(Ryan & Romney’s Laugh-in)
Ryan is being punted by the GOP spin machine as a brilliant econo-fiscal philosopher, presumably with the twin aims of (a) complementing Mitt Romney’s more ‘hands on’ approach to money, and (b) highlighting the fact that Obama is economically dyslexic – and his running mate is Joe Biden. It’s par for the course these days in politics to present anyone who can string a sentence together (especially in writing) as a hyper-genius, but then the example of Louise Mensch in the UK is a timely reminder that ability may be no guide to content quality.
In fact, Ryan is little more than a central-casting neocon hardline professional politician…his personal requirement for welfare until age eighteen (after the death of his father) notwithstanding. The Ryan males tend to keel over aged about 56, so at 42 we can be reassured – or horrified – that Paul would stay the course if elected. But he wouldn’t be a good bet as a two-term President after that.
Although Mr Ryan is not a Premier-league educational achiever (Miami University is way off the Ivy League ratings) he’s smart enough to have achieved a double major (joint honours) in economics and political science. But the subjects of his degree are for me a further condemnation. I’m a history/politics graduate myself – but then I went out and got a proper job. Aside from fries-shifting at McDonalds and waiting at tables, like most hardline politcians, Paul Ryan has never had a proper job.
He accepted a congressional position as a staff economist after graduating in 1992. Ryan then became a speechwriter for a conservative advocacy group, and later worked as a speechwriter for the Republican vice presidential candidate in the 1996 bunfight, Jack Kemp. After that, he worked as a speechwriter for Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas…by which time most of the speech alternatives were probably exhausted, so he returned to Wisconsin in 1997. Briefly, he became a marketing consultant….for Ryan Incorporated Central, the family construction company. You can just imagine, after that all that political speechwriting, how much Paul knew about marketing construction services: I think David Cameron might call getting this job The Leg Up.
Two years later, Ryan was elected to Congress against less than sparkling opposition, and went on to get re-elected six times in a safe GOP district. But credit where credit’s due, Paul has over $5.4 million in his congressional campaign account – more than any other House member. So, like UK MP Jeremy Hunt, he’s good at raising funds. For himself.
Like I say, Congressman Ryan is a card-carrying technocrat politician who has spent his life in academia, Congress, and falling back on the family. His fiscal economics are thus entirely theoretical and other-directed – and it shows.
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As it happens, I didn’t know any of this
before consulting Rep Ryan’s Roadmap to Utopia. Reading it yesterday
with an open but sceptical mind, I was at first impressed: the analysis
of where previous Washington policy had veered off piste was very good
indeed, and there were references to the correct use of welfare which
perhaps, on reflection, chime with his personal experiences as a kid.
But several pages, diagrams, graphs and
promises in, I was still looking for the directional signs beyond vague
flim-flam about the evils of Obaman medicare and incontinent budget
control in Washington. I mean, there’s all that taxpayers’ money wasted
on speechwriters for a start, so he has a point. But by the end of the
main document, the signs seemed to point me to where I’d been rather
than where I might want to go.
In the Roadmap introduction – A Choice of
Two Futures – there is a well-written but staggeringly naive and
selective analysis of collectivism versus free markets. And when one
gets into the detail of his medical provision model, it has that
disturbing preference for the systemic theory over the human experience
that characterises so many Believers. This for instance on the Obama
model – of which, by the way, I am myself a stern critic (my emphases):
‘The entire methodology of the program must be converted away from a program that shelters providers and consumers from prices – and is therefore inefficient in restraining rising costs – into one in which beneficiaries choose the most affordable coverage that best suits their needs.’
The emphases highlight my belief that Paul
Ryan is just another Andrew Lansley: no concept at all of the reality
that most people in this life – even in the wealthy West – are anything
from of limited means to dirt poor. It’s hard for any beneficiary to
choose affordable coverage if he or she has little or no money….and the
cost of straightforward anaesthesia is $6,700. It’s also hard to feel
reassured about medical fees when every ounce of your experience gives
you bad feelings about the wriggle-skills of insurance companies.
