Paul Ryan, admit you want to privatize Social Security already

Krugman explains why.

Paul Ryan's Randian road map

Ever since the intrepid Howard Gleckman revealed that the Road Map for America's Future does not, in fact, balance the budget, there's been a great deal of well-deserved piling on. Paul Ryan's response to the critique, meanwhile, is anemic.

But one of the more interesting analyses is by Jonathan Chait, who puts the Road Map in historical-political context:

The roadmap clarifies the essence of the Republican Party's approach to domestic policy issues. The essence is opposition to the downward redistribution of income. The principle first emerged under Ronald Reagan, but only in fits and starts--Republican presidents agreed to a tax reform in 1986 and a deficit reduction in 1990 that did redistribute income from rich to poor. Over the last twenty years, though, opposition to downward redistribution has hardened into the sacred tenet of Republican policymaking. Ryan's plan both codifies this principle and shows just how far the party is willing to go in its service.

Every major element of Ryan's plan reflects this commitment. Begin with his proposed tax changes.

Why does Ryan roll this way? Blame it on Ayn:

The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers. What's telling about Ryan's program is not so much that a hard-core ideologue like him would advocate it. It's that virtually the whole of the conservative movement has embraced him. ...

The rise of Ryan is a sign that the possibilities for bipartisan cooperation on domestic issues are, at the moment, essentially nil. This point is obscured by the figure of Ryan, a cheerful and courteous man who gives every sense of wanting to deal in good faith. But his goals, which are now fully the goals of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, are diametrically opposed to the liberal vision of capitalism shorn of its cruelest edges. His basic moral premises are foreign, even abhorrent, to liberals. He seems like a person you'd like to negotiate with, but there's nothing to negotiate over. Ryan is waging a zero sum fight over resources on behalf of the most fortunate members of society and against everybody else.

Ryan is better understood as an ideologue -- a great pol and a great marketer, to be sure, but first and foremost and ideologue -- than as a wonk.

NYT conservative columnist Ross Douthat attempts a response, failing utterly to take into account how the CBO notes that poor seniors get screwed in Ryan's plan to blow up Medicare.

Why does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's coverage of Paul Ryan suck?

In today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel we learn that Paul Ryan is "praised" for his alternative health-care plan.

Who's doing the praising? A guy from the Heritage Foundation and a former McCain advisor.

Shocking that two rightwingers would praise Ryan.

The story says:

Ryan's proposal, part of what he calls "A Roadmap for America's Future," would replace the existing Medicare benefit for people under 55 with a voucher that could be used to buy private insurance. The payment, which Ryan has said would initially average $11,000 a year, would be adjusted for inflation and tied to income.

That would lessen the fiscal challenges facing the Medicare program because health care spending outpaces overall inflation. But at the same time, it could lower costs by putting pressure on doctors and hospitals to become more efficient.

The story fails to note that the way Ryan's plan really lowers cost is by balancing the budget on the backs of poor seniors.

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.

Peggy Noonan loves Paul Ryan

Shorter Peggy Noonan: It will take a skillful politician to make Americans balance the budget on the backs of poor senions, a more skillful politician that Margaret Thatcher,who was derailed by that whole poll tax nonsense.

Patrick McIlheran: Let Paul Ryan set people free to go without healthcare

Patrick McIlheran, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's conservative columnist who has hung onto his job due to his willingness to link to right wing blogs,knows why Democrats have come out firing against Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America's future.
They hate freedom!

But the real problem for those on the dominant left of the Democratic Party is what you'd think makes Ryan's plans palatable: That they're voluntary. If you think Social Security's a good deal, you'd be able to stay in it, but for "progressives," this choice should never come up. For a century, progressive thought has sought to replace individual choice with collective decision-making.

The reasons vary, from seeing us as incompetent dupes to believing that only some compelled "social compact" can undo life's unfairness. The why is less important than the fact that, in fixing federal finances while treating us as individuals, not a herd, Ryan would transfer power from our leaders to us.

The fact that middle class and poor seniors won't fare well in Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand utopia, that it makes impractical cuts in the federal budget, and, oh yeah, the GOP is running away from it, never comes up in McIlheran's column.

Paul Ryan's roadmap: "Pure Bilge"

While some silly people continue to claim we should be grateful for introducing a slippery plan to fix some of our country's "systemic ills," Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times takes a look at Paul Ryan's Roadmap.

He finds the Paul Ryan roadmap to be "pure bilge."

Social Security comes in for particular abuse. Ryan states that "Social Security's shrinking value and fragile condition pose a serious problem. . . . To maintain the program's significant role as a part of the retirement security safety net, Social Security's mission must be fulfilled . . . without bankrupting future workers."

