Ross Douthat
In my Campaign Stops column this week, I make the point that you have to look at Paul Ryan’s record over the last few years in the context of where his party stood after the 2008 election — moribund, deluded, and potentially self-destructive — and recognize 1) how much he’s done to move the Republicans in a more constructive direction and 2) that many of the problems with his famous/infamous House budgets reflect his party’s continuing deficiencies rather than his own. The absence of a replacement for Obamacare in the budget, for instance, doesn’t mean that Ryan hasn’t come out for such a replacement. (He has.) Likewise with the absence of Social Security reform and the implausible cuts to discretionary spending that this absence entails: Ryan’s original Roadmap deals with Social Security in a more serious and plausible way; he just hasn’t been able to get all of his House colleagues onside.
But this point extend to issues beyond the ones I raise in my column. For instance, one of the refrains from Ryan’s critics — recent examples include David Stockman, Timothy Noah, and Scott Galupo — is that he’s too cynical or cowardly to support Medicare cuts for existing beneficiaries, lest he offend a crucial G.O.P. constituency. But in fact, the Medicare reform proposal that Ryan co-authored last year with Alice Rivlin, an Office of Management and Budget director under Bill Clinton, does include “a cost-sharing mechanism that would start in 2013,” and that would save $110 billion over the decade before premium support is phased in. So he is on the record supporting immediate cuts; he just hasn’t persuaded his fellow Republicans to join him.
The same goes for the (completely fair) critiques of the House Republican budget’s Medicaid projections, which envision spending growing at levels that would probably cripple an already-ineffective program. Here again, Ryan has publicly sketched out a much more plausible approach: In Ryan-Rivlin, Medicaid grows at the rate of G.D.P. per capita plus 1 percent, which is probably faster than the rate of growth for health-insurance subsidies under Obamacare.
And the same pattern shows up on even more obscure issues. For instance, in his blistering critique of Ryan’s budget, Stockman writes that “we need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.” But actually, Ryan did have the gumption to support something exactly like that: His original Roadmap replaces the current corporate income tax with what it describes as “a Business Consumption Tax of 8.5 percent on goods and services,” which would presumably function roughly like the consumption tax that Stockman favors. As with the Social Security reform proposals in the Roadmap, this idea was dropped somewhere during the process of selling his fellow Republicans on entitlement reform.
Now one could look at the range of proposals Ryan has endorsed or co-sponsored and say that this actually sharpens the case against his budget: He knows it’s incomplete and insufficient and implausible, and he went ahead and pushed it through the House of Representatives anyway! But I think this is a naive way of understanding how policy entrepreneurship works. Ryan has a lot of ideas about how to reform America’s public sector. He believes that one of them — premium support for Medicare — is by far the most important, as evidenced by the multiple iterations he’s proposed and co-sponsored (in his Roadmap, in Ryan-Rivlin and Ryan-Wyden, and then in both House budgets). He seized the opportunity afforded by the Tea Party sweep in 2010 to bring the entire G.O.P. House caucus on board with the plan, selling it to them — quite credibly — as the cornerstone of any serious effort to slow government’s inexorable growth. Having done the (incredibly difficult) work of salesmanship required to bring his fellow Republicans on board with a plan that many people in Washington D.C. considered political suicide, was he really supposed to then kill the plan without a vote because he couldn’t also bring them on board with the six other incredibly difficult things required to put America’s fiscal house in order? Especially when the budget in question wasn’t going to become law anyway? Especially when the mere act of voting on a budget that actually brought America’s commitments in line with tax revenue, however implausible some of its assumptions, had the added advantage of throwing the other party’s irresponsibilities and evasions into sharp relief?
