Paul Ryan’s path to nowhere

By Matt Miller, Published: March 21

“Why don’t you balance the budget at 24 percent [of GDP] instead of 19 percent?” I asked.

“I think it would do damage to the economy,” Rep. Paul Ryan replied.

This simple exchange from a conversation I had with Ryan in his office last October captures the uber-debate the country needs to have. That is, once we get done dissecting the deceptions, hypocrisies and regressive priorities in the Wisconsin Republican’s latest blueprint.

For starters, Ryan’s assumption that higher levels of spending and taxation would automatically hurt the economy can’t be right. If it were, America would be a poorer country today than it was a hundred years ago, when the federal government taxed and spent less than 5 percent of gross domestic product. But we’re obviously vastly wealthier. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a limit beyond which higher taxes and spending would hurt. Just that we’re not close to that point. How can we be, when President Reagan ran government at 22 percent of GDP?

Federal spending has gone from recent norms of about 20 percent of GDP to 24 percent under President Obama, thanks to the lagging economy and spending on things like the stimulus and unemployment insurance. Ryan wants to get it back to 20 percent in the next few years and return taxes to their more recent norms of 19 percent, up from today’s recession-depleted 15 percent. (The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center said Tuesday that Ryan’s proposals would in fact fall dramatically short of 19 percent, but leave that aside for the moment.)

At first blush, Ryan’s plan sounds perfectly reasonable — until you remember that we’re about to retire 76 million baby boomers.

“I think the historic size [of government as a share of GDP] is about right, or smaller,” Ryan told me that day.

“But how can that be,” I asked, “when we’re doubling the number of seniors” on Social Security and Medicare, the biggest federal programs.

“Because we can’t keep doing everything for everybody in this country,” he said. “We should trim down a lot of other stuff we’re doing.”

This was unintentionally revealing. Ryan has sounded this theme before. “We are at a moment,” Ryan said in his State of the Union response in 2011, “where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged . . . we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.”

But what hammock is Ryan talking about? The only thing slated to grow the size of government in the years ahead is the retirement of the baby boomers. The doubling of the number of people eligible for Social Security and Medicare is what is driving all the increase in federal spending — along with the spiral in system-wide health costs, which afflicts Medicare along with all privately financed health care.

If those programs for seniors haven’t been a “hammock” until now, simply doubling the number of people eligible for them can’t turn them into a “hammock” tomorrow. When it comes to fiscal policy, we have an aging population challenge, and a health-cost challenge. We don’t have a “hammock” challenge.

The upshot? Ryan wants to use an aging America and the bogus but superficially appealing constraint of “historic levels of spending and taxation” to force massive reductions in the rest of government. That’s why the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and others Tuesday were already calculating that Ryan’s new plan would basically zero out everything in government a few decades from now, save for Social Security, Medicare and defense.

The crucial thing to understand about Ryan is that he is not a fiscal conservative. He’s a small-government conservative. These are very different things. The fastest-growing federal program in Ryan’s new budget is interest on the debt, which nearly triples from $234 billion next year to $614 billion in 2022. He doesn’t even pretend to balance the budget until 2040, and then only under utterly dubious assumptions.

These are not the choices a fiscal conservative makes. A fiscal conservative pays for the government he wants. Ryan wants government smaller than the one Reagan led even as America ages, and he doesn’t want to pay for it. Instead he adds trillions in new debt and makes no bones about it.

“Why would you choose to have debt, as opposed to saying we’re going to pay our own way now” via higher taxes, I asked Ryan back in October. This even after spending cuts that most Republicans think won’t command public support. “Why is that a conservative value?”

“Because of growth,” he said. “What I don’t want to do is sacrifice an entire generation to having less than optimal potential growth because their parents didn’t fix this problem.”

Huh? A cynic would say Ryan would do anything to avoid acknowledging the need for higher taxes as the boomers age. The conservative darling just won’t go there. The less charitable assumption is that the congressman is confused.

