Shocking news: Paul Ryan misleads on Obamacare

Deficit chickenhawk Paul Ryan's star turn during the health care summit set tongues wagging in the right wing blogosphere, including this guy, and Wingnutty Investors Business Daily smirked that no one had refuted Paul Ryan's arguments.

That may be because Paul Ryan's critiques, while dishonest, are indisputably well crafted.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has that response that so many on the right were waiting for:

To sum up, then, Ryan makes some good points about the true cost of the bill and realities of the federal budget. But he purposefully omits any mention of the bill's expected savings, disingenuously attaches the price tag of a broken Republican policy onto the health-care reform bill, and selectively stops extrapolating trends when they don't fit his points. It's a presentation designed to make the bill look less fiscally responsible than it really is.

But don't listen to me. Robert Reischauer is the head of the Urban Institute. He's also one of the CBO's most revered former directors, in no small part because his relentlessly honest cost estimates helped doom Bill Clinton's bill in 1994. I reached him earlier today and asked whether he thought this bill made fiscal sense. "Were I in Congress and asked to vote on this," he replied, "I'd vote in favor." The bill isn't perfect, he continued, "but it at least has the prospect for creating a platform over which more significant and far-reaching cost containment can be enacted."

If Paul Ryan had an ounce of courage

There has been a ton of hooey about Paul Ryan is somehow courageous for raising a Roadmap for America's future that balances the budget on the backs of poor seniors. Scot Ross nails what true courage from Paul Ryan would have looked like:
Contrary to the revisionist history being offered, if Ryan had an ounce of courage, he would have stood up to the profligacy, corruption and bankruptcy of Tom DeLay and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, perhaps even once. Once. These policies of failure resulted in an entire decade of no job creation -- something unprecedented in American history.

Paul Ryan: Obama is "insincere!" Wah wah wah!

Unlike,say, Paul Ryan who has done more than Obama to create our current deficit situation, thanks to his voting for Bush's irresponsible budgets and providing a critical vote to the deficit-financed Medicare drug benefit. The same Paul Ryan who lashes the Obama administration for not fixing the mess he created fast enough.
Paul Ryan: Not credible.
From the New York Times.
Meanwhile,K-Lo joins the pity party.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel notices Paul Ryan supports the stimulus package

But his flack says it's just constituent service!

Paul Ryan justifies himself to the wingnuts

Paul Ryan last week took heat from rightwingers for his votes on TARP, the auto bailout and taxing AIG bonuses. Paul Ryan now justifies these votes to the wingnuts. He regrets the vote on bonuses (the vote seemed populist then, looks like big gummint now). He also says TARP was necessary because only massive goverment intervention could keep alive his Randian free market ideals. Seriously:

I believe we were on the cusp of a deflationary spiral which would have created a Depression. I think that’s probably pretty likely. If we would have allowed that to happen, I think we would have had a big government agenda sweeping through this country so fast that we wouldn’t have recovered from it. So in order to prevent a Depression and a complete evisceration of the free market system we have, I think it was necessary. It wasn’t a fun vote. You don’t get to choose the kind of votes you want. But I just think as far as the long term objectives that I have — which are restoring the principles of this country — I think it was necessary to prevent those principles from being really kind of wiped out for a generation.

Strangely, he was not questioned about his votes for the Bush budgets and for the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Paul Ryan deserves credit? For what?

Robert Samuelson and other parties say that, agree with Paul Ryan or not, you have to give Paul Ryan credit for putting challenging issues on the table.

But the thing is, he doesn't do that.

Not only is the Road Map politically -- within his own party -- a nonstarter. It's that the Road Map doesn't even do what it purports to do: balance the budget.

The Roadmap is not the work of a serious politician trying to grapple with the serious issues of the day. It's the work of a Randian ideologue, who apart from working in the family business has had zero experience in this thing "the free market" -- devising schemes to take out social programs that dont' fit in with his view of America.

I would be tempted to give Paul Ryan credit if he would produce a Road Map that was politically realistic and wasn't based on dubious revenue assumptions. I would be tempted to give Paul Ryan credit if he hadn't voted for the Bush budgets and a deficit-financed Medicare prescription drug benefit. I'd be tempted to give Paul Ryan credit if he would refrain from making false accusations -- and challenging members of his party and, say, Chariel Sykes --against the Dem plan. I'd be tempted to give Paul Ryan credit if he wouldn't whine about being attacked when he's been a point person in lobbying bogus accusations against Dem plans.

But he's not, so, contra Samuelson, I'm not giving Paul Ryan credit for anything.

Paul Ryan voted to add $5 trillion to the national debt and all we got was a lousy Road Map

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly also is flummoxed by Paul Ryan's pity party in Michael Gerson's column:

But the entire pitch is nevertheless pretty silly. Ryan voted for budgetary and economic policies that added $5 trillion to the national debt over eight years. He supported the budgetary and economic policies that took a $230 billion surplus and turned it into a $1.3 trillion deficit. He was proud to endorse all kinds of measures -- including two wars and Medicare expansion -- that cost a bundle, but which Ryan and his cohorts never even tried to pay for.

