[Vision2020] Paul Ryan’s Budget Games

[Art Deco]

*The New Yorker*

 August 12, 2012
Paul Ryan’s Budget Games
Posted by James
Surowiecki<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/james_surowiecki/search?contributorName=James%20Surowiecki>

[image: 120409_r22039_p233.jpg]

In theory, Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate has the
potential to turn this Presidential campaign into a substantive ideological
debate over the proper role and size of government in the United States.
And the general reaction from the media has been that this is, in fact,
what Ryan’s selection will mean—as the New York *Times *put it in a banner
front-page headline today, by putting Ryan on the ticket, Romney is
“pushing fiscal issues to the forefront.” But if that kind of clarifying,
substantive debate is in fact to materialize, Ryan (and Romney) will need
to be a lot more explicit, and a lot more honest, about what their budget
proposals would actually do to the U.S. government.

That may sound a bit strange, since so many stories about Ryan emphasize
how serious and wonky he is, and insist that, unlike most politicians, he’s
actually willing to talk in detail about the policies he’s advocating. Yet
the reality of Ryan’s approach is actually very different. His tax plan,
for instance, calls for trillions of dollars in tax cuts (heavily weighted,
of course, toward high-income earners), but also claims to be
revenue-neutral, since Ryan says that the tax cuts will be offset by
eliminating loopholes and tax subsidies. But when it comes to detailing
exactly what loopholes and subsidies he wants to get rid of, Ryan clams
up—just as Romney has done with his tax plan. This is politically astute,
since eliminating the tax benefits that have a substantive budget impact
would mean eliminating things voters love, like the mortgage-tax deduction.
But it’s a far cry from being honest and tough-minded.

Similarly, while Ryan has been reasonably upfront about his plans for
Social Security (which he wants to privatize) and Medicare (which he wants
to turn into a defined-contribution, rather than a defined-benefit, plan),
he has been both substantively and rhetorically obfuscatory when it comes
to the way his budget cuts would, over time, radically shrink the federal
government, and effectively make it impossible for the government to do
most of what it does today. As the Congressional Budget Office analysis of
Ryan’s budget makes clear, Ryan’s plan would mean that by 2050, all of the
government’s discretionary spending (including the defense budget) would
account for less than four per cent of G.D.P. Since defense spending in the
postwar era has never been less than three per cent of G.D.P., and since
Romney has said during the campaign that he doesn’t want defense spending
to be below four per cent of G.D.P., this means that the only way for
Ryan’s numbers to work would be to effectively eliminate nearly all
non-defense discretionary spending, including not just much of the social
safety net but infrastructure spending, R. & D. investment, federal support
for education, air-traffic control, regulatory and public safety spending,
and so on. This would be, needless to say, a radical remaking of the
federal government. Indeed, as I wrote in a
column<http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2012/04/09/120409ta_talk_surowiecki>earlier
this year, with the exception of support for health care and
retirement, it would basically return the federal government to something
like its nineteenth-century role—and early nineteenth-century at that.

Good luck getting Ryan (let alone Romney) to admit this to you. While Ryan
is good at talking about the need to shrink government spending, he’s
actually not forthright about what this would actually mean to voters.
While he goes into more detail about his short-term spending cuts (which
would be targeted largely at areas like aid to the working poor, education,
and so on) than about the tax loopholes he would supposedly close, he
refrains from explaining how, exactly, the government would function if
discretionary spending were just 0.75 per cent of G.D.P. Indeed, when Ryan
Lizza interviewed him for this
magazine<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza>,
Ryan said, “We think government should do what it does really well, but
that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like
infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.” But his own budget
proposal would, in practice, make it impossible for the government to
invest in and maintain infrastructure, highways, and airports. That kind of
rhetorical two-step is par for the course for Ryan—he says he wants a
“full-throated defense” of the Republican agenda, but he’s adept at
disguising the radicalness of his proposals, as when he describes his
proposed cuts to things like Medicaid as “strengthening the social safety
net.”

Ryan has been able to pull off this bait-and-switch game, and win the
hearts of many Washington pundits, because his earnest, wonky manner makes
it seem as if he’s a hard-nosed pragmatist who’s just listening to what the
numbers tell him. (In *Slate* yesterday, Will Saletan, in a
column<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/08/paul_ryan_for_vice_president_he_s_the_fiscal_conservative_a_republican_should_be_.html>extolling
Romney’s choice, wrote that while he would be voting for Obama
this time around, he could easily imagine voting for Ryan in 2016, which is
an utterly incoherent position, something like voting for John F. Kennedy
in 1960 and Barry Goldwater in 1964.) But Ryan is not a pragmatist; he is
an ideologue. His budget proposals are driven not by the demands of
America’s current fiscal situation, but rather by deeply held convictions
about the need to limit government power. There’s absolutely nothing wrong
with this—if you believe that “big” government destroys personal initiative
and strangles the economy, and that the current tax system is morally
offensive and economically destructive, then you need to not just tinker
with the system, but to remake it. What’s wrong is that, so far, Ryan
hasn’t been honest about the fact that this is what he wants to do—probably
because most voters, including most Republicans, don’t actually want to
dramatically shrink the government. Perhaps this campaign will change that.
But I’m not holding my breath.

*For more on Romney, Ryan, and the rest of the campaign, bookmark The
Political Scene <http://www.newyorker.com/politics>, our hub for coverage
of the 2012 election.*

*Illustration by Christoph Niemann*

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Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
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