Again, as I said in the column, nobody is required to agree with Ryan on any of the policies he’s championed. (I strongly disagree with him on a number of points.) But the ongoing attempt to portray him as unserious and uncourageous holds him to a standard that no figure in American politics, President Obama very much included, comes even close to meeting. No other American lawmaker has been as active as Ryan across so many policy fronts these last few years. No other Republican — with the arguable exception of Tom Coburn, who’s retiring after this term — has staked out so many specific and controversial positions on difficult issues. Ryan’s supposedly “sophisticated” liberal critics like to downplay this reality, preferring to paint him as a kind of flimflam man instead. But they aren’t actually sophisticated, and he’s actually legit.
OK
then, what would be "saying much?" The choices we have before us
are what we have. There is no perfect candidate, and there isn't
a candidate that would be all things to all people because there
are just too many issues where the two major parties are 180
degrees out of phase with each other. Obama ran on welfare
reform, entitlement reform, fixing Social Security and fixing
Medicare in 2008, and he has failed to start on, much less
deliver on anything of substance in those areas.
If anything, his payroll tax cut on the Social Security tax will
lead to bankrupting it sooner. Ditto the robbing of Medicare to
pay for Obamacare. The one who has actually done things to harm
Medicare and Social Security is Barack Milhous Obama, not Paul
Ryan. Yet, somehow, Ryan is out to push grandma off of the
cliff. I don't know why he would do that, because Barack is
doing that well enough on his own.
Demagoguery is all that the Democratic Party has. The campaign
commercials appear to be written by Joesph Goebbels, not to
mention Joe Biden's speeches. Or maybe Joe is using Pravda. It's
hard to tell which foot is going into his mouth on any given
day.
David
"The
principal villain in rising health
care costs is the government. Not
pharmaceutical companies, not doctors,
but government."--Neal
Boortz
On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:32 PM, David R. Block wrote:
> OK then, what would be "saying much?" The choices we have before us are what we have.There is no perfect candidate, and there isn't a candidate that would be all things to all people because there are just too many issues where the two major parties are 180 degrees out of phase with each other.
This isn't about "being all things to all people", or who is the lesser of multiple evils. This about what it *really* means to be serious and and courageous.
What I long to see is a politician who actively engages with his critics. Why hasn't written an op-ed where he actually admits and addresses questions like:
- the flaws and gaps in his budget proposal
- the tension between Christianity and Randian orthodoxy
I don't want him to be a miracle worker or make everyone happy. I just want him to be brutally honest about what he believes, admit his errors (if any), and clarify areas of legitimate confusion.
Which require him to demonstrate that he really has thought long and hard about these issue, to the point where he is willing to lay out his reasoning and take his licks in public; the way people like Nate Silvers and Judge Posner do every week.
You may well answer that such a thing would be political suicide, and you could be right. But that's is exactly why it would earn him the title "courageous".
> "The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government."--Neal Boortz
> On 8/17/2012 4:09 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>> Nice defense. It confirms my suspicion that he really is serious and courageous for a politician -- which still isn't saying much. :-(
>> Ross Douthat
>> In my Campaign Stops column this week, I make the point that you have to look at Paul Ryan’s record over the last few years in the context of where his party stood after the 2008 election — moribund, deluded, and potentially self-destructive — and recognize 1) how much he’s done to move the Republicans in a more constructive direction and 2) that many of the problems with his famous/infamous House budgets reflect his party’s continuing deficiencies rather than his own. The absence of a replacement for Obamacare in the budget, for instance, doesn’t mean that Ryan hasn’t come out for such a replacement. (He has.) Likewise with the absence of Social Security reform and the implausible cuts to discretionary spending that this absence entails: Ryan’s original Roadmap deals with Social Security in a more serious and plausible way; he just hasn’t been able to get all of his House colleagues onside.
>> But this point extend to issues beyond the ones I raise in my column. For instance, one of the refrains from Ryan’s critics — recent examples include David Stockman, Timothy Noah, and Scott Galupo — is that he’s too cynical or cowardly to support Medicare cuts for existing beneficiaries, lest he offend a crucial G.O.P. constituency. But in fact, the Medicare reform proposal that Ryan co-authored last year with Alice Rivlin, an Office of Management and Budget director under Bill Clinton, does include “a cost-sharing mechanism that would start in 2013,” and that would save $110 billion over the decade before premium support is phased in. So he is on the record supporting immediate cuts; he just hasn’t persuaded his fellow Republicans to join him.
