation of that wealth. The wealthier the nation the more income a nation should have. The US is the wealthiest nation on this entire planet, why is our government broke? That is the crisis.
And, please explain exactly how you can believe that President Obama is "trashing" the US Constitution when he invokes executive privilege when every other President has used that tool way more frequently than he? Also, did you know that the Obama administration shut down "Fast & Furious" after they found out about it? This was a plan hatched under the Bush administration, and it is likely that he didn't know about it either.
It's amazing how many serious errors one person can make in only 16 words. In the first place Ryan's irresponsibilit y is an integral part of the "fiscal disaster." He voted to put two wars, an unpaid mandate, a Big Bank giveaway and a Big Pharm giveaway on the credit card.
In the second place his plan does nothing to avert or even address the "disaster." All he does is move money around, robbing from the poor and middle class to pay the rich. You don't think that the loopholes he plans on closing are going to affect the wealthy, do you? He has already said that the Big Oil subsidies are sacrosanct. You can kiss your mortgage deduction and your health care deduction good by.
His own figures say that there won't be a balanced budget until 2053, and those figures depend on fallacious economic projections. He claims that debt will hurt the poor worse than loss of the social safety net, but then he uses the money that he takes from those who need it to give away to people who already have more than they can spend and who aren't pulling their part of the economic load as it is. The national debt really doesn't concern him.
You are so very correct. The national debt is just a false premise used to convince naive fox, friends and fascists watchers that Obama is bad, Obama is very bad. Republicans are good, they even profess to do Christ's bidding; Republicans good, Obama very bad.
on the part of the Bush/right wing administration and obstructionist Republicans.
..."and has set up a means to fix it"
by giving on average a tax cut of $250,000 - $350,000/yr to the richest households, while increasing taxes for those earning $50,000 - $100,000 up to $5,000/yr.
That won't 'fix' anything.
Elections are exercises in marketing. We no longer look for thoughtful policies. We look for heroes. When they are not found, we make them up.
And this is not just on the Rethuglican side of the ledger. Look at the rise of Obama himself. A complete unknown, then a featured speaker at the 2004 Democratic convention, then relentless marketing.
Romney and his bosses know what they are doing. Better take this guy seriously, and start to ORGANIZE!!!
I don't think so for a minute, but she is/was a corporatist. Balls is standing up and fighting corporatists, not bending over for them. However, she is a far better Secretary of State than the vastly overrated liar, Condi Rice who was also the worst NSA director in history.
This show is over. The race is between Obama and Romney.
I believe it is "by design" ... my thought is that the GOP is "throwing" the 2012 election so they can come back in 2016 with their "strongest" candidate, Jeb Bush ...
Move along, nothing new here.
NO! Case closed.
1) Point out that Ryan's "thoughtful" budget ideas are voodoo, (rhymes with...) and,
2) to treat Ryan as the senior partner at Romney-Ryan Capital, Inc. If nothing else it will drive Mittens bonkers trying to man-up.
He real mission is to push as much money into the 1% as he possibly can. this is his Ayn Rand philosophy, feed the strong, starve the weak. He's an enabler of the greedy.
I think those voting misunderstood your who you were referring too. And you're right, other than Bernie Sanders, there hasn't been anyone since Paul Wellstone with the courage to stand up to the "status-quo" military industrial corporate complex. I still have hope for the current Minnesota senators, Klobuchar and Franken, but I'm still waiting to see how they turn out.
My greatest fear when Obama won was that people would think they were done and not be prepared for the backroom backstabbing to prevent or gut anything he tried to do. I'm amazed at the few things he has been able to do before the ALEC types got their foot behind the door to stop all else. Then they continued the Newt GoPac memo use of Language as a Key Element of Control, denouncing even the ideas they once championed, and (like the Cato Institute thought Lenin did well) didn't just denounce what they had or would have support before, but actually sabotaged anything that would be credited in even the smallest way to their chosen fall guy.
