I spent nearly all of my youth in the state of Wisconsin, so to a certain extent it is where my “formative” years occurred, and where my “nature” and cultural “learnings” developed. But it took a bit longer for me to fully absorb the ramifications of my experiences to coalesce into a political ideology. Although my family supported Republicans since I can remember, the trajectory of my life couldn’t have been more unfavorable to such complacency, and it seemed fated that I would follow a different path politically even before I was born. For me to follow the “party” line would have been a concept as incompatible as oil and water.
Wisconsin doesn’t have a reputation as being “conservative,” but like many states above the Mason-Dixon Line, its politics can’t be pigeon-holed. This was a state that produced one of the most influential progressives in the nation’s history, “Fighting Bob” La Follette—and one of the most despised politicians in the nation’s history, Joseph McCarthy. One man felt a life-long obligation of decency toward his fellow humans—and the other had “no sense of decency” at all.
Thus when I heard that Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin had been selected by Mitt Romney for the vice presidential slot, I felt no obligation to feel “pride” in the matter. Ryan, who personifies Tea Party extremism, represents hypocrisy on so many levels that it is no wonder Romney feels a kinship with him. Romney comes across as such a fraud personally—like a patronizing patrician trying to convince the plebes that he “understands” their problems—that next to him, Ryan seems to be someone whose “charm” can better get across his “message” of civil self-destruction. As the presidential election draws nearer, we’ll talk more about Romney (ever notice those “I am a Mormon” ads on the side of Metro buses? Is it just “coincidence” to portray Mormons as “normal” people when Romney’s presidential aspirations became serious?), but for now we’ll take a look at this VP wannabe.
To begin with, it is not hard to fathom why Romney picked him. We may presume he wanted to shore-up the support of the Republican extreme right, but that is only part of the equation. It has been reported that Ryan has $5.4 million in his congressional campaign pot—far more than any other House member; state law allows Ryan to run for both Congress and on the presidential ticket, and he may do both. As we saw in the recent Scott Walker recall election, Wisconsin Republicans tend to receive most of their campaign cash from corporate elites, and right-wing PACs funded by corporate elites, from outside the state. Since Ryan has been a magnet for big money donors like the Koch brothers, Romney apparently expects that Ryan’s billionaire backers will pour money into his own campaign—making this the first example of how the Supreme Court’s irresponsible Citizen’s United decision is showing how presidential elections can be taken out of the hands of the people and be “bought.”
The only chance to effectively counter the Ryan factor is to repeatedly hammer home the realities and inconsistencies of his extreme views, which promise to help only the wealthy few and cause pain to the vast majority of Americans. It is hard not to imagine that many independents who were leaning toward Romney because of his alleged “moderation” will be alienated by Ryan—if people are allowed to hear the truth about him, and a cowardly media chooses to disseminate it. Ryan may come off on television all coifed and rational, but behind all the budget and deficit talking points, what we see is a man—like Romney—who has no real understanding of the problems of ordinary people, and in the case of his position on Social Security, shows us how the right always waits until they have theirs before telling you can’t have yours.
Ryan is your typical modern-day Republican, in that he is one of those “I’ll take mine, and screw the rest of you.” Ryan is, of course, a “disciple” of Ayn Rand, whose essential philosophy can be boiled down to eugenics, xenophobia and personal greed that is more important than the maintenance of civil society (like Ryan, whose college education was paid for by Social Security benefits after his father died, Rand applied for and received the Social Security and Medicare she had railed against for decades—something her adherents would rather not know). Ryan himself has never been employed for longer than a few months in what most of us would recognize as a real “job”—in fact he has “worked” most of his life as a promoter of right-wing ideological causes, either in or on the fringes of government.
Ryan went from comfortably well-off to rich in a very short time, and he did it the no-work way, like Romney—who, it was recently revealed, received the initial capitalization for his Bain Capital venture in part from El Salvadoran expatriates he visited in Florida, who were members of or connected to the country’s propertied elites who helped organize the right-wing murder gangs led by Roberto “Blowtorch Bob” D'Aubuisson, who freely admitted that his aim was to kill as many people as necessary to persuade the masses not to rebel against the oppression they were experiencing. According to the Los Angeles Times, Ryan has “reported investment income that, along with a distribution from the inheritance, supplemented his $174,000 congressional salary – somewhere between $168,000 and $1.2 million.” Members of Congress are only required to report their wealth in “ranges,” but why report such a high end if in fact his income was closer to the high end than the low end?