>> The same goes for the (completely fair) critiques of the House Republican budget’s Medicaid projections, which envision spending growing at levels that would probably cripple an already-ineffective program. Here again, Ryan has publicly sketched out a much more plausible approach: In Ryan-Rivlin, Medicaid grows at the rate of G.D.P. per capita plus 1 percent, which is probably faster than the rate of growth for health-insurance subsidies under Obamacare.
>> And the same pattern shows up on even more obscure issues. For instance, in his blistering critique of Ryan’s budget, Stockman writes that “we need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.” But actually, Ryan did have the gumption to support something exactly like that: His original Roadmap replaces the current corporate income tax with what it describes as “a Business Consumption Tax of 8.5 percent on goods and services,” which would presumably function roughly like the consumption tax that Stockman favors. As with the Social Security reform proposals in the Roadmap, this idea was dropped somewhere during the process of selling his fellow Republicans on entitlement reform.
>> Now one could look at the range of proposals Ryan has endorsed or co-sponsored and say that this actually sharpens the case against his budget: He knows it’s incomplete and insufficient and implausible, and he went ahead and pushed it through the House of Representatives anyway! But I think this is a naive way of understanding how policy entrepreneurship works. Ryan has a lot of ideas about how to reform America’s public sector. He believes that one of them — premium support for Medicare — is by far the most important, as evidenced by the multiple iterations he’s proposed and co-sponsored (in his Roadmap, in Ryan-Rivlin and Ryan-Wyden, and then in both House budgets). He seized the opportunity afforded by the Tea Party sweep in 2010 to bring the entire G.O.P. House caucus on board with the plan, selling it to them — quite credibly — as the cornerstone of any serious effort to slow government’s inexorable growth. Having done the (incredibly difficult) work of salesmanship required to bring his fellow Republicans on board with a plan that many people in Washington D.C. considered political suicide, was he really supposed to then kill the plan without a vote because he couldn’t also bring them on board with the six other incredibly difficult things required to put America’s fiscal house in order? Especially when the budget in question wasn’t going to become law anyway? Especially when the mere act of voting on a budget that actually brought America’s commitments in line with tax revenue, however implausible some of its assumptions, had the added advantage of throwing the other party’s irresponsibilities and evasions into sharp relief?
>> Again, as I said in the column, nobody is required to agree with Ryan on any of the policies he’s championed. (I strongly disagree with him on a number of points.) But the ongoing attempt to portray him as unserious and uncourageous holds him to a standard that no figure in American politics, President Obama very much included, comes even close to meeting. No other American lawmaker has been as active as Ryan across so many policy fronts these last few years. No other Republican — with the arguable exception of Tom Coburn, who’s retiring after this term — has staked out so many specific and controversial positions on difficult issues. Ryan’s supposedly “sophisticated” liberal critics like to downplay this reality, preferring to paint him as a kind of flimflam man instead. But they aren’t actually sophisticated, and he’s actually legit.
Well,
one thing in Ryan's favor is that he has a plan. As Treasury
Secretary Geitner has said "We don't have a plan, but we don't
like yours."
Once we get an actual plan from the Obama camp, we can compare
and contrast. Right now, it is hard to compare something to
nothing. Unless one wants to go to the budget that the President
proposed, which died in the House by 414-0 and died in the
Senate by 98-0. When a Democratic President cannot get a single
Democrat to vote for his budget, why is the Ryan Budget the
problem?? Seems to me that the President's budget, having failed
BOTH houses, is more problematic. However, I don't see anyone
interested in going over that one. Why not?
