The Ryan Nomination, Part I: Deflating the Myth

I realize that I’m late to this party, but I wanted to spend a little time discussing the imminent nomination of Paul Ryan as Vice President. The main reason for this, apart from the writing process itself and the accompanying necessity of organizing one’s thoughts, is to argue that yet again the corporate media is too lazy to do its collective job. Instead, we get warmed-over platitudes first uttered over cocktails by a “source.” Actual analysis? Forget it. Facts? Are you kidding? Anyway, today’s piece is on Ryan as man and myth.

True, much of what I’m about to say has already been written or spoken by the independent press and/or left-leaning commentators, but the folks at the networks, the news magazines, and the major newspapers haven’t necessarily caught on. The standard mantra was, à la CBS, “Romney surprises with Ryan as VP nominee.” There are also literally dozens of variations on the theme of “Mitt Romney Goes Bold” (Boston Globe). Charlie Mahtesian of Politico parrots with apparent approbation Representative Ted Poe’s remark that “The vice presidential debate between Paul Ryan and Joe Biden will be like Einstein debating Forrest Gump.” (That would be Biden as Forrest Gump, a role he apparently usurped from the last GOP veep nominee.) Even the Daily Kos credit Ryan with “conviction and raw intelligence.” He’s a “deficit warrior” (The Hill). Romney even earned “Ethics Hero” status from the usually astute Jack Marshall for the Ryan selection “because it makes an unequivocal statement about the priorities in the election and the years ahead: close the deficit, reduce the debt, and take the United States off the road to Greece and inevitable insolvency.”

OK, I’m saying this once. BULLSHIT.

Anyone really surprised by selection of Ryan should be required to STFU until after the election. Plutocrats stick together. My money was on Ryan all along. Nor was this anything like a bold choice. Any other potential candidate—I mean among the legitimate contenders, not the Michelle Bachmann types—would have brought an equivalent though not identical package of assets and weaknesses. Yes, selecting Ryan foregrounds the economy as the central issue for the Romney/Ryan campaign, but where else were they going to look? The trajectory of the economy may be a whole lot better than it was when President Obama took office, but both unemployment and substantial deficit spending remain serious problems.

Remember, too, that the announcement followed closely on Governor Romney’s disastrous foreign tour in which he managed to piss off the English, the Palestinians, and a fair number of Israelis (he didn’t, however, alienate the Poles; an aide did that). And there’s not a lot to run against: there are some legitimate questions about Mr. Obama’s prosecution of the War Powers Act, but those aren’t likely to be raised by a Republican without sounding shrill and partisan. Beyond that, the Iraq War is winding down, there has been a steady and relatively uncontroversial (whether it should be so or not) policy with respect to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and—whether he deserves the credit or not—Mr. Obama oversaw the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Moreover, whereas the Bush administration did considerable chest-thumping about how there were no terrorist attacks on the United States (except, you know, that one) the Obama administration has no need of the qualifier: there have been no successful attacks, period. So, there’s not a lot of room for Mr. Romney—not a specialist in foreign policy—to mount a campaign in those terms. It’s much easier to complain about the deficits that no Republican cared a whit about while George W. Bush was in the White House.

Paul Ryan is a corrupt, prevaricating, hypocrite. He thinks rules are made for other people, and he smirks about his self-perceived superiority. In this way, of course, he is essentially indistinguishable from virtually any politician of either party, especially his own. But Ryan has a reputation: as an intellectual, a policy wonk, a deficit hawk. He is, of course, none of these things. He is, to use a term that has apparently been trotted out by Senator Chuck Schumer since I started working on this piece (Schumer wasn’t the first, of course), a fraud.

I’m not saying that Ryan is an idiot. He isn’t. He’s certainly got a lot more on the ball than Sarah Palin, and let’s be real: Joe Biden isn’t exactly a genius. Ryan is smart enough and amoral enough (he learned those Ayn Rand lessons well) to be scary. But he’s no intellectual giant, either, even if he has long been touted as such by the right-wing punditocracy. I was reading a blog piece the other day by Dan Bauer, the managing editor of the school newspaper at Allegheny College. In analyzing the methodology employed by Newsweek to determine its list of “most rigorous schools,” Bauer points out that the “rigor” in question amounts to a ratio of self-perceived workload to student aptitude. In other words, “The ranking isn’t saying that Allegheny is rigorous because it’s difficult; it’s rigorous because the Daily Beast thinks it’s too much for your low test scores to handle. In short, according to Newsweek, we’re nothing but whiners of average intelligence.”

Does that description sound like Paul Ryan to anyone but me? Did he go to Allegheny? (Actually, he went to Miami of Ohio, considerably larger than Allegheny, but very much like it in history, orientation, and—dare I say—academic rigor.) There is, in fact, nothing in Ryan record that suggests extraordinary intellect. Even the thoroughness with which he is routinely credited is an illusion, as I’ll discuss in a moment. For now, let’s just admit that if you spend your time surrounded by the likes of Jon Kyl and Louis Gohmert, the average guy on a barstool is going to look pretty smart by comparison. Hell, my money’s on the stool itself in a battle of wits against those guys.

Let’s face it: there are few really smart Republican elected officials. ‘Twas not always thus: in my youth there were Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, John Lindsay, Jacob Javits, Mark Hatfield, and James Buckley. Lamar Alexander, John Sununu and John McCain qualified before they, to quote the sage political guru Charles Barkley, “lost their damned minds.” I didn’t agree with those guys all the time (or, even often), but you knew you were dealing with a grownup with some savvy that extended beyond the merely political. Who’s left? Dick Lugar, who was defeated in a primary run this year. And… um… uh… Seriously, I have trouble naming another Republican currently in office (and Lugar is about to not be) whom I’d describe as both sane and intelligent. Maybe Marco Rubio? Chris Christie?

