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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Friday 17 August 2012
Purporting to be a small-government budget hawk, Ryan publicly decries corporate welfare and says he wants “to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers.”
Who is Paul Ryan?
Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan admires Ayn Rand, and if you believe Republican Party mythology, Ryan is a messianic John Galt who will save America from a secret socialist conspiracy. Thus, in Rand fashion, it's worth asking: Who Is Paul Ryan?
The answer is simple: the GOP's presumptive vice presidential nominee is the 21st century's flesh-and-blood embodiment of political deception and media obfuscation.
Purporting to be a small-government budget hawk, Ryan publicly decries corporate welfare and says he wants "to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers." This has generated press coverage promoting Ryan as a great fiscal conservative. Yet, written out of the story is the fact that Ryan is a Huge Government Republican who voted for — and in some cases, still defends — the biggest examples of corporate welfare in American history.
Ryan, you see, was the Huge Government Republican who backed this era's massive corporate bailouts — the one who picked politically connected companies as winners and taxpayers as losers. He was the Huge Government Republican who regularly voted for profligate war spending bills — the ones that blew a gaping hole in the federal budget. And he is the Huge Government Republican now using his committee chairmanship to oppose serious cuts to the deficit-exploding corporate welfare still embedded in the bloated Pentagon budget.
Similarly, Ryan claims to be, and is billed in the press as, a libertarian-inspired acolyte of Rand — a man who supposedly values freedom and limited government. But as a Huge Government Republican, he has consistently voted to expand the surveillance state, endorse warrantless wiretapping and permit indefinite detention. Oh, and in contradiction to Rand's writings, he has also pushed to use the power of Huge Government to end a woman's right to choose an abortion.
Like so many Republicans, Ryan genuflects to the private sector and insinuates that the government is not a job creator.
It's funny coming from a guy who has spent most of his adult life as a federal employee and whose family's construction company brags of building its fortune off government highway contracts.
Ryan labels himself an opponent of "crony capitalism" and is often promoted by reporters as someone who can help Mitt Romney thwart the Washington insiders who corrupt our politics. Somehow, we are expected to ignore the fact that Ryan has spent the vast majority of his adult life in Washington; that his wife served as a top pharmaceutical and oil lobbyist in Washington; and that, as Newsweek reported in 2011, he tried to insert special provisions into federal law that would boost his personal oil investment portfolio.
Then there are Ryan's budget proposals, whose central premises are that Medicare must be gutted and Social Security must be turned over to Wall Street because we allegedly don't have enough revenue to fund them. In response, the press often credits Ryan's blueprint for being courageous and honest. Yet, in the very same plans, Ryan proposes to severely deplete public revenues by eliminating all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends, meaning that, according to The Atlantic magazine, Mitt Romney would pay a 0.82 percent tax rate on his $21 million annual earnings.
Republican power brokers, of course, hope you never learn any of this. They hope you and an obsequious press don't bother to review Ryan's congressional votes or his legislative history. They are hoping, in other words, that when you see Ryan's boyish Midwestern visage, you won't see the real Ryan — and you won't see what his ascent to vice president might mean for the future of America.
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ABOUT David Sirota
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado.
11 comments on "Who is Paul Ryan?"
August 18, 2012 7:16pm
There's a lot to worry about in Ryan's political history, as David Sirota shows. But I simply note, in reponse to his politically correct rhetotic about a woman's rights, that the 'right' to abortion is opposed by the central teaching office of the Catholic Church, the Magisterium. I am not in favour of backyard abortions, which often took place in my youth. But, as a Jewish Catholic, I naturally agree with Church teaching. It is not simply a woman who has rights in this matter. The most vulnerable human person is the baby. Does a fetus in the womb have rights? Or are other linguistic terms more appropriate?
August 20, 2012 11:56am
As a Catholic I agree on the Catholic Church teaching on abortion, although not on contraception. Pope Paul VI made a mistake on that in the 1960s after his Commission recommended allowing non-abortive means.
But all that is irrelevant to U. S. public policy! Just as we do not have Sharia law, or Torah law, we do not have Catholic law or doctrine as our guiding principle. No Catholic is compelled to choose abortion. No Catholic hospital is compelled to provide abortions. Obviously, others disagree on these issues. Medically there may be a choice between the lesser of two evils. We need discussion of ethics on the value of life which the Church is welcome to join.
August 18, 2012 3:45pm
Mitt Romney is a LIAR and a possible Income Tax evader.
“We the People” want to see your 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008 Income Tax Returns.
In picking Paul Ryan as his Vice President, Mitt Romney has doubled down on his own campaign promise to give big tax breaks to the wealthy, uniting himself with a candidate who goes even further to do so: While Romney would bring taxes for top incomes down to 28 percent, Ryan has proposed bringing the top rate down even lower, to 25 percent. Meanwhile, Ryan's plan would actually increase the effective tax rate on the very poorest Americans by getting rid of tax breaks that benefit low earners.
In Paul Ryan’s views and policy judgments — we find his true ideologue. More than any other politician today, Paul Ryan exemplifies the social Darwinism at the core of today’s Republican Party: Reward the rich, penalize the poor and let everyone else fend for themselves. Dog eat dog. The Republican vice presidential nominee is the 21st century's flesh-and-blood embodiment of political deception and media obfuscation.
