August 13, 2012--Ryan & His Budget

Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate is an act of desperation similar to John McCain's selecting Sarah Palin. It is an attempt to change the game.

If the ever-cautious Romney felt he had a winning hand against President Obama he would have gone the safe route and picked one of the bland members from the VP short list--Governor Tim Pawlenty or Senator Rob Portman.

Romney has been criticized for not having a detailed economic plan. That he talks in vague generalities, claiming that as a businessman he knows how to create jobs. When pressed for details he in effect says, "Trust me."

Well, now he has an economic plan--Congressman Paul Ryan's--and as Americans get to know the details of that, and they will I am certain because Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will relish the opportunity to explicate it for all of us, they will be horrified.

Seniors and near-seniors will learn that Medicare as they know it, or are counting on to cover their health care needs, will be gutted under the Ryan-now-Romney plan. It would be transformed into a voucher program with all of us given about $8,000 a year to purchase private insurance; and we know that that is not enough to buy coverage equivalent to Medicare's, especially if you have even the hint of a preexisting condition.

And, of course, Obamacare would be repealed. Romney has already pledged to do that on Inauguration Day. This alone would mean that at least 10 million soon to be covered by it would lose their medical insurance altogether. And the provision in the Affordable Care Act that closes the prescription drug donut hole would be eliminated, which would cost seniors up to $2,000 a year more for their medications.

If you do not have the money to care for yourself and your family, that's too bad. This is the way the free market works.

Speaking of the free market, a few years ago Ryan revealed that "the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker (sic), one person, it would be Ayn Rand." Say no more.

But I can't resist--in his high school yearbook he was voted "Biggest brown-noser."

As a confirmed Randian, under the Ryan budget taxes for the highest earners, including the tax on capital gains, would be cut dramatically and the middle class will be expected to pay more for less. If the Ryan plan had been in effect in 2010--the only year for which Mitt Romney released his returns--rather than having had to pay 13.9 percent in taxes he would have paid a miniscule 0.82 percent. Thus, from a personal perspective, Romney has on his team just the right person to shape tax policy.

But there is also an income side to to the Ryan budget--he claims it would yield $4.6 trillion over the decade by closing tax loopholes. Sounds good, but in his plan, and in subsequent interviews, he refused to list even one such loophole that he would close. Small wonder--almost all of them benefit the most affluent among us, his and Romney's patrons.

Hardly mentioned in discussions about the Ryan-Romney budget are the effects of cuts in so-called discretionary spending. This excludes military spending, which under Ryan-Romney would actually be increased. Thus all cuts in non-entitlement spending would come from education (including student loans and Head Start, among many others programs), scientific research, environmental protection, the national parks, NASA, food stamps, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and so forth. And these cuts would be even more dramatic than the savage cuts to all forms of federal health care--the discretionary part of the budget would be cut in half over the next ten years, from 12 percent of GDP to just 6 percent.

This is a dystopian vision for America.

Ryan does not just want to trim waste and fraud from the system, he doesn't want just to reduce the size of the federal budget because we can't afford the spending trajectories we are currently seeing (he's right about that--cuts need to be made), he wants to repeal, to eliminate most New Deal and Great Society programs and leave us without the safety nets we have for decades benefited from as a nation.

He, like Romney, doesn't need any safety net as he too is the child of privilege. So much so that, in addition to being inspired by Ayn Rand, his mother told him to get involved in politics since she was concerned he would become a "ski bum." And he did, never having had a "real" job in his life.

He is a zealot and it is incredible that he managed to get every Republican member of Congress to vote for his budget, and now it has the endorsement of the Republican nominee for the presidency. This is scary.

But as Americans get to see the details and understand what Ryan-Romney would do to their lives, and their children's, like him or not, Obama should be the political beneficiary. If we put Romeny and Ryan in the White House and give them majorities in both houses of Congress, what befalls us will be our own fault because the choice between two radically different approaches to the kind of America we want is now squarely on the table.