Importantly, Ryan’s budget, his signature piece of work, is deeply flawed. I’m not talking about its priorities, which I think are dead wrong (even Fox News admits it would result in a tax increase for the poor and a huge windfall for the rich), but which for the moment are beside the point. I’m not even talking about the fact that it doesn’t actually cut the deficit: Howard Gleckman of Forbes (Forbes!) writes that “CBO’s March, 2012 baseline projects a deficit in 2022 of about 1.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Ryan’s ‘Path to Prosperity,’ which became the framework for the House budget, brought the 2022 deficit down to exactly the same 1.2 percent.” (Note also that Ryan himself “hasn’t run the numbers” to predict when there might be a balanced budget.)

.

No, I’m really talking about the Ryan plan’s gaps, its assumptions, its unspecified new revenues totaling $5 trillion (!), its projections based on the wildest of speculation. I’m no economist, but I do know something about methodology, and to say that this document is grounded in fairy dust is probably to give it too much credit. Paul Krugman is an economist. Here’s his analysis: “None of this has any basis in reality; Ryan’s much-touted plan, far from being a real solution, relies crucially on stuff that is just pulled out of thin air — huge revenue increases from closing unspecified loopholes, huge spending cuts achieved in ways not mentioned.” In short, I suspect the famous cartoon by Sidney Harris (at left) may well have been drawn with the Paul Ryan budget in mind.

There’s the reduction of non-Social Security and non-Medicare spending as a percentage of GDP to a point below that of current military spending, which Ryan pledges to actually increase. There’s the projection of ridiculously low unemployment: 2.8%! For his numbers to work at all, in other words, Ryan must assume an unemployment rate lower than it’s been in half a century… lower, indeed, than the 3% “optimal” rate I learned about in Economics 1. But, hey, that wasn’t Ryan’s personal number: Rachel Maddow reported when the budget was first released that the unemployment projection came from the Heritage Foundation, the fun folks who projected enormous job growth as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Yeah, that worked out great. The projection, of course, suggests two fabulous if illusory advantages: more workers means more taxable income, fewer unemployed means fewer expenditures on unemployment compensation, welfare, etc. Maddow derisively but, alas, accurately, described the Ryan plan 18 months ago as “this magic Republican budget” founded on one essential principle: “belieeeeeeeeve.” She added that:

I doubt that actual numerically-based, fact-based information will penetrate the smoochie-smoochie love bubble surrounding Paul Ryan right now. He has done a remarkable job of romancing the Beltway media. There’s this little cult of him being brave and bold, and doing a very difficult workout every morning. But what Paul Ryan has just introduced is not a feature on “Grit vs. Glamor” in today’s GOP. It’s the official Republican Party Budget for 2012. And the numbers in it are so wrong they are occasionally funny. The Beltway media says Paul Ryan should be taken very seriously. Since this is the official Republican Party budget for 2012, taking him seriously should also include taking seriously his numbers, which in many cases make no sense.

I hate it when she’s right.

There’s another myth that Representative Ryan is, unlike the guy at the top of the ticket, consistent. That may be true, but not in the way the fawning Beltway types mean. He is indeed consistent: not in terms of real fiscal conservatism, balanced budgets and such, but in terms of advocating for the corporatocracy. It’s not just the Ryan budget that’s as phony as a three-dollar bill: it’s the pretense that he gives a damn about the deficit. He does not. A charitable description would be to say that he became a born-again deficit hawk on January 20, 2009. A more cynical one would be to suggest that his personal chance for advancement is predicated on the gimmick of debt control. This is the guy, remember, who voted for unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, voted for the prescription drug mandate, voted against allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. His proposal to privatize Social Security would have cost $2.4 trillion over ten years, and even the Bush administration called it “irresponsible.”

Ryan’s goal isn’t a balanced budget. His “holy grail,” as Gleckman describes it, is “low taxes and small government, not fiscal balance.” That is, of course, an intellectually honest position—one with which I disagree, but it’s honest—or, rather, it would be if Ryan believed in even that. He doesn’t. It’s not “small government” to increase military spending. (This is the guy, you may recall, Gentle Reader, who accused the military brass of lying when they agreed that their budget could be cut by a little less than half a trillion dollars over ten years.) It’s not “small government” to intrude into personal, legal, medical decisions, as he has often advocated. It’s not “small government” to increase taxes on those who can afford it least without concomitant increases on the more well-to-do.

Paul Ryan is, in short, neither a deficit hawk nor a libertarian. He is, as Nate Silver’s analysis points out, a partisan hack, plain and simple. He is, by Silver’s calculus, the single most ideological vice presidential nominee of either party since (at least) the beginning of the 20th century: he’s more conservative than Dick Cheney or Dan Quayle, far more conservative than the most left-leaning Democratic nominee, John Garner, was liberal. By contrast, Joe Biden is only the 11th most liberal candidate of the 18 Democrats on the list, and the 17th most ideological of the 31 candidates. (Not all candidates are listed for either party, by the way. My suspicion is that those listed served in the House or Senate, those not listed were governors, mayors, etc., but I’m not sure of that explanation.) The DW-Nominate scale puts Ryan well into the conservative wing, even relative to other Republicans: more conservative, in other words, than Louis Gohmert, Darrell Issa, and Eric Cantor, and in the same general ideological position as Michelle Bachmann.