One doesn't want to be picky about an elected congressman's words, but with all due respect, these words are pure bilge. They come straight from the talking points of Social Security's historical enemies: conservatives who have never believed that the government should play such an important role in people's retirement planning, and mutual fund and insurance companies that hanker for the business generated by millions of Americans looking for a profitable place to park their retirement assets.

Social Security's value to the average American isn't "shrinking" -- it’s expanding. In 1962, it accounted for 30% of the income of Americans aged 65 and older; in 2007 that figure was 36%. (These numbers come from the Social Security Administration.) Given what's happened to most families' financial assets since 2007, the percentage probably is even higher today.

Its "fragile condition"? Social Security runs an annual surplus and has done so since 1983; no other government program can make that claim.

By the way, even when the program starts paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll tax, that's not a "crisis," as it's often portrayed -- it's the expected outcome of changes implemented after 1982, when the tax was raised sharply to provide a cushion against the coming wave of baby-boomer retirements. The accumulated surplus in the program's trust fund at the end of 2008 was $2.4 trillion.

But ... what about the freedom of parking money in private accounts?

But as with every "guarantee" of financial wealth, this is a shell game. For one thing, the guarantee has to be funded from the federal budget -- presumably by borrowing. That's because Ryan's plan sucks revenue out of the program for years before the ostensible gains from stock market earnings take root.

When Social Security's chief actuary examined a Ryan proposal in 2008 (it's nearly identical to the Roadmap provisions, as far as I can tell), he concluded that annual infusions from the general fund totaling $4.3 trillion in present value would be required over a long, 30-year transition period, from 2032 through 2063.

"The individual account plans don't hurt in the short term," economist Peter A. Diamond of MIT, an expert on Social Security, told me this week. "But over the medium term they hurt a lot."

Diamond observes that shifting any portion of the program's funding to the general fund from the payroll tax, which is dedicated to Social Security and Medicare, undermines the future of Social Security.

"Politically, dedicated revenue is much more secure than revenue you have to take out of the annual budget," Diamond says. "The fact that we'll go through an extended period with the money coming out of the annual budget puts Social Security at risk. And the fact that to handle this we've got to do a whole lot more borrowing puts the finances of the entire federal government at risk."

As the Congressional Budget Office advised Ryan last month, the guarantee would become even costlier "during periods of economic stress" like recessions -- for that's when investment returns are most likely to fall below the inflation rate and therefore trigger greater and possibly more politically sensitive infusions from the government. One could argue that such major market reversals will occur only rarely in any average worker's lifetime. But one could also point out that we've had two in the last 11 years.

So what's Ayn Rand fan Paul Ryan really up to?

What is Ryan really up to? His Roadmap would achieve a goal that conservative opponents of Social Security have cherished for decades: killing the program by undermining its broad base of popular support. It would sap Social Security's resources, increase its complexity and hammer a wedge between the currently retired or near-retired (who would be guaranteed their current statutory benefits) and younger workers and the future workforce (who would be increasingly on their own). The term for this is "divide and conquer."

Why does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's coverage of Paul Ryan's policies suck?

Milwaukee Magazine recently noted an anti-Ryan blog did a better job covering critiques of Paul Ryan's Road Map.

Now Folkbum points out that while the MJS can cover Ryan's popularity, it's not very good at covering his proposals. (I talked about the woeful coverage of Paul Ryan at my eponymous blog more than a year ago).

Paul Ryan's Road Map "politically ludicrous"

Bruce Bartlett is sympathetic to the idea of making major cuts to entitlement programs to balance the budget. So he's sympathetic to some of Paul Ryan's ideas. That doesn't mean he thinks they'll get traction:

The Ryan plan is, of course, politically ludicrous. It would be impossible to get Congress to even implement one of its major provisions, let alone all of them simultaneously. And I say this as someone who in principle supports many of the ideas in his plan. For example, I believe we must raise the retirement age, and it's hard to see how we can meaningfully reform the health system to reduce cost inflation as long as health insurance is free of taxation. But I don't delude myself that it is possible to implement such changes absent a major transformation in political attitudes or conditions that do not now exist.

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.)

Anti-intellectualism in Paul Ryan Politics

Ezra Klein shreds Ross Douthat's defense of Paul Ryan's Road Map and his attack on the plan's critics.

Needed: Better media scrutiny of the Paul Ryan plan

Media Matters points out that the media missed the fine print on Paul Ryan's Road Map for America -- namely that it assumes revenue will remain the same as the status quo even though his plan calls for massive tax cuts.

Closer to home, Milwaukee Magazine's Erik Gunn wonders why an anti-Ryan blog is doing a better job than the Wisconsin media of covering critiques of the Paul Ryan Road Map.