Choice is fine if you’re middle class and
pensioned like me. But neocon economics have ensured that, since 1988,
the average American worker has been offered a smaller and smaller slice
of the economic apple pie – thanks to a super-rich 3%, and jobs moved
offshore. Mitt Romney hasn’t moved every last job offshore, but let’s
face it – the guy is implicated. As indeed is his wealth…after a level
of taxation we have yet to be allowed to examine.
Ryan is, in outline, good on how to make
medicare a better bet. But you’re left asking why his Party had never
lifted a finger to tackle the issue at all before Obama enacted his
recipe for fiscal disaster. He’s excellent on thrift, and the need for
balanced budgets…but in that context, the box marked ‘Reaganomics’ is
left blank. President Reagan (a fine man in arms-control foreign policy,
and a well-meaning leader) left behind the biggest debt in US history.
His Republican successors since that time have been building on that
mountain of fiscal thrift. For all his myriad faults and empty gestures,
President Obama inherited a level of deficit unthinkable for Americans
even a decade ago.
Paul Ryan’s roadmap, in fact, is largely
significant for the two things it leaves out: practical detail, and any
realistic appreciation of what 2008 was really all about. It is 90% a
description of the fiscal geography of America, and 10% Roadmap.
Basically, the actual route is in the Appendix.
The heading for the Roadmap comes
well before that – ‘Description of the Legislation’ – but what follows
is some desperate self-justification of the flim flam -
‘…this proposal is a comprehensive plan for restructuring health
care, the Federal health entitlements, retirement security, and Federal
taxation to put the Federal budget and the U.S. economy on a sustainable
path….The proposal should not be viewed as a rigid, absolute plan. It
has flexibility built into it so that it can adapt to conditions that
surely will change over the course of the century. Nevertheless, it is a
complete and comprehensive approach.’- and then just a load more bromides about ‘every American should be free from fear of medical bills’ and ‘putting the consumer back in control’ – in other words, the same old same old that sounds great in print, but gets perverted by the first insurance accountant let near it. It is an enduring fault of most neocon ‘thinkers’ that they are naive about the ethics of private business, and paint a picture of ‘consumers’ as if they might be sophisticated, discerning purchasers of financial services. Let’s get real: if they were, Lloyd Blankfein would be two-bit theatre producer.
The Roadmap steps (Appendix I) are based on
the assumption that the US is a fundamentally healthy economy, and the
only nation on the planet. Like all cod futurology, no allowance is made
for technological change, foreign recession, Asian slowdown or China’s
ownership of most American debt. No recognition is made of relative
Asian/Western wages. No mention appears at all of the growing inequities
of wealth in American society.
On healthcare, the ‘idea’ is a classic,
complicated Gordon Brownesque tax credit. Washington gives you some
money to get insured, you get insured with your insurer of choice.
Everyone lives happily ever after. It isn’t costed. That’s it. But
there’s a lulu under the heading ‘transparency’: a one-liner….’See
medical component of this legislation’. I’m sorry, but I laughed out
loud at that point.
On social welfare, the first ‘idea’ is a
remake of the old ‘opt-out’ Thatcher scam from which some folks in the
UK are still suffering: ‘…provides workers under 55 the option of
dedicating portions of their FICA payroll taxes toward personal
accounts, or remaining in the current Social Security system.’
It envisages four ‘phase-in’ stages that are
complete by 2042, when Paul will be 72 and, given his genes, very
probably extinct. Only an ivory-tower Washington wonk could seriously
suggest that one can plan a social security system change over…oh sorry,
I forgot: it’s flexible. Ah, right.
The second ‘idea’ is an extraordinarily
complex and bureaucrat-intensive system designed to protect workers as
they save for retirement, by ‘indexing’ their wage and price exposure at
2018. That’s basically an inflation-proof pension, almost non-existent
these days in the private sector because nobody can afford to provide
it. Not surprisingly, this isn’t costed either.
