“Roundabout And Silly”: Paul Ryan Suggests Need To Shred Safety Net Because Rich People Give Politicians Money
“Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.”
“That’s BS,” a constituent told Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) during a town hall Friday. “I don’t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix” it, the Wisconsinite declared as the crowd roared with applause.
Ryan, however, was less than sympathetic to their views. He insisted instead that money will always follow power, so because Washington is where policy is made, there is little we can do to mitigate the influence of money in politics. Worse, Ryan even claimed that the rush of corporate and billionaire donations authorized by the Republican justices in Citizens United justifies enacting his draconian budget.
CONSTITUENT: You have all these different things and I look up there and I say none of them will ever work because of one single item we have in our country today, and I don’t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix. It’s called “campaign financing,” which makes special interests. [Crowd applauds.] This country is bought, it’s paid for, it’s gift-wrapped. Supreme Court didn’t help us one bit when they made corporations humans, now they can dump all this money in. When you dump $16 million into your campaign fund, I own you. You can look me in the eye and say, “oh no, that’s not going to me anything to me.” That’s BS. This is what’s wrong with our country today. We need to get rid of it. Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.
RYAN: The point I would make is so long as so much money is going to be handled and run through government, through Washington, there will always be an attempt to influence it. So to me the best antidote is not give all of our money and our power to Washington, keep it for ourselves and our communities so there’s less influence-peddling there in the first place. [...] Even under the so-called new clean law that Russ Feingold wrote, even with the Supreme Court ruling that affected parts of that law. So let’s try and have more transparency so you see where the money’s going, let’s not destroy the political parties which are more [inaudible] to elected officials. Right now you have all these groups that pop up and then they go down come the election cycle.
Watch it: http://youtu.be/bKmUcP7pAkg
Ryan’s argument is both roundabout and silly. Rather than fighting to remove the corrupting influence of money on politics, he thinks we should simply pack up our bags and accept draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid — because such programs are doomed to be corrupted by the very donations Ryan’s Supreme Court allies authorized in Citizens United. It’s a bit like saying that, rather than banning drunk driving, we should simply tear up all the nation’s roads.
Moreover, he may call for shrinking Washington in order to shrink the influence of campaign money, but even under Ryan’s own budget, the government still spends more than $3.5 trillion. With a budget that size, under our current campaign finance law, the Koch Brothers can spend a few million dollars and get a fantastic return on investment. In modern America, it is impossible to achieve Ryan’s “antidote” of having a national government small enough that those with money wouldn’t be tempted to influence it.
It’s worth noting that, while Ryan also touts transparency as an alternative to keeping big money out of politics, he hardly has credibility on this point either. He was given an opportunity to actually vote on requiring more disclosure, he voted against the DISCLOSE Act. If Ryan now wants groups like Crossroads GPS to be forced to disclose their multi-million-dollar donors, wonderful. If he’s simply using this as a rhetorical sleight of hand to justify unlimited campaign funding from billionaires, as many Republicans are now doing, shame on him.
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, May 8, 2012
“Flim Flam Budgeter Paul Ryan”: Government Programs That Help Women Are “Creepy And Demeaning”
Mitt Romney surrogate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is criticizing the “Julia” interactive infographic released by the Obama campaign last week. The infographic shows how policies created and supported by President Obama’s administration help women, cradle to grave. Ryan thinks the whole idea of government services is “creepy” and “demeaning.”
“It suggests that this woman can’t go anywhere in life without Barack Obama’s government-centered society. It’s kind of demeaning to her,” Ryan said. “She must have him and his big government to depend on to go anywhere in life. It doesn’t say much about his faith in Julia.”
Because there’s nothing demeaning about going hungry and being unable to provide health care or education for your kids, Romney’s and Ryan’s preferred path for “Julia.” That “government-centered” society giving Ryan the creeps includes Head Start, public education, Pell Grants, health insurance, fair pay, access to birth control, prenatal care, small business loans and tax cuts, Medicare, and Social Security.
This part is good, too.
“Every one of those slides, I could go after their manipulation of statistics, and disentangle and unpack each of those talking points,” said Ryan. “It’s just the narrative that they’re trying to tell, that for this woman to succeed, she has to have a really big government.”
That coming from the flim-flam budgeter who insists that massive tax cuts for the wealthy will be revenue neutral (we still don’t know what loopholes he would close) and that the Pentagon can be wallowing in funds. This is the Very Serious guy who seems to think tax cuts are the unicorn poop fertilizer for prosperity for the nation.