There’s more to say on Ryan’s blueprint, and, in spite of my general hostility to his thinking, he deserves credit for putting his party’s head in the noose by calling (rightly, if imperfectly) for Medicare reform. But the first order of business is to expose Ryan’s overall plan for the misguided, misleading and unacceptable vision it represents.

The Divine Miss M

Do you think it’s a coincidence that ever since the world’s physicists announced that they had discovered a possible breakthrough in the study of mass and energy last week, our politics has taken on a kind of black-hole quality?

First, Bain Capital. Let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1999, Mitt Romney quit his hypersuccessful financial career at the private-equity firm in order to run the troubled Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. “I would walk away from my leadership at Bain Capital at the height of its profitability and take a position without compensation,” he wrote in his book “Turnaround.”

He was out, gone — walked away. Get it? It is very important that you do because given the hysteria with which the Romney campaign is defending this 1999 termination marker, you would think that in the next few years Bain had embarked on a new and lucrative path involving the slave labor of My Little Ponies.

Romney gave five network television interviews on the subject on Friday. While it was true that a bunch of Securities and Exchange Commission filings submitted into the new millennium described Romney as Bain Capital’s boss, that was a technicality, he told CNN.

Well, actually, he said, “I was the owner of an entity that is filing that information.” Also that there’s a difference between an owner and “a person who’s running an entity.”

It was Romney’s Star Trek moment. They were always talking about entities on Star Trek, and entities were very seldom good news.

By the time Mitt had cleared the interview decks, he was sounding more earthbound and demanding that President Obama apologize for an aide who said that Romney had either lied or committed a felony. I believe I speak for all Americans when I say that it would be nice if presidential campaigns avoided the use of the word “felony” except perhaps when discussing the occasional member of Congress.

But let’s get back to that entity. In the period between 1999 and 2002, Bain Capital engaged in a certain amount of activity along the steel-mill-closing, toymaker-killing, job-exporting lines. But Romney says he wasn’t responsible because he had walked away. The figure skaters and curling teams needed him. He and Bain were finito.

Sort of. While he was in Utah getting the luge runs in shape, Romney was also still getting a six-figure salary for being a Bain “executive.” Perhaps for Mitt, that was just the going-away equivalent of a monogrammed briefcase. Although it does sort of take the steam out of his principled refusal to accept any money from the Olympics until his turnaround was successfully completed.

So to summarize: Romney was at Bain after 1999, but not necessarily in the sense of occupying physical space. He was employed by folks in Utah, but not in the sense of the people who made out his paycheck.

If we ever manage to really get our heads around Higgs boson, perhaps we will also be able to understand the Mitt Romney Olympics period.

The Democrats suggested all this could be cleared up if Romney would release his back tax returns. There are actually very few things in the universe that the Democrats do not think would be made better if Romney released his tax returns.

This has not been a great stretch for Mitt. Pictures from his family vacation made him look dorky and rich. A woman recently asked the House speaker, John Boehner, how he was going to “make me love Mitt Romney,” and Boehner basically told her that it was impossible.

This was at a fund-raiser in West Virginia. Boehner said that come November, his side would be going to the polls to get rid of Barack Obama, and that the only ones marching off to vote Republican because they actually liked the idea of making Mitt Romney president would be his co-religionists and folks who have been invited to his house for dinner. (“Mitt Romney has some friends, relatives and fellow Mormons ... some people that are going to vote for him. But that’s not what this election is about.”)

Barack Obama is anti-matter. That’s what this election is all about.

Returning to Washington, Boehner triumphantly led the House through its 33rd symbolic vote to eliminate the Obama health care program. According to an estimate by CBS News, the House has spent 80 hours on this effort. As a result, the Republican leadership probably won’t have time to deal with a bipartisan Senate bill to fix the financial problems at the U.S. Postal Service, which is overwhelmed with debt obligations, many of them because of unnecessary and intrusive Congressional regulations.

The Republicans currently have a symbolic legislative agenda and a presidential candidate who can be in two places at one time, but whom nobody likes.