Why is Ryan the only one who has to address the flaws and gaps
in his budget when NO ONE (apparently) is interested in
exploring the same thing about the President's budget? I get
sick and damn tired of the double standard. Let's go over BOTH.
Or NEITHER.
With the 100 % negative campaign on the part of the Obama folks
(Romney hasn't paid taxes, Romney is complicit in a woman's
death, Romney may be a criminal and has committed a felony, and
Ryan pushes grandma over the cliff), what on Earth makes you
think that Romney and Ryan can or should feed the "politics of
personal destruction" machine employed by the Democratic team?
As far as I know, neither man is a masochist.
This is the same Soviet "guilty until proven innocent" ploy like
Harry Reid employs on the Romney Tax Returns bogus issue. The
President unseals his college records, ALL OF THEM, and then we
will think about more Tax Returns. Until then, Barry and Reid
can STFU.
Apparently I'm supposed to be more upset with what Mitt Romney
has done with his own money than I am over what Barack Obama has
done with mine. IT'S NOT WORKING.
David
"The
principal villain in rising health
care costs is the government. Not
pharmaceutical companies, not doctors,
but government."--Neal
Boortz
On 8/20/2012 4:59 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
Hi
David,
On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:32 PM, David R. Block wrote:
OK then, what would be "saying much?" The choices we have before us are
what we have.There is
no perfect candidate, and there isn't a candidate that
would be all things to all people because there are
just too many issues where the two major parties are
180 degrees out of phase with each other.
This isn't about "being all
things to all people", or who is the lesser of multiple
evils. This about what it *really* means to be
serious and and courageous.
What I long to see is a politician who actively engages
with his critics. Why hasn't written an op-ed where he
actually admits and addresses questions like:
- the flaws and gaps in his budget proposal
- the tension between Christianity and Randian orthodoxy
I don't want him to be a miracle worker or make everyone
happy. I just want him to be brutally honest about what he
believes, admit his errors (if any), and clarify areas of
legitimate confusion.
Which require him to demonstrate that he really has
thought long and hard about these issue, to the point where
he is willing to lay out his reasoning and take his licks in
public; the way people like Nate Silvers and Judge Posner do
every week.
You may well answer that such a thing would be political
suicide, and you could be right. But that's is exactly why
it would earn him the title "courageous".
> Once we get an actual plan from the Obama camp, we can compare and contrast. Right now, it is hard to compare something to nothing. Unless one wants to go to the budget that the President proposed, which died in the House by 414-0 and died in the Senate by 98-0. When a Democratic President cannot get a single Democrat to vote for his budget, why is the Ryan Budget the problem?? Seems to me that the President's budget, having failed BOTH houses, is more problematic. However, I don't see anyone interested in going over that one. Why not?
> Why is Ryan the only one who has to address the flaws and gaps in his budget when NO ONE (apparently) is interested in exploring the same thing about the President's budget? I get sick and damn tired of the double standard. Let's go over BOTH. Or NEITHER.
> With the 100 % negative campaign on the part of the Obama folks (Romney hasn't paid taxes, Romney is complicit in a woman's death, Romney may be a criminal and has committed a felony, and Ryan pushes grandma over the cliff), what on Earth makes you think that Romney and Ryan can or should feed the "politics of personal destruction" machine employed by the Democratic team? As far as I know, neither man is a masochist.
> This is the same Soviet "guilty until proven innocent" ploy like Harry Reid employs on the Romney Tax Returns bogus issue. The President unseals his college records, ALL OF THEM, and then we will think about more Tax Returns. Until then, Barry and Reid can STFU.
> Apparently I'm supposed to be more upset with what Mitt Romney has done with his own money than I am over what Barack Obama has done with mine. IT'S NOT WORKING.
> David
> "The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government."--Neal Boortz
> On 8/20/2012 4:59 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>> Hi David,
>> On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:32 PM, David R. Block wrote:
>>> OK then, what would be "saying much?" The choices we have before us are what we have.There is no perfect candidate, and there isn't a candidate that would be all things to all people because there are just too many issues where the two major parties are 180 degrees out of phase with each other.