Ryan’s 2011 state taxes indicates a taxable income of a little over $180,000—slightly more than his congressional pay; that leaves unexplained why, if his actual income was much higher than that, so much of it was beyond taxation? Ryan’s total assets, meanwhile, are as high as $8 million, the majority inherited by his wife—further indicating something less than “earned” wealth. Some of his “earning” included up to $223,000 in investment income, most of which came from leasing land and mineral rights to energy firms. Whether he was involved in sweetheart deals that his billionaire right-wing friends let him in on is something that can only be surmised, since like Romney, Ryan has been tight-lipped about his financials, no doubt for good reason.
In regard to his policy-pushing as a congressman, Ryan was one of the irresponsible proponents of repealing the Glass–Steagall Act, which predictably had the disastrous consequences on the banking industry that we have seen; perhaps not surprisingly, the deficit “conscious” Ryan voted for TARP funding to cover this mistake. While many people consider George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts irresponsible, Ryan not only thought the cuts should be steeper, but thought that the cuts should have been even more focused on the rich. He supported the Medicare D program, paid for entirely by deficit spending. In 2005, he proposed that Social Security should be replaced by “private accounts” paid for by a significant portion not out of Social Security taxes, but from income taxes. It is not hard to understand why even Bush and his indifference to deficits would consider the Ryan plan “irresponsible.”
In 2009, Ryan unleashed the first version of his “road map” to a budget “plan”: The top tax rate to be reduced to 25 percent, and a “value-added” tax of 8.5 percent would be instituted—a baldly regressive tax system that would have the effect of reducing consumption and hampering economic growth. While the rich who most benefitted from the tax cut were unlikely to increase their own consumption, the middle and lower-income consumers would have less disposable income under the Ryan “plan,” and would thus purchase less. Ryan’s plan also called for freezing discretionary spending, of which the largest component is military spending; this is not technically immoral, since it is the military budget and “war on terror” than has been the biggest miscreant in the ballooning federal deficit since 2001. But given the Republicans nationalistic chest-thumping, the real losers would be education, health care, housing and the like. Ryan also advocated for “vouchers” to pay for health insurance for the elderly in place of Medicare; the problem—well known to us with “mini” medical plans—that they would in no way be sufficient to pay for the kind of coverage needed. In regard to Social Security, Ryan was (and is) still pushing a version of his 2005 plan, just not so loudly that you can hear it.
Ryan’s recent “modified” deficit-reduction plan is even more irresponsible on taxes: Besides further reductions in income taxes on the rich, he proposes eliminating taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest. The tax-cutting insanity would not stop there; Ryan would obliterate the corporate income tax, estate tax, and alternative minimum tax.
Many critics have pointed out that Ryan’s “plan” has more holes in it than a buckshot-ridden barn door. Paul Krugman of the New York Times—who actually has a PhD in economics—denounced this “plan” as more likely to increase, rather than decrease the deficit. Besides its regressive consumption tax features that would in fact be a tax increase on 95 percent of the population, because Ryan’s proposed tax cuts for the wealthy are so ginormous, revenues would decrease $4 trillion in the next decade—and generate a deficit of $1.3 trillion by 2020.
Ryan’s grand endgame is that discretionary spending will be reduced to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050 from12 percent today. This is only achievable by following Rand’s dictum of opposition to “ethical altruism,” which is not only unchristian, but since it requires the elimination of support for education, health care or anything else considered supporting the “unworthy”--meaning anyone who isn't rich--it would have the effect of turning this country into little more than the Third World totalitarian, government-controlled dictatorship that Rand allegedly railed against. Except this would be a dictatorship whose figurehead “leader” is controlled by corporate types like the malevolent Koch brothers, who see the world as divided between the privileged few and virtual slave laborers—like the society predicted by Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The problem with this “philosophy” is that Ryans and Rands of the world keep forgetting that no one can become “rich” all by themselves—even the “unworthy” have to be paid enough to actually buy the goods and services they peddle.
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