Having a budget is an accomplishment. Having one that doesn’t make sense is not. Again, I’m not arguing its priorities; I’m arguing its math. If Paul Ryan were an academic, there’d be a word for him: sloppy. His positions are so abstracted by a presumed faith in unsupported (if not unsupportable) hypotheses that his conclusions are meaningless at best. He is the pseudo-scholar, the one who starts with a conclusion and searches frantically for supporting evidence. He’s the guy whose infomercial shows up on the cable stations at 2:00 a.m. (or perhaps on public television during pledge week). To say that he is all smoke and mirrors is to give him too much credit.

The choice of Paul Ryan as vice presidential candidate, in other words, is crass, cynical, and absolutely what we would expect from a supercilious jackass like Mitt Romney. The pretense of a solution is far worse than no solution at all, whether we’re talking about cyber-bullying or the ballooning national debt. Ryan may, however, be the best available Republican for the job. That tells you all you need to know about today’s GOP.

Next up (well, maybe not next, but soon): how the Ryan candidacy will affect the election. Hint: not much.

PolitiFact Earns Its Own "Pants on Fire"

There was a time not long ago that PolitiFact, the fact-checking project initiated by the St. Petersburg Times, was widely and universally acclaimed. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and might well have deserved it. But that was back in those halcyon days when politicians of both parties at least pretended to care about the truth.

Since then, three things have happened. I suspect they’re not unrelated, although teasing out the causal links is a little more than my feeble brain can handle, at least at present.

• 1. News sources have become increasingly polarized—not partisan, necessarily, but locked into a narrative that is seldom shaken even with facts. The corollary to this point is that an increasing number of Americans get their news from sources that make only token attempts at objectivity (cough… FoxNews… cough).

• 2. Largely because of the Tea Party—the largest ever assemblage of misinformed knuckle-draggers—the lunatic fringe of the Right has become mainstream in the GOP. This isn’t to say that the left is devoid of loonies, but they still tend to be thought of as outsiders. There is no liberal counterpart to Glenn Beck, to Michele Bachmann, to Louis Gohmert. Are there progressives that stupid and that crazy? Sure. But they don’t get the platforms of their right-wing brethren.

• 3. It’s become Amateur Hour at PolitiFact. Despite great bluster and pseudo-solemnity from the PF muckety-mucks, it is certainly true that they apply different standards to different claims. I talked about this phenomenon in June, wondering “when PolitiFact got into the implications business. They sometimes consider a statement based on its literal truth, sometimes (apparently) on what someone might think it implies. Sometimes they give a speaker the benefit of the doubt as to what s/he might have meant….”

In April, I somewhat presciently called attention to what I called a “particularly inept” analysis of claims that the Paul Ryan budget plan would “eliminate Medicare.”

Why “prescient,” you ask? Well, the incompetent, misleading, illogical pronouncement that Democratic claims about the Ryan plan merited a “Pants on Fire” rating (to be fair, the ads weren’t exactly above reproach) served as the foundation for declaring those Democratic assertions the “Lie of the Year” for 2011. I call Bullshit.

There are several parts to this story. Let’s start with the original analysis itself. PolitiFact “rulings” (yes, that’s their term for it—they take themselves, if not their work, very seriously) tend to be anonymous. This one is. The author, whoever he or she may be, grants that the Ryan plan would be “a huge change” and “a dramatic change of course,” and that “seniors would have to pay more for their health plans if it becomes law.” But s/he takes issue with the characterization of “ending” Medicare, calling it “a major exaggeration.” This is interesting terminology, by the way, because even if true this wouldn’t qualify for “Pants on Fire” status, let alone “Lie of the Year.”

The PF Pundit (let’s call him/her something non-gender specific, like “Moe,” which could be short for Maurice or Maureen, and has the advantage of identifying the writer as a Stooge… no offense to my friend Mo—no “e”—who is anything but stupid) sniffs that “Democrats, including Obama, have said the plan would end Medicare ‘as we know it,’ a critical qualifier. But the 30-second ad from the DCCC makes a sweeping claim without that important qualifier.” So we’re basing the decision for Lie of the Year not on an actual lie repeated ad nauseum (e.g., “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’”).

No, Moe—and Moe’s masters—decided that a single, arguably accurate, statement in a single web ad ought to be the centerpiece for our collective indignation. (Be it noted, other Democrats have echoed the claim, but nowhere near to the extent of all the “failed stimulus” crap that passes for objective analysis in the corporate media. And the original article takes issue only with a single web ad.) Let’s face it, if the concession that Democrats in general aren’t really making the “exaggerated” claim isn’t enough, then the fact that under the Ryan plan Medicare would pay for only 32% of seniors’ health-care costs by 2030 (and get worse from there) isn’t going to matter to ol’ Moe. By the way, the link I provided here isn’t to some commie pinko website; it’s to the official report of the Congressional Budget Office.

Moe then whinges that the DCCC ad in question “claims that participants would have to find $12,500 to pay for Medicare.” Two points. First, Moe, if you’re going to get all pissy about minor details of accuracy, you might notice that the ad says “health care,” not Medicare. The Dems are saying the GOP is ending Medicare, remember? Really, Moe, try to keep up. Secondly, the claim is absolutely, unequivocally, factually true. Nowhere in the ad is there any claim that seniors will have to spend $12,500 more. If I’m contemplating buying a new house and tell my friend that I’m worried about finding $1700 a month in mortgage payments, I shouldn’t have to footnote my remarks by saying that I’m already paying half of that. Moe’s argument is unadulterated bovine feces.

