Ross Douthat: Paul Ryan and the Art of the Possible - NYTimes.com
Dr. Ernie Prabhakar
Paul Ryan and the Art of the Possible
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.
David R. Block
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
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Dr. Ernie Prabhakar
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.
David R. Block
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
Dr. Ernie Prabhakar
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."
David R. Block
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
Dr. Ernie Prabhakar
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.