>> This isn't about "being all things to all people", or who is the lesser of multiple evils. This about what it *really* means to be serious and and courageous.
>> What I long to see is a politician who actively engages with his critics. Why hasn't written an op-ed where he actually admits and addresses questions like:
>> - the flaws and gaps in his budget proposal
>> - the tension between Christianity and Randian orthodoxy
>> I don't want him to be a miracle worker or make everyone happy. I just want him to be brutally honest about what he believes, admit his errors (if any), and clarify areas of legitimate confusion.
>> Which require him to demonstrate that he really has thought long and hard about these issue, to the point where he is willing to lay out his reasoning and take his licks in public; the way people like Nate Silvers and Judge Posner do every week.
>> You may well answer that such a thing would be political suicide, and you could be right. But that's is exactly why it would earn him the title "courageous".
>> -- Ernie P.
>>> "The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government."--Neal Boortz
>>> On 8/17/2012 4:09 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>>>> Nice defense. It confirms my suspicion that he really is serious and courageous for a politician -- which still isn't saying much. :-(
>>>> Ross Douthat
>>>> In my Campaign Stops column this week, I make the point that you have to look at Paul Ryan’s record over the last few years in the context of where his party stood after the 2008 election — moribund, deluded, and potentially self-destructive — and recognize 1) how much he’s done to move the Republicans in a more constructive direction and 2) that many of the problems with his famous/infamous House budgets reflect his party’s continuing deficiencies rather than his own. The absence of a replacement for Obamacare in the budget, for instance, doesn’t mean that Ryan hasn’t come out for such a replacement. (He has.) Likewise with the absence of Social Security reform and the implausible cuts to discretionary spending that this absence entails: Ryan’s original Roadmap deals with Social Security in a more serious and plausible way; he just hasn’t been able to get all of his House colleagues onside.
>>>> But this point extend to issues beyond the ones I raise in my column. For instance, one of the refrains from Ryan’s critics — recent examples include David Stockman, Timothy Noah, and Scott Galupo — is that he’s too cynical or cowardly to support Medicare cuts for existing beneficiaries, lest he offend a crucial G.O.P. constituency. But in fact, the Medicare reform proposal that Ryan co-authored last year with Alice Rivlin, an Office of Management and Budget director under Bill Clinton, does include “a cost-sharing mechanism that would start in 2013,” and that would save $110 billion over the decade before premium support is phased in. So he is on the record supporting immediate cuts; he just hasn’t persuaded his fellow Republicans to join him.
>>>> The same goes for the (completely fair) critiques of the House Republican budget’s Medicaid projections, which envision spending growing at levels that would probably cripple an already-ineffective program. Here again, Ryan has publicly sketched out a much more plausible approach: In Ryan-Rivlin, Medicaid grows at the rate of G.D.P. per capita plus 1 percent, which is probably faster than the rate of growth for health-insurance subsidies under Obamacare.
>>>> And the same pattern shows up on even more obscure issues. For instance, in his blistering critique of Ryan’s budget, Stockman writes that “we need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.” But actually, Ryan did have the gumption to support something exactly like that: His original Roadmap replaces the current corporate income tax with what it describes as “a Business Consumption Tax of 8.5 percent on goods and services,” which would presumably function roughly like the consumption tax that Stockman favors. As with the Social Security reform proposals in the Roadmap, this idea was dropped somewhere during the process of selling his fellow Republicans on entitlement reform.