Ah, but Moe isn’t done: “Still another problem with the ad involves who’s immediately affected by the Republican proposal. In one scene, the ad shows a senior citizen pushing a walker behind a lawn mower. A teenager looking on eats an apple and says, ‘You missed a spot.’ In reality, people 55 and older won’t see changes under the Ryan plan.” Seriously, Moe? That’s what you’ve got? Perhaps, just perhaps, the scene in the ad is intended to take place in a (thank God) fictional future… when people a couple of years younger than I (my wife, for example) are trying to figure out how to stay alive because Paul Ryan won’t tax his fatcat friends at the rate they paid under the sainted Reagan. Indeed, the entire ad can be taken as representing a “what would happen if…” scenario. No one believes the spot represents a literal representation of the present. I understand, Moe, that you can’t comprehend that line of reasoning. It requires the barest sliver of imagination, a quality that you and your masters evidently lack. Sorry, hallucinations don’t count.

Finally, there’s the utterly ridiculous claim that when the Republicans voted to end Medicare (as we know it), they didn’t really vote to end Medicare because it was a non-binding resolution. Moe, you crack me up. Seriously, that one idiot pseudo-journalist can go through this many contortions to justify an utterly absurd conclusion is really amusing. Or at least it would be if your organization didn’t have a little residual credibility: enough so that someone somewhere might think you have the integrity of snake-oil salesmen and/or intellectual superiority to a watermelon. We get it, they didn’t end Medicare. But that little dog and pony show they staged sure as hell included a vote on “a budget” (your description, Moe, not mine), and they sure as hell did vote as pretty little lockstep drones to radically reduce medical coverage for people who have been paying taxes for years.

Had it been a “real vote,” and been shot down in the Senate or vetoed by a President who’s pretty inept but not that brain-meltingly stupid, the pragmatic effect would have been precisely the same. Not sure if that would have satisfied Moe, however. And this, of course, is only the first salvo in the Republicans’ attacks on everyone not rich enough, scared enough, or stupid enough to sign on to their greed- and paranoia-induced assault on every social program that doesn’t benefit primarily those who don’t need the help.

Fast forward a few months. PolitiFact, as usual, announces its “Lie of the Year” voting. For at least two years in a row, the site’s viewers and editors/staff selected the same contender. In 2009, it was “Death panels,” capturing an impressive 61% of the vote against some pretty good competition (the birthers, for example). Last year, the readers and editors alike selected “A government takeover of health care,” with 44% of the readers’ votes, again against some pretty good whoppers (my personal favorite, that “94 percent of small businesses will face higher taxes under the Democrats' plan”—the actual number is under 3%—came in fourth).

This year’s finalists, in addition to the eventual winner:

• “President Obama ‘went around the world and apologized for America.’”

• “The Obama administration's review of obsolete regulations was ‘unprecedented.’”

• “The vaccine to prevent HPV can cause mental retardation.”

• “Abortion services are ‘well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.’” [this absurd claim by Jon Kyl was the actual subject of my April piece, linked above; this one, by the way, got my vote]

• “Because of more restrictive voting laws, Republicans ‘want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.’”

• “Scientists are ‘questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. … (It is) more and more being put into question.’”

• “Congressional Republicans have introduced dozens of bills on social issues and other topics, but ‘zero on job creation.’”

• “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’” [You didn’t think I’d pulled that example I used earlier out of thin air, did you, Gentle Reader?]

• “I didn't raise taxes once.” (President Obama)

A decent enough list, although some are merely poor choices of phrasing, others are pretty much insignificant, and others are so preposterous that no rational person would believe them (which after all, is what keeps Michele Bachmann at least marginally amusing instead of terrifying).

Two things out of the ordinary happened when the finalists were announced. First, the leftie blogosphere lit up about the stupidity of including a “100% True” statement as a contender for “Lie of the Year.” CrooksandLiars’ Susie Madrak wrote, “Capping costs to beneficiaries, closing the traditional fee-for-service program, and forcing seniors to enroll in new private coverage, ends Medicare by eliminating everything that has defined the program for the last 46 years.” In other words, “ending Medicare” isn’t far off the mark. At the very least, it falls under the category of unexceptional political hyperbole which, for example, declares the current President a socialist.

Secondly, Paul Ryan started soliciting supporters to stuff the ballot box, as it were, encouraging them to “Help me fight the lies, falsehoods, and attacks of the Left by casting a vote to show the Democrat’s lie that Republicans voted to ‘end Medicare’ is the worst political lie of 2011.”

Despite this anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) maneuver, however, the actual readers of PolitiFact prevailed, and the “killing Medicare” claim came in only third, behind the “zero jobs” claim and the ridiculous distortion of Planned Parenthood’s priorities. So far, so good.

But, as you know, the editors over-rode the readers. This is troubling for a variety of reasons, not least because Bill Adair and Angie Drobnic Holan (they have names!) admit that even conservative think-tankers like Norman Ornstein agree that a slight tweak to the language of a handful of progressives would satisfy even him. Adair and Holan proceed to note that

At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would “privatize” Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal “would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more.”

In other words, even though more incendiary language has been employed, the de facto leader of Democrats wasn’t the one to do so.

Ah, but, quoth the PF morons, “more often, Democrats and liberals overreached.” More often? Evidence, please. You’re supposed to be freaking journalists. If your claim is true, back it up. If it isn’t, then, to steal a line I saw posted on Facebook today, off is the general direction in which I wish you would fuck. Adair and Holan then proceed to run through the same tired and unconvincing litany employed by our friend Moe in the original post. Oh, and they point out that other self-appointed incompetents “fact checkers” agree with them. Trouble is, they’re still wrong.