By: Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, May 7, 2012
“Fact, Pseudo-Fact And Pure Imagination”: How Paul Ryan Escapes Scrutiny
Because of his pleasant demeanor, the Wisconsin congressman is rarely pressed on his radical agenda.
House Budget chairman Paul Ryan inhabits two, mutually exclusive spaces in Washington politics. He’s both a crusader for deficit reduction—the recipient of praise and accolades from the Beltway’s collection of deficit hawks—and a pure right-wing ideologue, whose budgets would gut the social safety net, slash taxes on the rich, and load the United States with trillions of dollars in debt. That he’s managed to do this without backlash from the Right or incredulity from the mainstream is a remarkable achievement, and as Jonathan Chait describes for New York Magazine, a product of his studied earnestness and ostentatious love of “wonkery”:
Seeming genuine is something Ryan does extraordinarily well. And here is where something deeper is at play, more than Ryan’s charm and winning personality, something that gets at the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary Washington. The Ryan brand is rooted in his ostentatious wonkery. Because, unlike the Bushes and the Palins, he grounds his position in facts and figures, he seems like an encouraging candidate to strike a bargain. But the thing to keep in mind about Ryan is that he was trained in the world of Washington Republican think tanks. These were created out of a belief that mainstream economists were hopelessly biased to the left, and crafted an alternative intellectual ecosystem in which conservative beliefs—the planet is not getting warmer, the economy is not growing more unequal—can flourish, undisturbed by skepticism. Ryan is intimately versed in the blend of fact, pseudo-fact, and pure imagination inhabiting this realm.
The thing that comes across in Chait’s piece, more than anything, is the degree to which so many people simply don’t believe that Ryan is a right-wing ideologue. When given a choice between him and their lying eyes, they choose him, despite the fact that his budget would clearly result in a return to the pre-New Deal era, where government was mostly uninvolved in the economic life of the country, to the detriment of everyone.
To wit, Chait relays an interview with New York Times business columnist James Stewart, who assumes that Ryan would raise tax rates on capital gains as part of his budget plan, despite the fact that Ryan has been a vocal opponent of taxes on capital gains. Chait is baffled, and asks him to square the circle:
I asked Stewart why he believed so strongly that Ryan actually supported such a reform, despite the explicit opposition of his budget. “Maybe he’s being boxed in” by right-wing colleagues, Stewart suggested.
This is actually a problem for trying to challenge Ryan’s brand of reactionary conservatism; if the arbiters of mainstream discourse refuse to take Ryan on his stated terms—because he talks nice and works out a lot—then the public is necessarily less informed about what the Wisconsin representative wants for the United States. You can see this dynamic at work in today’s Times profile of Ryan, where we learn a lot about his popularity, his exercise regimen, and his love of noodling (catching catfish with your bare hands), and not very much about his plans or their implications.
Ryan’s ideas should discredit him—they are little more than an updated version of the policies that led us to the worst economy since the Depression. But people like to be hooked, and the earnest congressman is a great salesman.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 30, 2012
Like this:
“Ryan Shrugged”: Paul Ryan Suddenly Does Not Embrace Ayn Rand’s Teachings
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) tried to send the message this week that, contrary to “urban legend,”he is not obsessed with philosopher and author Ayn Rand.
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told National Review on Thursday. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”
Best known for her novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand advocated a philosophy that emphasizes the individual over the collective, and viewed capitalism as the only system truly based on the protection of the individual. She has been a significant influence on libertarians and conservatives.
Ryan, whose name has been floated as a possible running mate for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, appeared to be distancing himself from Rand in response to a public letter he received this week from nearly 90 faculty and administrators at Georgetown University. In their letter, they criticize him for misusing Catholic social teaching in defending his budget, which hurts the poor by proposing significant cuts to anti-hunger programs, slashing Pell Grants for low-income students and calling for a replacement of Medicare with a voucher-like system. They also invoke Rand’s name.
“As scholars, we want to join the Catholic bishops in pointing out that his budget has a devastating impact on programs for the poor,” said Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese, one of the organizers of the letter. “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”
But any urban legend about Ryan’s affinity for Rand surely started with Ryan himself, who, prior to this week, had no qualms about gushing about Rand’s influence on his guiding principles.
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said during a 2005 event honoring Rand in Washington, D.C., the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in April 2009.
During the 2005 gathering, Ryan told the audience, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict — individualism versus collectivism.” The event was hosted by The Atlas Society, which prominently features a photo of Rand on its website and describes itself as a group that “promotes open Objectivism: the philosophy of reason, achievement, individualism, and freedom.”
