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Paul Ryan and The Rich Man's Burden

by Michael Maiello 8/11/2012 - 9:32 pm

Based on work I'd done earlier, I was able to put together a column about Paul Ryan for Reuters.  It just went up.  I guess Dagblogging has trained me to write quickly!

Read the full article at http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/08/12/paul-ryan-and-the-rich-man%E2%80%99s-burden/

Nice piece, Destor. Congrats again on the reuters gig.

by Michael Wolraich 8/12/2012 - 12:24 am

Well this quote from your article, a quote from his "Roadmap for America's Demise"

Americans have been lured into viewing government – more than themselves, their families, their communities, their faith – as their main source of support; they have been drawn toward depending on the public sector for growing shares of their material and personal well-being.  The trend drains individual initiative and personal responsibility. It creates an aversion to risk, sapping the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for growth, innovation, and prosperity. In turn, it subtly and gradually suffocates the creative potential for prosperity.

That's pretty rich for a guy who benefited from social security benefits, Pell grants and Stafford loans to get his college education.  He doesn't seem so suffocated, oh I guess he is immune since he thinks for himself and passes out Atlas Shrugged to all his poor uneducated staffers. #smh

by tmccarthy0 8/12/2012 - 1:07 am

tmac, It's understood that the Obama campaign surely has a plethora of things now to put in ads, but I fervently hope that they do a pointed one about how Ryan's college tuition was funded.  It's something both the students and their parents need to be made aware of since he's not touting doing away or at least reducing both funding and access to these types of educational tools.

by Aunt Sam 8/12/2012 - 2:08 am (re: tmccarthy0)

Auntie, I am under the impression that this issue will be used to expose  Paul Ryan's ideas which are highly weighted towards supporting people who have tons of money and weighted against regular people. Mr. Ryan seems under the impression that those benefits were good for him but bad for everyone else. This will be made very clear to voters, especially women, during this election. And he is touting eliminating Pell Grants over time, which as you know are for the poorest of the poor students, he is the typical Rand believer, he believes in a libertarian Utopia, which as I've stated previously is a vapid ideology grounded in the old fashioned, long disproved, social Darwinism, which amounts to nothing more than bullshit. Because as we all know Rand herself used Medicare and social services before she died. These pull yourself up by your jockstrap set never actually do  that do they, they always us to pull them up and then make the claims that no one should have those services because they don't work. Riggghhhhttt! Like I keep saying this is the LOLz 2012 campaign. It's going to be great.

by tmccarthy0 8/12/2012 - 10:39 am (re: Aunt Sam)

Your take is one of the more original ones I've seen today.  Good job.

by anna am 8/12/2012 - 1:48 am

I think the nut of all's ideology is your statement:

We all share in those programs, but we don’t all share in them equally.

All of us are either victims or beneficiaries of our own base environment and usually tend to base our views and judgments on what's relevant/important to our needs.  i.e., 'until we walk a mile on another's path, we cannot understand their journey, much less seek their same distination'. 

I don't think either Romney or Ryan can relate to the needs of the vast majority who do not share in the largesse of their personal environment, having never lived in a different socio-economic environment. 

They don't need the 'social' programs such as healthcare (medicare), social security, food stamps, unemployment, etc.  They may relate to needing good roads and sound transportation modes of travel, but only because they have to utilize them too. 

Good article, appreciate.

by Aunt Sam 8/12/2012 - 2:55 am

Congratulations, Destor. Really fine piece. I see, that in contrast to Ryan, you have practiced some deep thinking.

Conceptually very strong and a foundational piece on the inner Ryan. Most original piece I've seen on him.

 

by Oxy Mora 8/12/2012 - 6:18 am

Well done. The Romney/Ryan tax plan would also reduce Mitt's tax rate to 0.82%, the Atlantic:

.......Add it all up, and Romney would have paid $177,650 out of a taxable income of $21,661,344, for a cool effective rate of 0.82 percent.

 
But what about corporate taxes? Aren't they a double tax on savings and investment, so Romney's "real" rate is higher than his headline rate? No. As Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, Romney has structured his investments as "pass-throughs" that avoid corporate tax. In other words, the 0.82 percent tax rate is really a 0.82 percent tax rate.
 
Tax calculations always ignore Social Security taxes, which are spent immediately as general revenue, with an IOU sent to that drawer in W. Va, which GWB and Ryan say are worthless paper,  'just IOU's.
 
If you add in SS and Medicare tax, ignoring lopsided unprogressive sales taxes, low and middle income Americans pay over twice the taxes, as a percentage of their income, then Mitt Romney and the upper 1% or 5%  pay, even though many poor Americans pay no federal income tax at all. 
by NCD 8/12/2012 - 3:09 pm

True to what you wrote yesterday, I think, expressing admiration for the honesty with which Ryan advocates what he believes, you are engaging him in good faith and with respect on the level of ideas and not just specific programs, which is the easier, knee-jerk response.  

Democrats have long been criticized for being too attached to specific popular programs such as SS and Medicare, and not devoting enough attention to winning the battle of ideas by communicating, clearly and compellingly, why their approach is better for the country than that of their opponents.  I don't see it as either/or.  SS and Medicare have been trump cards and so using them to illustrate why their approach is better than those of the opposition is an enviable position to be in.  The more ideologically extreme the GOP has become, the more that looks like a winnable battle.  

It used to be the CW that the electorate was operationally liberal--they like the programs Democrats had created--despite being philosophically conservative (they like the "self-reliance" and "small" or "limited" government, and low tax, rhetoric in the abstract).  So Democrats have tended to talk about popular programs they'd protect while Republicans talked more abstractly about their philosophy.  

The meaning of the terms "liberal" and "conservative", and the nature of the perceived association between those terms and the two major parties, is not historically fixed, though.  What used to be the GOP's conservatism has become radicalism bordering on nihilism.  Democrats are in some ordinary meaning senses of the term the more philosophically conservative of the two major parties at this point.  Democrats may now actually have, or be able to generate this campaign season, a rhetorical advantage at the philosophical as well as the programmatic levels at this point in the evolution of the GOP.     

by AmericanDreamer 8/12/2012 - 3:39 pm

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