Does Paul Ryan know where his Roadmap leads?

The fact that Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Social Security might ultimately lead to a federal bailout caught our eye nearly two years ago. And it caught the CBPP's as well ... and Ryan's response suggests the celebrated wonk has no idea of the implications of his bill.

Cost of the Social Security Guarantee

Ryan’s Assertion : Ryan challenges our statement that his requirement that the Treasury bail out private-account holders for stock-market losses could cost $2.9 trillion and that this cost is not reflected in the CBO report on his plan. He claims that CBO explicitly estimated this cost and included it in its projections of his plan.

Our Response : Once again, Rep. Ryan is mistaken and our statements are accurate. We wrote, “These potential bailout costs — like the cost of the plan’s very large tax cuts — are not reflected in the CBO estimates that Rep. Ryan cites when touting the plan’s fiscal responsibility.” We confirmed the accuracy of this statement with CBO before issuing our report. CBO conducted separate analyses of the proposed benefit guarantee, but CBO’s budget estimates reported in Appendix II of the Ryan plan do not include the cost of the guarantee. Moreover, the $2.9 trillion cost estimate does not come from us, as Rep. Ryan implies. Our report clearly states that it is the estimate of the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration, based on an earlier version of Rep. Ryan’s plan and taking stock-market risk into account.

Why oh why do people take Paul Ryan seriously?

Paul Ryan, admit you want to privatize Social Security already

Krugman explains why.

Paul Ryan's plans can bear little scrutiny...same goes for his defenses

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities eviscerates Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future. Paul Ryan responds. Paul Ryan probably wishes he didn't.

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.

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.

Palin-Paul Ryan in 2012

Demonstrating his intellectual heft, Paul Ryan doesn't say no to being second banana on a Palin presidential ticket.

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.

Paul Ryan claims his numbers work

Paul Ryan responds to Howard Gleckman's argument that his revenue assumptions are unrealistic. Take a look.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel notices Paul Ryan supports the stimulus package

But his flack says it's just constituent service!

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."

Paul Ryan: We're on the road to serfdom

Did you know that many Americans are more worried about their material support from the government than their own liberties? That right now the government is more concerned about equalizing outcomes than equalizing opportunities? That the government is doing so much in our lives that we have less freedom? That we are, in short, on the road to serfdom?

If not, then you haven't watched Paul Ryan's interview with John Stossel. Oh, yeah: Despite his vote, Paul Ryan -- who has spent most of his adult life working for government -- thinks we shouldn't have bailed out the auto companies. Suck on that, auto workers of WI-1.

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).

Charles Krauthammer wants Paul Ryan to be face of GOP at Health Care summit

Perhaps Charles Krauthammer wasn't told the Republican Party is running from the Road Map:

"Here's what you do: you show up and you designate one guy who knows a lot about all this health care stuff as your only spokesman. You don't have people raising their hands and shouting questions. You pick Paul Ryan who knows this stuff up and down."

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'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 talks Ayn Rand on Facebook

Did you know that we are living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking? That capitalism is under assault and we're going to replace it with a "Crony capitalism collectivist government run system"? If not, then you haven't viewed these two embarrassingly fanboyish Facebook videos by Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan.