Ryan is a Fraud

Though I love Paul Krugman's economics, I often find his partisan writings a bit too harsh for me. And so I try to be more reasonable and objective. And yet, I also find that I agree with him, at least recently. And never more so than on Paul Ryan.

While many in the media are tripping over themselves to say that Paul Ryan is brave and reasonable, his latest budget shows that he is neither of those things.

Let's start with brave. While he deserves a tiny bit of credit for actually laying out a plan, it is far less brave and transparent than we are led to believe. Ezra Klein has some pretty good summaries of it, and the short of it is that the budget preserves defense spending and social security, cuts taxes for the rich, and slashes discretionary programs, most of which go to the poor.

All of that together makes it clear this is not brave. It is a political document that has all of the popular things in there - tax cuts, no cuts to military, and protecting social security - while leaving out anything unpopular, like how to pay for the tax cuts. He says he will eliminate tax deductions, but doesn't say which ones, because they would all be unpopular. If he really was brave, he would say in there that he is eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction and child tax deduction and all of the other benefits that are popular as individual items. But he is not brave, so he leaves it out.

His budget is also not reasonable. In order to pay for his tax cuts for the wealthy and for leaving military unharmed, he is going to gut discretionary programs, much of which goes to help the poor and middle class. Again, he doesn't say which programs he will have to cut (because that would be unpopular) but because of the scale, we know it will hit most programs, or if it leaves some harmless, it will be even deeper in others.

I might be able to handle all of this, if he wasn't so pious and dishonest about his budget. Here is what he said about how his budget treats the poor:

[T]he preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty out onto life of independence.

If his budget only cut cash assistance (welfare) but increased spending on education, Pell grants, job training, etc, I would disagree with that as policy, but his argument would be at least defensible.  Instead, his budget cuts taxes for the rich and in return, will have to cut all programs that would actually help people escape poverty.

Ryan in the past gave a speech on how he believes in equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome. That be accused Obama of believing in the later is utterly dishonest. But he doesn't actually believe in the former himself. Now, he doesn't really want equality of opportunity, but a base level of opportunity that we can all be comfortable with (otherwise, no one would be allowed private education). But his budgets show that he doesn't even believe in that. He does everything he can to kill programs that would allow all people to have a decent education, decent job training, etc - in other words, he kills programs that would work to create an even playing field.

Paul Ryan has a callous attitude about poverty. But so do many others. That he thinks and says he is actually being helpful is disgusting. That the press lets him get away with this, and pretends that he is being genuine and not honest is shameful. Paul Ryan is not a policy wonk. He is a politician that will say whatever he can get away with. And his policies do not help the poor or create an even playing field. More people should acknowledge this.