Instead of "evil" in that age-old debate. I'm glad he's giving Ryan the time; the Bachman debacle really did succeed in making Ryan seem sober and serious just by contrast. Yeah she's ridiculous, but she's not US history's most powerful Budget Chair. Focus, people. Real problems first, Ryan can actually do real damage:
Let me also highlight another point from that passage: Ryan warns that if we don't deal with our fiscal problems, we'll have to raise taxes and cut benefits for seniors. So what can we do to reduce the deficit? Well, government spending is dominated by the big 5: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest payments; you can't make a significant dent in the deficit without either raising taxes or cutting those big 5. Defense is untouchable, says the GOP; so that leaves the entitlement programs. And 2.7 of the three entitlement programs are benefits to seniors (70 percent of Medicaid spending goes on seniors).
So let's see: to avoid cuts in benefits to seniors, we must ... cut benefits to seniors.
I'm reasonably sure that Ryan hasn't thought any of this through.
One might differ with Krugman on the stupid v. evil thing, but tactically, treating Ryan as unserious and unworthy seems the better way to handle him. It's not dishonest anyway, he is saying really stupid things with a sober look and measured tones, so let's take him at face value rather than trying to read his soul.
Yesterday, in response to my diary, "The incredible dishonesty of Megan McArdle", I received an email advising me to look at a blog post at the Tax Policy Center, "in defense of her [McArdle's] position against Krugman, and in defense of Rep. Ryan's Roadmap (which I like, but obviously has flaws)", which he later characterized as "TPC's opinion".
However, the post was not "TPC's opinion". It was the opinion of one economist who works at TPC, one Ted Gayer who served in the Treasury Department and as a senior economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers (under G.W. Bush), as a visiting scholar at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute from 2004 to 2006, and as a Lone Mountain Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, which Sourcewatch identifies as a Montana-base think tank "that specialises in free market environmentalism" and that "links to a long list of the country's most powerful right-wing foundations and organizations committed to deregulation of industry and to the privatization of public assets."
The fact that Gayer now works at the Brookings Institution--and through it at the TPC (a joint project of Brookings and the Urban Institute) is indicative of how successful the right has been in influence economic thinking in Versailles. But his opinion does not have the same status as an institutional analysis, even though his post tries to convery the impression of an official position. It's worth noting precisely because it helps flesh out a fuller picture of how rightwing hegemony works in the field of economics with absolutely nothing factual going for it.
Gayer begins his post in an inherently dishonest fashion:
Given that columnist Paul Krugman relied on Tax Policy Center estimates to level claims that Congressman Paul Ryan is a "flimflam man" and that Ryan's plan to address our fiscal problems is a "fraud," I think a defense of the Congressman is in order.
The clear implication here is that Krugman has misused the TPC estimates in making his argument. Why else intervene? Merely because Gayer is a conservative and he wishes to build up Ryan's cred? That would be my guess--but it's only a guess. What I can say for certain is that Gayer presents no evidence at all that Krugman has misrepresented the TPC data and what it has to say about Ryan's plan. Instead, he is simply echoing the narrative that other have used to obfuscate the nature of Ryan's plan, which Krugman represented quite accurately.
Gayer, in contrast, begins by repeating the very mis-representation of CBO data that Krugman zeroed in on:
I had wanted to write a post today about the pathetic Versailles attempt to manufacture a new generation of "serious" "responsible" conservative politicians on budget matters, referencing what real economists have to say about the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels. But in googling around to pick up some dropped threads, I came across an extremely disingenuous attack on Paul Krugman by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic (a followup to an earlier, equally disingenuous attack), and decided I should say something about her first.
The two attacks I just mentioned are attempts to discredit Krugman's attacks on Paul Ryan's so-called "Roadmap for America's Future". The main problem here is that it's not Krugman's attack. Krugman is simply attacking Ryan with the failings of his plan as analyzed by others, most notably, the Tax Policy Center, which produced a devastating critical analysis last March that Ryan has never seriously responded to. Most notably:
In his provocative Roadmap for America's Future, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) figures that his broad tax code overhaul would eventually generate about 19 percent of Gross Domestic Product in revenues. But the Ryan plan would produce hundreds of billions of dollars-a-year less than that-about 16.8 percent of GDP-a decade from now, according to new Tax Policy Center estimates. Moreover, the plan would give a huge tax cut to the wealthy, while cutting taxes by little or nothing (and in some cases even raising taxes) for low- and middle-income people.