Steve Benen sums up the argument this way:

I’ve been trying to think of the best analogy for this. How about this one: imagine someone owns a Ferrari. It’s expensive and drives beautifully, and the owner desperately wants to keep his car intact. Now imagine I took the car away, removed the metallic badge off the trunk that says “Ferrari,” I stuck it on a golf cart, and I handed the owner the keys.

“Where’s my Ferrari?” the owner would ask.

“It’s right here,” I’d respond. “This has four wheels, a steering wheel, and pedals, and it says ‘Ferrari’ right there on the back.”

By PolitiFact’s reasoning, I haven’t actually replaced the car — and if you disagree, you’re a pants-on-fire liar.

Not bad. Medicare is more of a Toyota, and the Ryan plan a Yugo for the price of a Cadillac, but the point is still pretty clear.

Interestingly, Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard agrees:

Truthfully, the notion that Paul Ryan's plan will “end Medicare as we know it” is a fair assessment. The idea it flatly “ends Medicare” might be a bit too reductive, as there will still obviously be a federal program to help seniors get medical coverage and those currently over a certain age will be guaranteed to get Medicare as we know it. But broadly, I don't think it's a lie. In fact, “ending Medicare as we know it” is a good thing. The program is over $30 trillion in debt. Any politician who tells you that that they can preserve the program as it is and still get costs under control is probably lying to you. And I think Paul Ryan has basically been open about the fact that the status quo in Medicare must change.

See what he did, there? He calls the Dems’ claim “a bit too reductive,” then argues why Medicare as we know it should end. We can agree or disagree with his opinion (I personally think there should be some tightening of the belt in Medicare, but it is hardly the first place I’d go to reduce the federal deficit), but it is honest and thoughtful: two things PolitiFact is not.

The howling on the left, therefore, may be a trifle overwrought, but it is not without legitimacy. Paul Krugman, who I venture to say knows more about economic structures than Adair, Holan, Moe and me combined, agrees. He also writes that:

... the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear ‘balanced’—and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

I’m not as ready as Mr. Krugman to ascribe motives to PolitiFact’s inane choice. There’s nothing inherently political about their decision—utterly unjustified, yes, but not necessarily political. Fact is, they’re just inept. An earlier piece by Hemingway, written just before instead of just after PolitiFact’s big announcement, demonstrates pretty clearly that they’re just as inept at criticizing the right as they are the left.

PolitiFact’s problem is that they started to believe their own press clippings. They got lazy, smug, and arrogant. They substituted sloth for research, acquiescence for skepticism, petulant defensiveness for argumentation. They aren’t fact-checkers at all—fact-checkers would understand that the denotative and connotative accuracy of a statement are often radically different. They would understand that an argument can be literally true but ultimately irrelevant: but that doesn’t make it anything less than true. They would understand that there’s a continuum between fact and opinion, and that the latter is almost always going to come into play: and the way to deal with that is to acknowledge it rather than pretend to a fallacious pseudo-objectivity. They would, in short, not be PolitiFact.

Did PolitiFact render themselves “useless and irrelevant”? Yes. But that, of course, is only my opinion.

Paul Ryan Isn't as Smart or as Honest as We Thought: And That's Saying Rather a Lot

Paul Ryan is in the news again: twice, in fact. Neither of the stories casts him in a good light, although one seems to want to do so. Let’s go there first.

On Thursday, Congressman Ryan signaled his willingness to make optional his controversial (to say the least) proposal to shift Medicare from a fee-for-services system to a voucher system. Indeed, Ryan aides pointed to an April interview in the Weekly Standard in which he seems to have been saying that even then. Except, of course, that he wasn’t.

Let’s face it: the argument in favor of the Ryan plan is that it saves the government money. How? By shifting some of the burden of seniors’ health care away from the taxpayers in general and onto the individual recipients. This is a defensible position in pragmatic if not political terms. But, just as the benefits of “Obamacare” rely on the participation of everyone—including those less likely to require high-cost services—so does Ryan’s plan only reach its goal of reducing costs if a significant number of people subscribe.

But no sane individual retiree would choose Ryan’s plan over the status quo for the precise reason that the scheme is appealing to deficit-cutters: the government would pay less towards the health care needs of the elderly. Given the choice, then, between Ryan’s voucher plan and the current structure of Medicare, not even Ryan’s own mother would choose Ryancare. Be it noted: this doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea (I think it’s an abomination, but that’s not the point). It means that for Ryan’s proposition to work, it cannot be voluntary.

Rep. Ryan himself, of course, wants to have it both ways. He seems quite reasonable if allows an option, but of course he has to understand that doing so completely destroys whatever efficacy his plan may have going for it. So, back in April, to a fawning John McCormack at the Weekly Standard, Ryan argued that an optional system could still achieve the budgetary goals of the program:

because it wouldn’t be an open-ended fee for service system, like the current one for the under-55 plan. They would get a set amount of money to go toward the traditional fee for service and then, like current Medicare they’d probably buy coverage to supplement it. I would think a person would prefer a comprehensive plan like Medicare Advantage is today, but you can do this in a way that doesn’t have a budgetary effect, that it doesn’t bankrupt the program.

In other words, people would be free to choose the current system, except that it wouldn’t be the current system.

Thus, Ryan is being disingenuous in two different ways, completely apart from the Panglossian predictions on which his whole schema is founded. What Ryan is proposing as an option, then, is neither what he pretends it is (i.e., the current system) nor a source for any appreciable deficit reduction. And, of course, any movement towards making Medicare less universal ultimately increases per capita costs by reducing Medicare’s ability to use its incredible purchasing power to negotiate better rates on behalf of all of us—Medicare recipients and taxpayers alike.