Ryan also said during a 2003 interview with the Weekly Standard, “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well … I try to make my interns read it.” He noted that he “looked into” Rand’s work when he was younger, but reiterated that he is a Christian and reads the Bible often.
In 2009, Ryan posted two videos on his Facebook page raving about the importance of Rand’s views.
“If ‘Atlas Shrugged’ author Ayn Rand were alive today, here’s the urgent message I think she’d be conveying,” Ryan wrote alongside the first video, titled “Ayn Rand’s relevance in 2009.”
He says in the video:
What’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build the moral case for capitalism. And that morality of capitalism is under assault. And we are going to replace it with a crony capitalism, collectivist, government-run system which is creeping its way into government. And so if Ayn Rand were here today, I think she would do a great job in showing us just how wrong what government is doing is. Not the quantitative analysis, not the numbers, but the morality of what is wrong with what government is doing today.
In the second video, titled “Ayn Rand & 2009 America, Part 2,” Ryan says it doesn’t surprise him that sales of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” have “surged” since President Barack Obama took office.
“It’s that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living in an Ayn Rand novel right now, metaphorically speaking,” Ryan says. “The attack on Democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. This, to me, is what matters most.”
Some of Ryan’s critics took a shot at him for suddenly distancing himself from Rand.
“Not pure enough on entitlement cuts @philipaklein @robertcostaNRO Paul Ryan on Ayn Rand: ‘I reject her philosophy,’” Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, tweeted Thursday.
UPDATE: 5:14 p.m. — Ryan spokesman Kevin Seifert downplayed the lawmaker’s apparent change of tune on Rand.
“I wouldn’t make too much of this one way or another. Congressman Ryan was not ‘distancing himself’ from Rand, merely correcting several false storylines that are out there, such as the myth that he requires all of his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. Saying he ‘rejects Ayn Rand’s philosophy’ was simply meant to correct a popular falsehood that Congressman Ryan is an Objectivist — he isn’t now and never claimed to be,” Seifert said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
By: Jennifer Bendery, The Huffington Post, April 27, 2012
“Committed To Decline And Despair”: It’s Time For The GOP To Grow Up
The United States needs two responsible governing parties if it’s ever going to address its most pressing problems.
I’ve grown so used to dismissing Tom Friedman’s work for The New York Times that when he writes something genuinely good, it comes as a surprise. To wit, in his column for the Sunday paper, he aruges that our political system has devolved into a “vetocracy”—a system where “no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all.”
The culprits, according to Friedman, are polarization, broken institutional norms—in particular, filibuster abuse—the massive proliferation of special interests, and the growing importance of money in politics. The ultimate outcome of this, says Friedman, is governmental paralysis:
America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.
This dovetails with a problem that Friedman only alludes to:
[I]f you believe the fantasy that America’s economic success derives from having had a government that stayed out of the way, then gridlock and vetocracy are just fine with you. But if you have a proper understanding of American history — so you know that government played a vital role in generating growth by maintaining the rule of law, promulgating regulations that incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness, educating the work force, building infrastructure and funding scientific research — then a vetocracy becomes a very dangerous thing.
If there’s anything that defines the current political moment, it’s the fact that—of the two major parties—one has completely abandoned the American consensus that Friedman describes. In the mythology of the Republican Party, government has never played a part in the country’s growth or prosperity—the “free market” alone is responsible for the nation’s current prosperity. Not only does this run counter to the historical record—to say nothing of observable reality—but it has resulted in a world where one party refuses to accept a role for government in anything.
As Friedman (obliquely) points out, this is a recipe for disaster. The institutions of the United States aren’t built for one-party rule, and we can’t make progress on pressing issues—climate change, health care, aging infrastructure—without a mutual understanding between the two parties. Republicans don’t have to abandon their preference for small government or their skepticism for federal programs, but effective action requires the GOP to back away from its opposition to the public sector, and reconsider the role of government in solving the nation’s problems.
Between Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the Republican Party is committed to a radical attack on the size and role of government. The Romney economic plan, which draws its ideas from Paul Ryan’s budget, would eliminate most non-defense discretionary spending, and funnel the savings to tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Vital government functions like environmental regulation, scientific research, and poverty reduction would be sacrificed on the altar of small government. This isn’t a sustainable state of affairs. A world where government completely withdraws from the lives of ordinary Americans is one where we all but commit to a path of decline and disrepair.
If there’s anything that this country needs right now, it’s a responsible and functional Republican Party. I won’t hold my breath.
BY: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April23, 2012
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