Look: I could go on, but it is going to get
boring. The point I’m making is that the content is recycled,
busted-flush bollocks, and there is no evidence provided that it will
save any money for the State. Frankly, in the context of a $3trillion
deficit growing daily, this is less than useless as a roadmap to
anything except the cliff-face of national insolvency. And we have about
as much chance of Ryan showing us the numbers as we do of seeing the
balance in Mitt’s Bahamian bank account.
So let me instead close this critique by
focusing on Paul Ryan’s at best gullible omission of the events that got
us to where we are today. The Unmentionables are, chiefly:
1. Hank Paulson and $870bn. On toxic asset relief (TARP) Ryan hilariously offers this judgement:
‘The
Troubled Asset Relief Program was intended to thaw credit markets that
seized up during the financial crisis – and it succeeded in its
short-term objective’.
It didn’t thaw anything Paul, it stopped
Lehman turning into a whole row of over-leveraged dominoes within the
month. That was indeed its short-term objective, but we have yet to see
an audit of where the money went. (Can we also have a little more detail
on the seizing-up thing, or was this a spontaneous, celestial event
similar to the Second Coming in which Romney so passionately believes?)
2. Lack of banking reform. Not a single
substantive change was enacted to create a Glass-Steagall firewall, calm
the bonus culture, write off derivative lunacy, or prosecute
malfeasance.
3. Trickle-down wealth. Rather than
trickling down, it’s spouting upwards like a Texas Tea gusher. Funny how
nobody from Dan Hannan via George Osborne to Angela Merkel ever wants
to discuss that side of Friedmanite thought.
4. Congressional self-abuse on the subject
of deficit action, and Ryan’s personal role in the mass onanism. The
Republican capture of the House in the November 2010 elections set the
stage for a series of budget confrontations in 2011 between President
Obama and his Democratic allies in the Senate, and conservatives who
campaigned on making steep cuts to government spending. Fair enough. But
The Republican response in April of that year starred none other than
Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin. Unveiling his party’s 2012
budget, he said the plan would reduce the deficit by $5.8 trillion over
the next decade, mainly by making deep cuts in discretionary spending
programs, and turning Medicare into a “defined benefit’’. Is that what it says in the Roadmap Paul? (And we still don’t have the costs: maybe they’re in a Bahamian account too.)
5. Flagrant criminality on the part of
everyone in Wall Street from Goldman Sachs to Barcap. Fines handed out
like confetti. Fines paid by banks in return for not admitting their
obvious guilt. Not one culprit of the 2008 disaster doing time. Speaking
less than clearly from within this herd of roomed Elephants, wide eyed
Paul Ryan merely makes the following contradictory observation:
‘In a
single stroke late last year, the House passed the most significant
overhaul of the Nation’s financial system since the creation of
Depression-era banking and securities laws….The new legislation expands
the role of government in the financial arena on multiple levels for
institutions and individuals….The financial bill creates a new
government agency designed to safeguard consumers from risk-taking for a
broad array of products, from mortgages to credit cards. But
ironically, the new bureaucracy will harm the very consumers it seeks to
protect: by writing far-reaching rules and restricting risk, it will
limit consumer choices, ration credit, and hamper individuals’ ability
to make investment decisions.’
Where to start on this one? The GOP had the
House majority for all of the period, so I’m not clear what point Mr
Ryan is making. Calling it a ‘significant overhaul’ is a bit like saying
that the European EFSF is overfunded. Despite the $23trillion global
write-off of crazy investment bank risk since 2008, Ryan doesn’t like
restricting risk. And ration credit? Is he kidding? What does he call
what the banks are doing now, the Marshall Plan? And once again,
per-leeeze…most people don’t make individual investment decisions: it’s
all they can do to work the remote control. Naive folks are sold investment products they usually don’t need by snake-oil salesmen like Bob Diamond.
This is the bottom line: the roadmap is dated August, 1979. What we need is new roads, not an old roadmap.
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I find myself back considering the wisdom of Peter Oborne’s 2007 book The Triumph of the Political Class.
