It's almost fall, which means election season is fully in gear. Which is too bad-- I hate election season. Instead of Bud Light ads, the TV's looping ads with messages approved by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. When they come on, I change the channel.
But the press has been filled with the typical cycle of politicians putting their feet in their collective mouths. The theme this time around is Tea Party representatives'... questionable grasp of female anatomy. You've got Todd Akin declaring that women who are "legitimately raped" don't get pregnant (apparently, he learned everything he knows about women from this documentary). Then there's Stephen King (the representative, not the Cujo author), who says women can't get pregnant from statutory rape or incest (Rep. King needs to catch up on his Game of Thrones; then he'd know that one's also not very true). And that's the core of the 55-year-old virgin wing of the Republican Party. They're kinda crazy. And kinda ignorant. But everyone knew that already.
The contrast to that end of the party is supposed to be what the media likes to dub the "serious" end. The supposed leaders of that faction are people like Chris Christie and Paul Ryan, who claim to be fiscally responsible, and who the media loves. The existence of the Akin-King axis lets the media play the balanced card-- some Republicans are nuts, they declare, but there are plenty who aren't. And Romney's choice of Paul Ryan is a sign, they say, that we're going to have a "serious" campaign between "competing ideas". Because, you know, Ryan has a serious vision that we should pay attention to. The problem with this narrative, of course, is that it's complete nonsense. In their own way, Romney and Christie are just as nuts and just as un-serious as Akin and King. Here's why.
To start with, the distinction the media likes to draw isn't as clean as they tend to like to pretend. For starters, Ryan is a card-carrying member of the "Sperm Are People Too" club. But that's not what makes his ideas nutty. It's the very ideas that the media likes to trumpet as "serious" that are a complete house of cards. The reason behind that, I think, has to do with the people who become journalists. By and large, journalists are reasonably smart people. But they're journalists because they like words. Throw numbers are them, and their eyes glaze over, they get chills, and their brain shuts down. Which is why they swoon any time a politician throws numbers at them, assuming that the politician must know what s/he's talking about because there are a lot of digits on that spreadsheet, and that must mean that they're smart.
This is what happened with Paul Ryan's "budget". It gets quotation marks because calling it a budget is a joke. Normally, when you put together a long-term budget, you specify changes to certain programs; you expand or contract different parts of the government, raise some taxes, cut others, and create an approximation of how you see the federal budget going forward. The further out you go, of course, the less accurate it is, but it provides something of a vision for a big picture. Ryan's "budget" makes a mockery of all that. It's got numbers, sure. But the way you normally get those numbers is to make specific policy recommendations and then apply those to the numbers.
Ryan budgeting works the other way around-- make up numbers, without specifying how you get there. Yes, it's as deeply stupid as it sounds. It's the equivalent of asking a basketball coach how he plans to win a game, and getting "We plan to score more points than the other team" in response. It's true, maybe, but it's not a response-- it's an insult to the reader's intelligence. Ryan got the CBO to "score" his budget, to give it an air of legitimacy. But this, too, was an exercise in deception. Normal CBO procedure is to give them policies, whose budget impact they project. Ryan gave them numbers and told them to calculate those. In essence, he told them, "If we raise X revenue and spend Y dollars, will we have a balanced budget?" And so long as X was equal to Y, the answer would be yes. Problem is, that's useless without a plan for getting to X or Y.
So what is in Ryan's budget(s)? Well, there's the specifics-- lots and lots of tax cuts, concentrated at the top. He would eliminate the estate tax and capital gains taxes and create two tax brackets-- 10% and 25%. If this sounds like a massive tax cut, that's because it is. But he says he'd offset those revenue losses by closing loopholes in the tax code. Which loopholes? He won't say. And, given that he's CUTTING capital gains taxes, it's safe to say that there won't be enough in loopholes to keep the tax code from either becoming WAY more regressive than it already is, or massively reducing the amount of revenue the government takes in. When the nonpartisan Tax Policy Centered analyzed all the loopholes in the tax code and constructed a maximally favorable scenario for the Ryan plan (closing the loopholes that were most regressive first). It determined that, even in that scenario, the budget amounted to a further tax cut for the mega-rich, and a tax hike for the poor and middle class.
Ryan, of course, complained about that analysis by... calling the TPC a patrisan organization run by a "former Obama Administration official" (it's actually directed by officials from both the Obama and Bush Administrations, and they weren't in political positions). So that's the plan on taxes. But it gets worse. Ryan makes a bunch of absurd assumptions about the federal government-- he claims he'll be able to cut the federal government to a third of its present size in... unspecified ways (this is, of course, ridiculous, and it doesn't address the problem; the federal government is small already-- social security, health care, defense, and interest on the debt make up over 3/4 of the federal budget; everything else the government does, from running the federal courts to managing national parks, conducting diplomacy, and regulating the financial system take up under a fifth of the budget; somehow, Ryan proposes to cut that by 2/3). It won't happen, and it shouldn't happen-- it's more hand-waving and magic asterisks.
But what's really terrifying is Ryan's vision for health care. The Romney campaign has been attacking the Obama people for "cutting Medicare to pay for Obamacare". Which is untrue, and especially egregious when compared to Ryan's plan. While cost control is a priority, there's a smart way to do it, and a dumb way to do it. Ryan, unsurprisingly, opts for the latter. Health care costs have been rising faster than GDP for awhile (though they've slowed down in the last few years), so controlling them is clearly a priority. The smarter way to do that is to find efficiencies on the demand side-- by determining what does and doesn't work, we can try to cut down on superfluous procedures and consume fewer health care services; in essence, we cut demand for superfluous and expensive procedures without (hopefully) compromising quality. We know that can work because just about the entire developed world spends less on health care than we do, yet has better health care outcomes. The Affordable Care Act takes steps to compile data on the effectiveness of various procedures to make positive steps toward that goal. Then there's the Ryan plan, which involves capping what seniors get for Medicare by placing a cap on the supply side. In essence, it tells them that they can spend a fixed amount on health insurance. And if that insurance doesn't cover all the health care they need, they can pay out of pocket. And if they can't afford it, well, tough luck, they get to die. In other words, according to the Ryan Plan, we can't make cuts to superfluous procedures because that's "rationing", but we can hand people a check, then go to the market and find out that it won't buy them health insurance that actually insures them. But I guess that's "fiscal discipline"-- financing massive tax cuts for the Romneys and the Buffetts, while throwing granny off a cliff. That's not a scare story-- scare stories aren't true.
So no, the Ryans in the Republican Party aren't serious, and they're no more principled than the anti-abortion crusaders-- they are, in their own way, just as nuts as the Akins, and are not to be taken any more seriously. If only the media would try looking at the numbers long enough to figure that out...
