By Charles P. Pierce
The only reason that the zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan gets to present his own federal budget, as though he were the shadow president and not a guy elected by roughly 180,000 people in and around Janesville, Wisconsin, is that he managed early on to convince people that he was not your run-of-the-mill zombie-eyed, granny-starving, trickle-down Randian snake-oil salesman of the kind that have been running Republican economic policy since half-past Ronald Reagan's lucidity. No, indeed. Ryan was a Serious Man Of Public Policy, interested only in disinterested pursuit of answers to the country's pressing economic needs. You might disagree with him, we were told, but you can't dispute the fact that the man knows his stuff. Even liberal wonks found themselves charmed by Ryan's charts and graphs, all of which, remarkably, came to the same conclusions that a generation of conservative fiscal cranks had been proposing for 30 years. Shift the country's wealth upward and soak the poor and the middle class. Create a functional oligarchy in the national economy and lay in sufficient budgetary traps and snares that the oligarchy you have created is unassailable in the future.
Nonetheless, the ways of the Village are what they are, so Paul Ryan got to bring forth his own budget on Tuesday, and its fiscal bullying is matched only by its towering political cowardice. Ryan is forever meeping about making the "tough choices" necessary to get our economic house back in order, but faced with actual tough political choices, he and his pet budget duck every single one of them. He's still a zombie-eyed granny-starver, but he pushes all the actual zombie-eyed granny-starving down the road a decade, so as not to anger the various grannies in the First Congressional District of Wisconsin. (Ezra Klein seems to find this alarming, although I don't know why, since at least there will be less granny-starving in the short term.) And Ryan and the other Republicans are breaking all kinds of rock trying to defang the automatic defense cuts in the Budget Conrol Act of last summer. Republicans rushing to protect the defense budget — there's change we can believe in.
The fact that this budget is shot through with political chickenshit is relevant because this is primarily a political document, a campaign blueprint for the Republicans this fall. (It's also an attempt to establish bargaining position in the upcoming budgetary brawl with the White House. Whether that succeeds, of course, is completely dependent on whether the White House takes any part of this bag of horrors seriously enough as an actual budget to negotiate on it.) As a plan for governing, it's yet another blueprint for economic dystopia from a man who either doesn't know, or doesn't care, what life is actually like for the people who don't buy him $4000 bottles of wine in restaurants far from the Time Out Pub in Janesville. It's a supply-sider's wet dream, in technicolor, with Jenna Jameson serving you popcorn at intermission. Food stamps and Medicaid — which loses $770 billion anyway, according to Ryan's plan — get handed back to the states in the form of block grants which, if our experience with stimulus money and the tobacco settlement are any indication, the states will then use to fund those things that get their governors re-elected, and you may have noticed that healthy poor people are rarely one of those things. There's what amounts to be a flat-tax: two basic income-tax rates, the top being 25 percent. Also the corporate tax rate gets cut to 20 percent. Because he has to pretend that he's visiting this radical restructuring of the American economy on us because of his great concern over The Deficit — and we'll get to that particular canard in a moment — Ryan proposes to close "loopholes", which means that the upper one percent loses some boutoniere money while you lose your mortgage interest deduction, but you and Steve Forbes will be paying the same flat rate, so it's all good!