I will defensively vote for Obama/Biden even though they are less important than defeating the ALEC types at every local, state, and federal office they try to grab even more power through. They are the ones who sabotage even their own ideas if there is any risk of Obama getting any credit for agreeing with them. This is the politics, dirtier than Democrats, one of my old party's fund raisers said we had to use. I became fiercely independent, but still tried to see if the goal was good, independent of the means. They lost sight of the worthy goals, too. I'm done with them, except as opponents.
Actually I would put it slightly differently: They want to throw everyone's babies, even most of their own, under the bus.
It is also intersting to watch all their rallies and see the women behind them cheering for their success. Are these such ignorant souls that they do not care that their rights as caring, thinking individuals are begin legislated away from them by the men that they support?
How much longer will the lame-stream media permit these candidates from the GOP to offer platitudes without substance?
We must speak out to our fellow Americans to wake up and react to these hypocrites. While money can buy advertising, and partially blur our view of the future, we still have the power of numbers to overcome the message -- if we are vigilant.
Then, when Republicans get back into the Whitehouse, deficit spending and debt issues magically disappear while they "borrow, borrow, borrow and spend, spend, spend". Look at the Republicans' spending record when they were in the Whitehouse. And Paul Ryan's voting record on spending issues certainly defies any claim to fiscal responsibility.
So obviously, the debt issue is nothing more than a red herring thrown up by Republicans to distract voters from the fact that it was they who created the problem in the first place.
Wake up citizens and stop drinking the kool-aid. There's a great big difference between fiscal conservatism and fiscal responsiblity; and today's Republicans have no claim to fiscal responsibility.
Intellectuals? They are simply a little smoother than the others, not more thoughtful or intelligent.
There is, however, one huge significant difference between a family and a country (except for a country in the EURO). A country, especially a rich one like ours, has the ability to safely spend beyond its income during an economic downturn helping the unemployed find meaningful jobs rebuilding needed infrastructure upgrades and maintaining critical state and local services like police, fire, and education, to name just three. Fulfilling this critical role is what the Tea Party troglodytes have been blocking since they fooled the voters two years ago. Its time to replace them and get on with repairing this great country.
tis a question to be answered. freud was working on that when he died. would have liked to see what he would have come up with.heros. greek myths. american myths too.
Ryan's ignorance and ideology is extreme - but fits in present USA money/military culture - not bit of reality there. Building war machine in the Persian Gulf - to start the proxy war to get AIPAC money.
will people take me seriously if i can't spell? do i care if i dazzle with brilliance and nobody out there cares? no, the answer is no, i don't care. i am trying like hell to keep my brain from turning into mush. i comment to just comment and sometimes i come up with an original thought, or one that arises from the process of synthesis of all the stuff, both good and bad, that i have read. hopefully someone out there enjoys my mostly crap.i keep trying for that diamond in the rough. bear with me folks. i live with right wing neighbors. reason enough to seek some intellect.
But that doesn't really matter too much because his fiscal disaster is an illusion. At the moment people buy US government bonds at below inflation level. That means that our debt is not growing as long as we keep taxes high enough to pay back the bonds.
The other thing that his plan does is create a social disaster. Right now, thanks to republican policies, the number of poverty stricken people is at a record due to unemployment. His plan is to make it even worse by not spending on science, education, health, infrastructure, food stamps, clean energy, student loans, or law enforcement. In other words, forget investment in our future. The only thing he plans to increase spending on is the military which is the least productive use of dollars there is. Once a dollar goes into the MIC, it is never seen again.
How can we prevent this? Please Democrats - be careful to monitor the elections- Ryan's extreme right wing positions are such a joke - if the election is fair I don't know how anyone could now vote for Romney- I am upper middle class - pay 45% of my income in taxes if one includes sales and real estate taxes and I am mad at Romney for not paying his fair share.
As I recall it was Bush the Chimp Jr. who proudly proclaimed the Constitution is nothing but a piece of paper. It was the same Chimp that lied us into the Iraq war, got us into Afgahnistan and lowered taxes all at the same time. 2 Trillion dollars down the drain, hundreds of thousands killed and millions of Iraqi refugees and the Repubs are ready to launch into Iran and lower taxes for the rich according to Romney's plan. Have you learned anything or are you just one that will vote Republican even if he's a Chimp?
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