I understand the impulse of Democrats to accuse Ryan of walking away from his own proposal, and to try to concentrate attention on it, given its capacity to be a bigger albatross for the Republicans than Watergate, which could at least be blamed on a handful of rogues. No, the entire GOP political class has quaffed deep of this particular Kool-Aid, and no one—not even the Tea Party—thinks they’re on the right track. Still, the Dems are making the wrong argument: the problem isn’t a lack of conviction on Ryan’s part. It’s the fundamental fact that his underlying logic is even less logical, less consistent, and less honest than we’d previously believed.

Speaking of less honest, the other Ryan headline comes in the form of an article by Daniel Stone of The Daily Beast. Stone alleges, and provides no little evidence, that those tax cuts to energy companies proposed in the Ryan budget aren’t simply crass, counter-productive and inane: they’re also self-serving.

Importantly, I don’t mean self-serving in the “helping out my campaign contributors” sense that, alas, is pervasive on both sides of the aisle. In the absence of a smoking gun in the quid pro quo department, it’s always difficult to determine whether Corporation X or Union Y supports a candidate because they like the way he votes, or whether he votes that way because that’s how his biggest financial backers (not to be confused with his constituents) want him to. No, this is much more obvious: Ryan gets well into six-figures a year in income from two kinds of companies: those that lease land to energy companies and the energy companies themselves.

Or course, it’s mere coincidence that the companies like these are precisely those which, for reasons never made entirely clear, get ginormous tax breaks under the Ryan plan. After all, one of his minions said it was all on the up-and-up:

Ryan’s office says the congressman wasn’t thinking about himself or the oil companies that lease his land when he drafted the budget blueprint that extended the energy tax breaks. “These are properties that Congressman Ryan married into,” spokesman Kevin Seifert said. “It’s not something he has a lot of control over.”

Seriously, where do they find these people? Is Representative Ryan so stupid that he doesn’t know what these investments are in? Or so arrogant that he thinks he’s above getting called out on what is at the very least the appearance of a conflict of interest? He lacks the intellectual or financial wherewithal to put his assets in a blind trust? Or what?

Here’s Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington director Melanie Sloan: “Sure, senior citizens should have to pay more for health care, but landholders like [Ryan] who lease property to big oil companies, well, their government subsidies must be protected at all costs. It smacks of hypocrisy.” (Be it noted that I don’t implicitly trust edicts from CREW… it’s just that this time, they’re right.)

Not long ago, Ryan was being touted by the right as some sort of budgetary genius. Of course, that was before the people at large actually heard his ideas, which have been roundly rejected by voters of every stripe. Democrats unquestionably have Ryan to thank for their victory in the supposedly safe GOP stronghold of the New York 26th in last month’s special election: even if you buy into the Republican mantra that the presence of a third-party candidate swung that election for Kathy Hochul, it’s difficult to see how to spin the disintegration of Republican Jane Corwin’s double-digit lead at precisely the time Hochul started hammering Corwin on the latter’s support of Ryan. Even Tea Party enthusiasts think Ryan’s gutting of social programs is extreme. I think we can take as given that the Democrats will find a way to screw this up, but making Paul Ryan the face of Republican over-reach is both good policy and good politics.

Ryan, of course, claims to be misunderstood, poor lamb. He’s not really the heartless asshat we perceive him to be. No, apparently, he’s stupider than that. And more corrupt.

Is Paul Ryan Running in the New York 26th?

There’s a special election in the New York 26th today to replace the disgraced Chris Lee (he was the shirtless Craigslist guy, for those of you struggling to remember which slimebag Republican hypocrite is which). Such events often garner considerably more attention than they’re worth, and this one is certainly no exception: it’s not like there’s going to be a shift in the balance of power, after all.

And both sides have already audience-tested their talking points in the event of a defeat. Should Jane Corwin hold the seat for the Republicans, expect to hear the Dems crow about how close they made an election in what should have been a safe seat for the GOP, despite a massive amount of cash from both the RNC and a host of PACs, ranging from Karl Rove’s American Crossroads to various Tea Party affiliates. (Corwin has also “loaned” her campaign more than $2 million of her own money.)

Speaking of the Tea Party, there’s actually a Tea Party candidate in the race, Jack Davis. And his presence will be blamed for a Republican defeat, should there be one. This is especially galling to the GOP because Davis is simply a rich and largely self-funded political opportunist who doesn’t really believe in Tea Party ideals. He’s run for Congress three times before, always as a Democrat, and he’s been denounced by the Tea Party hierarchy. (Oh, wait. The Tea Party is an entirely grass-roots organization; they don’t have a hierarchy. Well, you know what I mean.) What Davis is doing is precisely what many other “third-party” candidates have done in the past: find a spot on the ballot because some small party doesn’t really have a candidate of their own (does anyone really believe Ralph Nader was a Green, or Bob Barr a Libertarian?). And it’s certainly true that such candidacies can affect elections: many on the right blame Ross Perot for Bill Clinton’s victory over George H. W. Bush; many on the left blame Nader for George W. Bush’s win over Al Gore.

Yes, it’s certainly Davis’s presence on the ballot that is making things tough for Corwin. It couldn’t be that Democrat Kathy Hochul has been hammering at Corwin’s support for Paul Ryan’s budgetary fantasies to the extent that the AP article describes the race as “a referendum on the Republican plan to transform Medicare.” No, it couldn’t be that. It’s all about Davis. After all, Eric Cantor said so, so you know it’s true.

