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.

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.

FrontPageMag: Paul Ryan's plan doesn't go far enough,let's just off seniors to balance the budget

Paul Ryan wants to balance the budget by providing less care to seniors. The neoLeninists at FrontPageMag want to go one step further: just kill Medicare:

But here is an even larger question: Why should ending Medicare be a bad thing? From whichever angle we look at it, Medicare has been a disaster. Ending it would be a good thing. In fact, America cannot prosper financially while Medicare continues in its present form.

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?

Paul Ryan, Schiavo Republican

While it's all well and good to talk about Paul Ryan's policy proposal, it's important to always keep in mind that Paul Ryan is deep wingnut. Indeed, he was a Schiavo interventionist -- although he tried to distance himself from that position.

From a February 2007 post at my other, eponymous blog:

Here's what Ryan had to say in the 3/22/05 Cap Times & Wisconsin State Journal:

About 2 p.m. Sunday, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, learned he'd need to fly to Washington, D.C., for an emergency House debate on Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was removed Friday on a state judge's order.

Ryan cut short an archery lesson with his nephew and gave up grilling dinner for his family to catch the last flight out of Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport.

"Any inconvenience in my life paled in comparison to the issue that was before us," Ryan said Monday. "This is a matter of life or death. There's no higher principle that we're involved in."

"We are simply asserting Terri Schiavo's constitutionally protected right to life," Ryan said. "This is an area where the Constitution delegates the power to Congress. It is certainly in our purview to do what we did."

Ryan said Congress is not inserting itself into a family matter.

"This was not a private bill," he said. "This is giving her access to the federal court system, much like mass murderers get."

Ryan called Schiavo "a healthy, disabled woman without a living will and with a serious dispute between her parents and her husband." She is not terminally ill, he said.

"She is not in a coma, she is healthy and does not need machines to keep her alive, other than to feed her," Ryan said. "To end her life is to starve her to death."

Also in the 3/22/05 Journal Sentinel:

Ryan disputed the notion that Schiavo was being kept alive by extraordinary means.

"She is brain damaged and needs help taking in food and drink," he said. "Her life is precious and her rights and her parents' rights should be respected."

Ryan subsequently tried to distance himself from his wingnutty vote. From a February 2007 column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

To a lesser extent, the Schiavo dispute was perceived by the public as another betrayal of conservative principles. Technically, this was a case about court jurisdiction, which is relevant for Congress to consider.

Nonetheless, it was perceived as the ultimate big-government intrusion into a family affair.

Something to keep in mind as we're called upon to take Paul Ryan and his ideas seriously.