>>>> Now one could look at the range of proposals Ryan has endorsed or co-sponsored and say that this actually sharpens the case against his budget: He knows it’s incomplete and insufficient and implausible, and he went ahead and pushed it through the House of Representatives anyway! But I think this is a naive way of understanding how policy entrepreneurship works. Ryan has a lot of ideas about how to reform America’s public sector. He believes that one of them — premium support for Medicare — is by far the most important, as evidenced by the multiple iterations he’s proposed and co-sponsored (in his Roadmap, in Ryan-Rivlin and Ryan-Wyden, and then in both House budgets). He seized the opportunity afforded by the Tea Party sweep in 2010 to bring the entire G.O.P. House caucus on board with the plan, selling it to them — quite credibly — as the cornerstone of any serious effort to slow government’s inexorable growth. Having done the (incredibly difficult) work of salesmanship required to bring his fellow Republicans on board with a plan that many people in Washington D.C. considered political suicide, was he really supposed to then kill the plan without a vote because he couldn’t also bring them on board with the six other incredibly difficult things required to put America’s fiscal house in order? Especially when the budget in question wasn’t going to become law anyway? Especially when the mere act of voting on a budget that actually brought America’s commitments in line with tax revenue, however implausible some of its assumptions, had the added advantage of throwing the other party’s irresponsibilities and evasions into sharp relief?
>>>> Again, as I said in the column, nobody is required to agree with Ryan on any of the policies he’s championed. (I strongly disagree with him on a number of points.) But the ongoing attempt to portray him as unserious and uncourageous holds him to a standard that no figure in American politics, President Obama very much included, comes even close to meeting. No other American lawmaker has been as active as Ryan across so many policy fronts these last few years. No other Republican — with the arguable exception of Tom Coburn, who’s retiring after this term — has staked out so many specific and controversial positions on difficult issues. Ryan’s supposedly “sophisticated” liberal critics like to downplay this reality, preferring to paint him as a kind of flimflam man instead. But they aren’t actually sophisticated, and he’s actually legit.
>>>> -- >>>> Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
We have to go with those we have on the ballot, unless someone
wants to throw their vote to the winds and write someone in. Now
the ballots differ from state to state so there are some other
choices who have little chance of winning unless both major
parties lay an egg. The Libertarians may be everywhere, and so
might the Greens (not sure about that). Votes for others that
are on the ballot in only a couple of states is a fools errand
the way things have been set up from the beginning.
So name some names if you have other ideas.
David
"The
principal villain in rising health
care costs is the government. Not
pharmaceutical companies, not doctors,
but government."--Neal
Boortz
On 8/21/2012 1:37 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
Hi
David,
On Aug 20, 2012, at 9:13 PM, David R. Block wrote:
Well, one thing in Ryan's favor is that he
has a plan. As Treasury Secretary Geitner has said "We
don't have a plan, but we don't like yours."
Sure. Like I said, compared to *other politicians*, Paul
Ryan is awesome.
But that's still faint praise.
-- Ernie P.
Once we get an actual plan from the Obama camp, we can
compare and contrast. Right now, it is hard to compare
something to nothing. Unless one wants to go to the
budget that the President proposed, which died in the
House by 414-0 and died in the Senate by 98-0. When a
Democratic President cannot get a single Democrat to
vote for his budget, why is the Ryan Budget the
problem?? Seems to me that the President's budget,
having failed BOTH houses, is more problematic.
However, I don't see anyone interested in going over
that one. Why not?
Why is Ryan the only one who has to address the flaws
and gaps in his budget when NO ONE (apparently) is
interested in exploring the same thing about the
President's budget? I get sick and damn tired of the
double standard. Let's go over BOTH. Or NEITHER.
With the 100 % negative campaign on the part of the
Obama folks (Romney hasn't paid taxes, Romney is
complicit in a woman's death, Romney may be a criminal
and has committed a felony, and Ryan pushes grandma
over the cliff), what on Earth makes you think that
Romney and Ryan can or should feed the "politics of
personal destruction" machine employed by the
Democratic team? As far as I know, neither man is a
masochist.
This is the same Soviet "guilty until proven innocent"
ploy like Harry Reid employs on the Romney Tax Returns
bogus issue. The President unseals his college
records, ALL OF THEM, and then we will think about
more Tax Returns. Until then, Barry and Reid can STFU.
Apparently I'm supposed to be more upset with what
Mitt Romney has done with his own money than I am over
what Barack Obama has done with mine. IT'S NOT
WORKING.
On Aug 21, 2012, at 9:03 PM, David R. Block wrote:
> Well Ernie,
> We have to go with those we have on the ballot, unless someone wants to throw their vote to the winds and write someone in. Now the ballots differ from state to state so there are some other choices who have little chance of winning unless both major parties lay an egg. The Libertarians may be everywhere, and so might the Greens (not sure about that). Votes for others that are on the ballot in only a couple of states is a fools errand the way things have been set up from the beginning.
> So name some names if you have other ideas.
I'm happy to vote for him. But I refuse to call him "serious and courageous" on any absolute scale.
We should certainly applaud politicians who take even baby steps towards tough engagement with the issues. But we shouldn't pretend that's the best they could possible do.
> "The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government."--Neal Boortz
> On 8/21/2012 1:37 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>> Hi David,
>> On Aug 20, 2012, at 9:13 PM, David R. Block wrote:
>>> Well, one thing in Ryan's favor is that he has a plan. As Treasury Secretary Geitner has said "We don't have a plan, but we don't like yours."
>> Sure. Like I said, compared to *other politicians*, Paul Ryan is awesome.
>> But that's still faint praise.
>> -- Ernie P.
>>> Once we get an actual plan from the Obama camp, we can compare and contrast. Right now, it is hard to compare something to nothing. Unless one wants to go to the budget that the President proposed, which died in the House by 414-0 and died in the Senate by 98-0. When a Democratic President cannot get a single Democrat to vote for his budget, why is the Ryan Budget the problem?? Seems to me that the President's budget, having failed BOTH houses, is more problematic. However, I don't see anyone interested in going over that one. Why not?
>>> Why is Ryan the only one who has to address the flaws and gaps in his budget when NO ONE (apparently) is interested in exploring the same thing about the President's budget? I get sick and damn tired of the double standard. Let's go over BOTH. Or NEITHER.
>>> With the 100 % negative campaign on the part of the Obama folks (Romney hasn't paid taxes, Romney is complicit in a woman's death, Romney may be a criminal and has committed a felony, and Ryan pushes grandma over the cliff), what on Earth makes you think that Romney and Ryan can or should feed the "politics of personal destruction" machine employed by the Democratic team? As far as I know, neither man is a masochist.
>>> This is the same Soviet "guilty until proven innocent" ploy like Harry Reid employs on the Romney Tax Returns bogus issue. The President unseals his college records, ALL OF THEM, and then we will think about more Tax Returns. Until then, Barry and Reid can STFU.
>>> Apparently I'm supposed to be more upset with what Mitt Romney has done with his own money than I am over what Barack Obama has done with mine. IT'S NOT WORKING.
>>> David
>>> "The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government."--Neal Boortz
>>> On 8/20/2012 4:59 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>>>> Hi David,
>>>> On Aug 17, 2012, at 10:32 PM, David R. Block wrote:
>>>>> OK then, what would be "saying much?" The choices we have before us are what we have.There is no perfect candidate, and there isn't a candidate that would be all things to all people because there are just too many issues where the two major parties are 180 degrees out of phase with each other.
>>>> This isn't about "being all things to all people", or who is the lesser of multiple evils. This about what it *really* means to be serious and and courageous.
>>>> What I long to see is a politician who actively engages with his critics. Why hasn't written an op-ed where he actually admits and addresses questions like:
>>>> - the flaws and gaps in his budget proposal
>>>> - the tension between Christianity and Randian orthodoxy
>>>> I don't want him to be a miracle worker or make everyone happy. I just want him to be brutally honest about what he believes, admit his errors (if any), and clarify areas of legitimate confusion.
>>>> Which require him to demonstrate that he really has thought long and hard about these issue, to the point where he is willing to lay out his reasoning and take his licks in public; the way people like Nate Silvers and Judge Posner do every week.