Well, actually, it’s both, and anyone honest about what this election means will tell you so… which means that we won’t hear it from any party leaders on either side. The Ryan plan is hugely unpopular with just about everyone who isn’t a GOP Representative. Even Tea Party supporters oppose cutting Medicare and Medicaid by a 70-28 margin. If Hochul can tap into that opposition to radical libertarianism, and it appears she has been fairly effective at doing so, she could stand a chance even in a very conservative district that voted for Chris Lee by 51 points(!). But no, she would have no chance of more than a moral victory without Davis.

Another point needs making. My guess is that Davis will attract three kinds of voters. The first, the smallest group, will know him and/or his policies (he apparently has better name recognition than either of his major-party opponents), and will vote for him on that basis. A somewhat larger cohort, I suspect, are completely fed up with both parties and are looking to lodge a protest vote, to express displeasure actively rather than passively sitting out the election. I’ve used this tactic myself on numerous occasions over the years. Finally, there’s the part of the Davis voting bloc that the GOP is rightfully worried about: those who will vote for him not because he isn’t running as a major-party candidate, but specifically because he is running as a Tea Partier. That may draw votes from Corwin, and might just turn the election.

Of course, we have no real way of knowing why people vote the way they do. What they tell pollsters is probably some indication, but it isn’t entirely accurate for one simple reason: people lie. What is really important here is this: Davis is indeed the largely liberal “fraud” the national Tea Party claims him to be. But let’s look at the ramifications of that statement. In an informed electorate, that would mean that his third-party candidacy would draw votes from Hochul, not Corwin. That the GOP is screaming foul can be taken as proof that the Republicans (rightly) regard a significant percentage of Tea Partiers as completely uninformed and/or stupid. Only someone who didn’t know the candidates would vote for Davis over Corwin thinking he was the more conservative choice. Of course, only someone hubristically ignorant or dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers would vote for a Tea Party candidate at all, ever.

I should note that this kind of implicit recognition of the political incompetence of many of one’s supporters is not a specifically Republican phenomenon. Remember the 2000 Presidential election, when many on the left pointed to exit polling to suggest that more people in Florida had intended to vote for Gore rather than Bush? Those “butterfly” ballots were a real problem (after the fact, of course) to Gore supporters. But when you really break down their argument, it looked like this: “voters too stupid to figure out a ballot would have voted disproportionately for our guy.” Probably true, in this case, but hardly the stuff of bumper sticker aphorisms.

So what will tonight’s results mean? Not much. There’s no way the GOP can make even a reasonably comfortable victory look good. For the Republicans to come up as real winners, they’d have to limit Hochul to less than the 26.2% achieved by Philip Fedele against Lee last November. In other words, even if we grant that every vote for Davis would have gone to Corwin in a two-way race, those two candidates combined would have to total over 73% of the vote or the GOP is losing ground. I can’t imagine that Hochul won’t close that gap appreciably, even if she doesn’t win. Indeed, a “blowout” win for Corwin right now would be maybe 6 points. For those of you who aren’t math majors, 6 is considerably less than 51. And that dramatic decline happened a). in less than seven months, and b). when the Democratic candidate focused on what the national GOP is saying.

Conversely, I don’t see Hochul taking 50% of the vote, either. Even were she to be elected, and even if national trends tip towards the Democrats (or, more accurately, away from the Republicans), as I expect them to do, she’ll face a tough re-election fight in that district. But the Democrats have already won, even if they don’t end up electing Ms. Hochul. This should have been a safe hold for the GOP, and it wasn’t. That may have to be enough for the Dems, but it really is rather a lot.

What does all this mean nationally? Well, if Corwin wins, not much. The national GOP already knows they’ve got to figure out a way to disavow Ryan’s budget plan without appearing to do so: a perilous balancing act, but one which they’re likely to get away with, thanks to the usual sloth of the corporate media. And a win is a win. The fact that it was considerably narrower than it should have been will be gone from the news cycle in days if not hours. If Hochul pulls off what would still rank as a significant upset, however, there’s a chance of energizing the base, attracting candidates who want to run as Democrats rather than as GOP-Lite, and suggesting the kinds of strategies and ground games that might lead to a very different 2012 election than happened in 2010.

One other consideration, of course, is that Paul Ryan’s name is being tossed around by the likes of Eric Cantor and Dick Armey as a presidential candidate. Such a run would be significantly damaged by a Hochul victory, as it wouldn’t be just the Democrats who would natter on about how unpopular Ryan’s economic plan is, but rather the rest of the Republican field would have their knives sharpened and at the ready, too. The fact that many of these same folks supported those policies… erm… yesterday is, of course, irrelevant in the world of politics.

Yes, a Hochul victory would hurt Ryan a fair bit. Decisively? Possibly, but remember that four years ago all the pundits were gearing up for the seemingly inevitable presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. Oops.

More on Budgets... and Moron Budgets

If you’ve been paying even a little attention lately, you’ve been hearing a lot about the federal deficit, which is ongoing, potentially crippling, and the subject of the rankest of hypocrisies from both sides of the aisle. Is raising the debt ceiling the first horseman of the apocalypse, as the Rush Limbaughs of the world would have us believe? Of course not. But the deficit is a serious issue, and one that won’t be solved without making some difficult choices.

And we’re going to continue to have a problem until and unless the Democrats decide to spend less and the Republicans decide to collect more. That’s an oversimplification, of course—the GOP certainly likes its military budget (well, except for actually paying the troops appropriately during and after their service: that part, the Republicans aren’t so good at), and the Democrats don’t want to raise taxes on anybody except the insanely wealthy, buying into the specious argument that with taxes the lowest they’ve been in two generations, it’s a struggle to survive on a mere $180K a year, even as the Dems try to claim they are the true representatives of families making a quarter of that.