As a result, Ryan would likely fall far short of meeting his goal of balancing the budget and paying off the national debt by 2080, even if government spending were slashed to 1951 levels as he proposes....
TPC found Ryan's plan generates much less revenue than he projects. If all taxpayers chose the simplified system, it would produce about 16.8 percent of GDP by 2020, far below the 18.6 percent he figures for that year. If taxpayers chose the system most favorable to their situation, the Ryan plan would produce even less revenue-about 16.6 percent of GDP.
What does that mean in dollars? CBO's most realistic projection of revenues (assuming most Bush tax cuts are extended and many middle-class families continue to be exempted from the Alternative Minimum Tax) figures the existing tax system would raise about $4.2 trillion in 2020. By contrast, Ryan's plan would generate about $3.7 trillion, or $500 billion less in that year alone.
While TPC didn't model the Ryan plan beyond 2020, the pattern of revenues it generates suggests it would be decades before it reaches his goal of 19 percent of GDP-very likely sometime after 2040.
Top-bracket taxpayers would overwhelmingly benefit from Ryan's tax cuts. By 2014 people making in excess of $1 million-a-year would enjoy an average tax cut of more than $600,000. To put it another way, their after-tax income would rise by nearly 30 percent.
So, McArdle's game is to avoid the substantive problems identified by the TPC, and try to tangle up Krugman in alleged misrepresentations of how Ryan went about presenting his plan.
Ezra Klein likes Paul Ryan. Methinks that this is the first time Ezra has run into a charming and personable Republican selling deficit-exploding plans as deficit reducing ones.
But some of us have seen this story many times before...
This is yet another--if somewhat milder--example of the sensible center critiquing the "sensible center". As DeLong implies, there's nothing new here. In fact, it's just another incarnation of Lucy with the football. But the really annoying part is when Ezra gets all superior to those like DeLong (hey, I'm staying out of it as much as I possibly can, while not staying out of it all!) who've actually got a handle on what's going on:
And now let's get to the paragraph a lot of you will flay me for: I don't think Ryan is a charlatan or a flim-flam artist. More to the point, I think he's playing an important role, and one I'm happy to try and help him play: The worlds of liberals and conservatives are increasingly closed loops. Very few politicians from one side are willing to seriously engage with the other side, particularly on substance. Substance is scary. Substance is where you can be made to look bad. And substance has occasionally made Ryan look bad. But the willingness to engage has made him look good. It's given some people the information they need to decide him a charlatan, and others the information they need to decide him a bright spot. It's also given Ryan a much deeper understanding of liberal ideas than most conservative politicians have.
So do Ryan's arguments persuade me? Not as far as the Roadmap goes. But I'm glad to give him space to try to persuade all of you, so long as he's willing to let me try and poke holes in his arguments while he's doing it. That's an offer I've extended to every legislator interested in taking me up on it, and it still stands.
Ah, where to begin? Ezra's smug superiority? Or the part where Lucy pulls away the football, and Ezra lands flat on his ass? Or the part where Ezra totally misses the point of everything?
Substance is scary. Substance is where you can be made to look bad. And substance has occasionally made Ryan look bad. But the willingness to engage has made him look good.
Memo To Ezra: Looking good is the only game that Ryan's playing. By saying what you've just said, you've made yourself Ryan's bitch. That's the beginning, middle and end of the story.
And this:
It's given some people the information they need to decide him a charlatan, and others the information they need to decide him a bright spot. It's also given Ryan a much deeper understanding of liberal ideas than most conservative politicians have.
is the same sort of standard-less standard that's standard operating proceedure for making the Obama Administration such a staggering disappointment. (Since most conservative politicians understand liberal ideas about as well as meerkats understand quantum physics, I'm not terribly impressed that Ryan understands them as well as orangutangs understand quantum physics.)
Bottom line: Ezra suffers from the age-old liberal disease of thinking that conservatives are just liberals with a different set of policy preferences. They're not: They come from an entirely different culture: a pre-modern culture of warriors and priests. Not surprisingly, their only interest in ideas is as weapons.
It's one thing for Ezra to be taken in by Ryan's con. But he's actually doing much, much more: by legitimizing Ryan the way he does, he's actually participating in Ryan's con.
Despite--or perhaps because of--all his education and intelligence, Ezra really doesn't get that Ryan is offering excuses, rather than reasons, for doing things that any reasonably smart 13-year old can see are utterly catastrophic.
That is, any reasonably smart 13-year old that doesn't already want to be Paul Ryan or Ezra Klein when they grow up.
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