But now Paul Ryan has decided it's time to clean up the mess he helped create, and to do so, he wants to go after Medicare and Social Security. When the left suggests that's ridiculous, Ryan concludes that Democrats are big meanies.

Michael Gerson gives Paul Ryan a shoulder to cry on

From today's Michael Gerson column in the Washington Post, Paul Ryan bemoans how his deceptively packaged plan to shred the social safety net is being pilloried.

The attack "came out of the Democratic National Committee, and that is the White House," Ryan told me recently, sounding both disappointed and unsurprised. On the deficit, Obama's outreach to Republicans has been a ploy, which is to say, a deception. Once again, a president so impressed by his own idealism has become the nation's main manufacturer of public cynicism.

To Ryan, the motivations of Democratic leaders are transparent. "They had an ugly week of budget news. They are precipitating a debt crisis, with deficits that get up to 85 percent of GDP and never get to a sustainable level. They are flirting with economic disaster." So they are attempting some "misdirection," calling attention to Ryan's recently updated budget road map -- first unveiled two years ago -- which proposes difficult entitlement reforms. When all else fails, change the subject to Republican heartlessness.

This quote cracked me up:

But unlike Kemp -- who didn't give a rip for deficits, being focused exclusively on economic growth -- Ryan is the cheerful prophet of deficit doom. "For the first generation of supply-siders," he explains, "the fiscal balance sheet was not as bad. The second generation of supply-siders needs to be just as concerned about debt and deficits. They are the greatest threats to economic growth today."

It would have been nice if Paul Ryan had demonstrated concern about deficits when he provided a critical vote for the deficit-financed Medicare drug benefit, which is more expensive than the Dem health care plan. Bruce Bartlett:

Just to be clear, the Medicare drug benefit was a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered. Together the new bills would cost roughly $900 billion over the next 10 years, while Medicare Part D will cost $1 trillion.

Moreover, there is a critical distinction--the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit, whereas the health reform measures now being debated will be paid for with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, adding nothing to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (See here for the Senate bill estimate and here for the House bill.)

Wingnuts attack Paul Ryan: Not wingnutty enough!

Paul Ryan Watch has observed that Paul Ryan's fiscal conservative schtick is fairly humorous, given his votes for TARP, the deficit-financed Medicare drug benefit, and the auto bailout.

Wingnuts have paid attention to Paul Ryan's record and found it wanting in ideological purity:

Says Matt Lewis at Daily Call:

Though he talks like Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, some of Ryan’s most high-profile votes seem closer to Keynes than to Adam Smith. For example, in the span of about a year, Ryan committed fiscal conservative apostasy on three high-profile votes: The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP (whereby the government purchased assets and equity from financial institutions), the auto-bailout (which essentially implied he agrees car companies – especially the ones with an auto plant in his district—are too big to fail), and for a confiscatory tax on CEO bonuses (which essentially says the government has the right to take away private property—if it doesn’t like you).

While Ryan’s overall voting record is very conservative, the problem with casting these high-profile votes is that they demonstrate he is willing to fundamentally reject conservatism when the heat is on. ...


Though Ryan has downplayed his bad votes, what is more interesting is that few conservatives seem to hold them against him. His many defenders (and trust me, I’ve encountered them) cavalierly dismiss his voting record as mere pragmatism, or an easily forgiven mistake, like, ‘Oops, I voted for $700 billion! My bad…’

Still others, when pressed, his apologists often admit they support him because of his style and intellect, despite his actual voting record. The irony, of course, is that conservatives were furious when Clinton and Obama apologists dismissed their flaws by saying, “but he’s so smart,” or “he’s cool…”

Lewis notes that just last year Michelle Malkin took a shot at Ryan.

Then again, these are probably good ideological opponents for Ryan to have.

Should Paul Ryan expect a tea party challenger?

Remember when Paul Ryan voted against earmark reform?

It's all too funny watching Paul Ryan pose as a tribune of fiscal rectitude. It's not just because he voted for Bush's budgets, it's not just because he voted for the deficit-financed Medicare drug benefit.

It's also because, just three short years ago, Paul Ryan voted against earmark reform and responsible budgeting:

Most Republicans supported the curbs on earmarks but opposed the other key piece of the package: restoring a "pay-as-you-go" rule requiring that any new tax cuts or entitlement programs not add to the deficit. That means such measures would have to be "paid for" by raising revenue or cutting spending elsewhere in the budget.

"This will have the back-door effect of simply raising taxes," said Janesville Rep. Paul Ryan, now the top Republican on the House Budget Committee.

Ryan argued that the pay-as-you-go provision wasn't tough enough on spending (it applies only to new entitlement programs, not discretionary programs such as education and defense), and that it shouldn't apply at all to tax cuts.

"We don't have a tax revenue problem in Washington, we have a spending problem in Washington," Ryan said.

Paul Ryan has no problem with voucherizing Medicare and turning it into a program that doesn't keep up with rising health care costs. He has no problem with balancing the budget on the backs of poor seniors. But sunsetting the Bush tax cuts is a matter of grave concern.

Cross-posted at Brew City Brawler.