But there some things we can agree on, and we ought to start there. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq need to be wound down sooner rather than later—or, alternatively, we need a coherent and well-documented rationale for staying. New weapons systems even the Pentagon says it doesn’t need get the axe. Subsidizing oil companies that are making record profits has got to stop. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposed gutting of Social Security and Medicare is indeed “radical” and “right-wing social engineering,” as Newt Gingrich said it was before he started the ever-so-predictable walkback, but something really does have to be done (e.g. making FICA less regressive?). Finally, when we say we’re cutting the budget, we need to… you know… cut the budget, not actually increase spending, as the last so-called “cut” did.

On the income side, we could start by collecting what the BPs and Transoceans owe us, and above all to stop making excuses for their perfidy. More significantly, of course, as I’ve said before, we also need to raise taxes: a lot on the richest folks, some on most of us. The supply-side canard that the “rich create jobs” and are therefore to be exempt from feeling any of the pain suffered by teachers, cops, and similar leeches must be revealed as the daft and/or insidious dogma it is. The weeping and wailing about how the richest among us are paying a greater share of the taxes than at the beginning of the Reagan administration has got to stop, too, even though it’s technically true.

Here’s why: according to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1%’s share of the total tax burden in fact doubled from 1980-2007, from 14.2% to 28%. The top 10%’s share went from 40% to 55%. So the GOP has a point, right? Of course not. Because the wealth in this country has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands over that period. Figures from the the Tax Foundation demonstrate this shift. With the proviso that the definition of Adjusted Gross Income changed with the Tax Reform Act of 1986, so comparisons on opposite sides of that date aren’t strictly apples to apples, we see that in 1980 the top 1% made 8.46% of the income; in 2007, that was 20.81%. The figures for the 10%: 32.13% and 48.05%. (Note: the Tax Foundation has different numbers than those cited above. That’s because the Tax Policy Center includes Social Security and the Tax Foundation doesn’t.)

Let’s see how the math works out here. Between 1980 and 2007, the last year for which these statistics are available, the top 1%’s income as a percentage of the whole went up 146% and their tax burden went up 97%. The top 10%’s income went up just under 50%; their taxes, under 38%. What I’ve tried to create here are real statistics which, of course, can be read in multiple ways. Those on the left will see that the richest 1% of the population has seen their incomes rise once and a half as fast as their tax burden over the last generation or so; for the top 10%, it’s about once and a third as fast. So shut up, already, with the “rich pay more than before” arguments. They’re crap, and either you know it and you’re being disingenuous, or you’re transcendently ignorant and fit only to be a Vice Presidential candidate for the GOP.

Those on the right, however, will compare different statistics: they’ll concentrate on the fact that the rich are indeed being taxed at a higher rate than the rest of us. The top 1% pays 28% of the taxes on 21% of the income; the top 10% pays 55% of the taxes on 48% of the income. So the screams on the left that the wealthiest are paying virtually nothing are also so much fertilizer. (That claim is true about corporations, but that’s a rant for another day.)

There are lots of ways of either saving money or bringing more in. How about not sending difference checks for federal financial aid until courses have been completed successfully? This would also have the further benefit of incentivizing academic success. It would mean that students would need a little more of their own money up front; in exchange, we’d be subsidizing tens of thousands fewer lazy little bastards whose job it is to sign up for classes, get a difference check, and never go to class again until doing the same thing at a different school next time. Or how about raising the gasoline tax, bringing in about $1.4 billion a year per 1¢ increase? This would also incentivize fuel efficient vehicles, improve air quality, and provide a number of other advantages.

But we also need to be willing to say that saving a few million dollars actually matters. That aircraft engine that John Boehner wanted only because it would be built in southwestern Ohio? $450,000,000 is a lot of money in my neighborhood, even if represents only a fraction of one per cent of the deficit, let alone of the entire budget. The amount of money to be saved by eliminating energy company subsidies? About $20 billion a year: a little over 1% of the deficit. I actually just read an article (alas, I can’t find it to link) that suggested that it isn’t worth the bother to save a mere $20,000,000,000. Seriously, where do they find these people?

But even smaller wastes of money matter. How about this one: $2 million for cameras so that parents can see what their kids are eating for lunch at school. Really. Dr. Lloyd Werk, Chief of Consultative Pediatrics at Nemours Children's Clinic in Orlando, says this is a way to fight childhood obesity. Dr. Lloyd Werk is an idiot. Does he really think that a parent who can’t see that Junior is as wide as he is tall is going to suddenly start taking an interest in a healthy diet just because of some Junior Spy-Cam photographs? Or that what a kid eats at lunch, as opposed to between classes, after school, etc., is the problem? Or that asking the kid what he had for lunch wouldn’t generate the same results for a shitpile less money? Seriously, I can’t decide whether I’m most appalled by this project as a civil libertarian, as a taxpayer, or simply as a thinking adult. I’m leaning towards this last option.

This is an Agriculture Department project, but you know as well as I do that supporters and especially critics will tag it to Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign. The Obamas—both of them—ought to run, not walk, away from this inanity. For one thing, it’s really bad politics. $2 million may be a drop in the federal government’s very large bucket, but it sure sounds like a lot of money to the average taxpayer. Of course, there’s going to be an interview with some Tea Party guru in every city in the country when this story finds its way to the local news, all of them suggesting that this is precisely the kind of wasteful spending they seek to eliminate. Trouble is, this time, with the surety of a stopped clock, they’re right. And that’s the real reason to ditch this program: not because it’s a political nightmare waiting to happen (although it is), but because it’s, well, stupid.