If one thing needs thawing out in the political elites of the West, it
is the mammoth residing in their undertstairs loo: the constant
factory-like production of high College-educated idiots with no
experience and even less humility.
Such clones continue to be forced upon
local selection committees by the Big Party Machines as fodder designed
to vote the ‘right’ way, and agree with the Executive about everything.
There can be no doubt that senior politicians throughout the West are
perfectly well aware of just how dysfunctional this is, but to change it
would be to loosen their incompetent grip upon power.
Dan Hannan blogged in the Telegraph that
there were two words to explain why Americans should vote for Romney:
Paul Ryan. Oh, and Mrs Romney. Not Mitt Romney for it is he, then? Well,
Dan would like to get selected too, and good luck to him. But the
self-publicising MEP is showing a truly superficial appreciation of US
politics in making that recommendation. Romney is an asset-stripping,
tax-dodging, offshore-job-shifting right wing Republican, and Paul Ryan
is in there as his running mate because he has what look like
squeaky-clean credentials as a fiscal reformer. It really is that
simple.
This is no different to super-cool thin
black dude a bit intellectually up himself choosing a yob like Joe
Biden. In political circles, it’s called complementing. But it’s
meaningless packaging – just as Ryan’s roadmap is yet another guide to
the past…its type faded, it’s cover bent, and its pages curling at the
edges.
I won’t be reading any more of Dan’s
recommendations. But I do thank him profoundly for providing the Slog
with some more evidenced deconstruction of drivel.
Source
Bollocks: the triumph of the objectionable over the objective
Bollocks: the triumph of the objectionable over the objective
In Greece, the US and South Africa, the gargoyles are running the Communion Service.
* The Greek government is scoping out a plan to tax citizens who turned in their license plates because they couldn’t afford to keep a car. The ‘logic’ here is that they are evading tax by not paying the licence any more, and technically yes, the conclusion is sound: more and more Greeks are also driving without insurance because they can’t afford that either. What we need here, however, is some sort of viability analysis probing the likelihood of somebody paying a tax designed to penalise them for not having any money to pay a tax. Tell you what – let’s stand McKinsey down and conclude ‘zero’.
* Dan Hannan is rapidly becoming a parody of himself. He’s at the GOP convention (who’s paying for this MEP to be there, we ask ourselves?) and a few hours ago tweeted thuswise: ‘So Mitt is a good businessman, compassionate employer, selfless friend, decent churchman. But was he ever a community organiser? Eh, eh?’
There is something about Dan that seems to suggest short trousers, but for the record, here, from July 27th last, is the Slog’s properly balanced choice-auditbetween Opeless Obama and Rapacious Romney. It sort of gives the lie to compassionate employer and decent churchman. It is called Butterfingers v Sticky Fingers and it represents the triumph of objective over the objectionable.
* ‘The 270 miners arrested over this month’s violent strikes in South Africa have been charged with the murder of their 34 colleagues who were shot dead by police’, reports the Daily Telegraph. The Zuma regime’s rationale for this surreal police decision is a piece of “common purpose” legislation much favoured by apartheid governments from Verwoerd to Botha. It “places responsibility for any fatal confrontation with armed police on whoever challenges them” confirmed Frank Lesenyego, spokesman for South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority, without breaking into a maniacal giggle.
Earlier this week Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega confirmed that the 34 murdered miners died after police shot them down at the mine owned by Lonmin. But the executioners are innocent because agitators asking for a living wage made the murders inevitableburble booble bumble bingle argle oogle pop.
On March 3rd 2010, The Slog posted that ‘Jacob Zuma is a corrupt, womanising, controlling and ruthless ANC hardliner. To those of us old enough to have marched against first Smith in Rhodesia and then the Botha dynasty in South Africa, he is a walking betrayal of our support.’ Jacob has now begun the task of proving me more right than even I knew I was.
That last sentence is, I hope, in keeping with the surreality of today’s opening burst of bollocks.
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