>>>> You may well answer that such a thing would be political suicide, and you could be right. But that's is exactly why it would earn him the title "courageous".
>>>> -- Ernie P.
>>>>> "The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government."--Neal Boortz
>>>>> On 8/17/2012 4:09 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>>>>>> Nice defense. It confirms my suspicion that he really is serious and courageous for a politician -- which still isn't saying much. :-(
>>>>>> Ross Douthat
>>>>>> In my Campaign Stops column this week, I make the point that you have to look at Paul Ryan’s record over the last few years in the context of where his party stood after the 2008 election — moribund, deluded, and potentially self-destructive — and recognize 1) how much he’s done to move the Republicans in a more constructive direction and 2) that many of the problems with his famous/infamous House budgets reflect his party’s continuing deficiencies rather than his own. The absence of a replacement for Obamacare in the budget, for instance, doesn’t mean that Ryan hasn’t come out for such a replacement. (He has.) Likewise with the absence of Social Security reform and the implausible cuts to discretionary spending that this absence entails: Ryan’s original Roadmap deals with Social Security in a more serious and plausible way; he just hasn’t been able to get all of his House colleagues onside.
>>>>>> But this point extend to issues beyond the ones I raise in my column. For instance, one of the refrains from Ryan’s critics — recent examples include David Stockman, Timothy Noah, and Scott Galupo — is that he’s too cynical or cowardly to support Medicare cuts for existing beneficiaries, lest he offend a crucial G.O.P. constituency. But in fact, the Medicare reform proposal that Ryan co-authored last year with Alice Rivlin, an Office of Management and Budget director under Bill Clinton, does include “a cost-sharing mechanism that would start in 2013,” and that would save $110 billion over the decade before premium support is phased in. So he is on the record supporting immediate cuts; he just hasn’t persuaded his fellow Republicans to join him.
>>>>>> The same goes for the (completely fair) critiques of the House Republican budget’s Medicaid projections, which envision spending growing at levels that would probably cripple an already-ineffective program. Here again, Ryan has publicly sketched out a much more plausible approach: In Ryan-Rivlin, Medicaid grows at the rate of G.D.P. per capita plus 1 percent, which is probably faster than the rate of growth for health-insurance subsidies under Obamacare.
>>>>>> And the same pattern shows up on even more obscure issues. For instance, in his blistering critique of Ryan’s budget, Stockman writes that “we need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.” But actually, Ryan did have the gumption to support something exactly like that: His original Roadmap replaces the current corporate income tax with what it describes as “a Business Consumption Tax of 8.5 percent on goods and services,” which would presumably function roughly like the consumption tax that Stockman favors. As with the Social Security reform proposals in the Roadmap, this idea was dropped somewhere during the process of selling his fellow Republicans on entitlement reform.
>>>>>> Now one could look at the range of proposals Ryan has endorsed or co-sponsored and say that this actually sharpens the case against his budget: He knows it’s incomplete and insufficient and implausible, and he went ahead and pushed it through the House of Representatives anyway! But I think this is a naive way of understanding how policy entrepreneurship works. Ryan has a lot of ideas about how to reform America’s public sector. He believes that one of them — premium support for Medicare — is by far the most important, as evidenced by the multiple iterations he’s proposed and co-sponsored (in his Roadmap, in Ryan-Rivlin and Ryan-Wyden, and then in both House budgets). He seized the opportunity afforded by the Tea Party sweep in 2010 to bring the entire G.O.P. House caucus on board with the plan, selling it to them — quite credibly — as the cornerstone of any serious effort to slow government’s inexorable growth. Having done the (incredibly difficult) work of salesmanship required to bring his fellow Republicans on board with a plan that many people in Washington D.C. considered political suicide, was he really supposed to then kill the plan without a vote because he couldn’t also bring them on board with the six other incredibly difficult things required to put America’s fiscal house in order? Especially when the
