Monday Smackdown: Ezra Klein Smacks Down Paul Ryan as a Grifter, and Himself for a Griftee...
Very welcome to see: Remember: Fool me once, shame on you; fool my twice, shame on me: Ezra Klein: Speaker Paul Ryan Retires: His Legacy Is Debt and Disappointment: "Ryan says that debt reduction is one of those things 'I wish we could have gotten done'. Ryan, the man with the single most power over the federal budget in recent years, sounds like a bystander.... To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the 'most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country'. Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than 'the end of the American dream'. Ryan’s reputation was built on the back of his budgets: draconian documents that gutted social spending, privatized Medicare, and showed the Republican Party had embraced the kinds of hard fiscal choices that Bush had sloughed off. And Ryan presented himself as the wonkish apostle of this new GOP...
...For this, Ryan was feted in Washington society; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget gave him a “Fiscy” award for budget bravery; he was a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission (which he ultimately voted against); he became Mitt Romney’s vice presidential candidate. His reputation was so towering that when John Boehner stepped down as speaker, he told Ryan, “You’ve got to do this job.” I was among the reporters who took Ryan’s reboot seriously. “To move us to surpluses,” I wrote of his 2010 proposal:
Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs....
I didn’t agree with Ryan’s policies, but at least he was making the trade-offs of his vision clear. Here was a Republican who said what he was going to do, who admitted his health care plan included “rationing,” who offered something specific to argue with. That was progress. But to critics like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, Ryan was an obvious con man weaponizing the deficit to hamstring Obama’s presidency, weaken the recovery, and snooker Beltway centrists eager to champion a reasonable-seeming Republican. Ryan, after all, had voted for Bush’s deficits — he was a yes on the tax cuts, on the wars, on Medicare Part D. He proposed a Social Security privatization scheme so pricey that even the Bush administration dismissed it as “irresponsible.” And his budgets, for all the hard choices, didn’t actually add up. They included massive tax cuts with underestimated costs and unspecified financing—which is what led Krugman to call him a charlatan back in 2010. Ryan waved this away as nitpicking.... But his critics predicted he would lose his appetite for hard choices the moment his party returned to power.... The numbers proved them right. Ryan was elected speaker of the House on October 29, 2015. Over the next three years, annual deficits increased by almost 80 percent. The added debt is Ryan’s legacy, not his circumstance. It is entirely attributable to policy choices he made....
As speaker, Ryan had tremendous power. He could have, for instance, brought immigration compromises to the floor of the House but enforced congressional PayGo rules to bar any bills that increased the deficit from coming to a vote. Instead, he refused to bring immigration compromises to the floor while personally shepherding bills that betrayed the ideas that won him power. We are the choices we make—and Ryan made his. To be clear, I am not particularly concerned about deficits right now.... But I took Ryan seriously when he said he was. I covered the arguments Ryan made, the policies he crafted, and I treated them as if they offered a guide to how Republicans would govern. I listened when Ryan said things like, “In Europe, generations of welfare-dependent citizens are hurling Molotov cocktails because their governments can no longer fund their entitlement programs. We can’t let that happen here.”...
Now, as Ryan prepares to leave Congress, it is clear that his critics were correct and a credulous Washington press corps—including me—that took him at his word was wrong.... Ryan proved as much a practitioner of post-truth politics as Donald Trump.... Three bills in particular.... The 2017 tax cut Ryan passed but didn’t pay for.... The spending Ryan passed but didn’t pay for.... The expansion of the earned income tax credit Ryan proposed but never even tried to pass.... Ryan proved himself and his party to be exactly what the critics said: monomaniacally focused on taking health insurance from the poor, cutting taxes for the rich, and spending more on the Pentagon. And he proved that Republicans were willing to betray their promises and, in their embrace of Trump, violate basic decency to achieve those goals....
Sooner or later, Trump’s presidency will end, and there will come a new generation of Republicans who want to separate themselves from the embarrassments of their party’s record. As Ryan did, they will present themselves as appalled by both their party’s past and the Democrats’ present, and they will promise to lead into a more responsible future. The first question they will face, and the hardest one to answer, will be: Why should anyone believe they’re not just another Paul Ryan?...
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