Ryan proclaims himself as a great fiscal conservative. Ryan publicly decries corporate welfare and says he wants "to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers." This has generated press coverage promoting Ryan as a great fiscal conservative. Yet, written out of the story is the fact that Ryan is a Huge Government Republican who voted for — and in some cases, still defends — the biggest examples of corporate welfare in American history.
Ryan, you see, was the Huge Government Republican who backed this era's massive corporate bailouts — the one who picked politically connected companies as winners and taxpayers as losers. He was the Huge Government Republican who regularly voted for profligate war spending bills — the ones that blew a gaping hole in the federal budget. And he is the Huge Government Republican now using his committee chairmanship to oppose serious cuts to the deficit-exploding corporate welfare still embedded in the bloated Pentagon budget.
Ryan is a man who supposedly values freedom and limited government. As a Huge Government Republican, he has consistently voted to expand the surveillance state, endorse warrantless wiretapping and permit indefinite detention. Oh, and in contradiction to Ayn Rand's writings, he has also pushed to use the power of Huge Government to end a woman's right to choose an abortion.
If you know anything about Paul Ryan, you probably know him as a deficit hawk. But Ryan has voted to increase deficits and expand Federal Government spending too many times for that to be his true north star. Rather, the common thread throughout his career is his desire to remake the basic architecture of the Federal Government. Paul Ryan wrote the Budget proposal that will give the Ultra-Rich huge Tax cuts and raise Taxes on the Poor and Middle-Class.
Ryan sponsored a Social Security privatization scheme that went so far that the George W. Bush administration rejected it. The Social Security Administration concluded that the Ryan-Sununu plan would require huge increases in general budget revenue to make up the shortfall left in payroll tax revenue. Specifically, revenue would have to increase by 1.5 percent of GDP every year, an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found, or about $225 billion at current GDP. That’s a big honking tax hike.
Ryan has repeatedly sponsored proposals that would allow the president to veto specific line items in bills, especially budgets.
To me the single most ageist thing that Paul Ryan has consistently introduced are bills to reduce capital gains and dividend taxes, which only benefits the “Rich and Powerful.” He proposed a bill in 2004 making permanent Bush’s 2003 investment-tax cuts, twice proposed cutting the capital gains rate from 20 percent to 15 percent before Bush did just that, proposed allowing corporations to deduct the dividends they paid out and allowing individuals to pay lower capital gains tax rates on dividend income, and proposed making the 2001 Bush tax cuts permanent the same year they were passed.
Ryan’s latest proposal severely depletes public revenues by eliminating all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends, meaning that, according to The Atlantic magazine, Mitt Romney would pay a 0.82 percent tax rate on his $21 million annual earnings.
August 17, 2012 9:02pm
Judging from their policies, the Gop candidates would be best called Mitt Romoney and Paul Rand.
August 17, 2012 5:02pm
So, in other words, he's the perfect VP for Romney to had chosen. Both are liars, built their fortunes at the expense of blatant deception and/or lobbying, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with how they got to where they are.
I see lots wrong with even having this guy in politics and I'm sure that if elected by all the boneheads who want these weasels in the driver's seat of Washington that in the long run nothing good will come from it.
I also see that once that golden throne is reached, Ryan won't be doing too much of the changes he currently clammering due to being over ridden by the policies of his new Boss.
Pretty sad when nobody can trust any of their politicians. And that includes the Tea-Baggers who only seem to be there currently with public interest in mind, but once elected it'll all come back to their own self-interests and that of their rich friends.
There's not enough civil unrest to show Washington that there needs to be a big change in the way they conduct themselves publicly and privately. It's called Morals.
Me? I'm waiting for a Drone to take me out when I least expect it living within a Police State.
August 17, 2012 4:43pm
So then, Ryan's dad was a lawyer and the fmily had an interest in a construtcion company. This is why he could save dad's SS money to go to college. It neve hurts to have a leg up.
August 17, 2012 3:37pm
Another face of this multifaceted jewel is Starve The Beast (STB). http://machimon.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/norquist-the-gops-grey-eminence/
August 17, 2012 1:59pm
This sounds like the first guy who would win two photo entries in the new version of Webster's Dictionary, one each next to 'HYPOCRITE' and 'MISOGYNIST'. With regards to the maniacal obsession which is so ballyhooed in the media about Ayn Rand, it is curious indeed that there is never any honest portrayal of a woman whose extreme views, philosophy and ideology were shaped by events in her native Russia when she was witness to the Bolshevik activities against private and family-owned business, like that of her father. There is much to be learned about her from her writings and it is only reasonable to conclude that each of us, based upon our own biases and experiences, would come to our individual conclusions about the contents of Ms.Rands books. However, the common theme in all of Ayn Rand's writings is Ayn Rand and her profound anger and her rejection of the power or relevance of the 'collective'. Rand's celebration of the importance of her version of the individual, as a champion against the raging masses, is nothing if not idolatrous. What I have read is a detailed road-map and powerful inspiration to an ambitious power-craving person such as Paul Ryan. It would also not surprises me that this is a handbook which Mitt Romney reads before he goes to bed. Well, there will be plenty of time for reading between election cycles.
August 17, 2012 1:50pm
All that aside, just from the dumb, sad-eyed, floppy eared puppy dog look, he's get some votes for the bad guys.
August 17, 2012 12:55pm
Thanks, David, for another good article, and well timed to help us figure out what Paul Ryan is all about.
Your reference to 'Atlas Shrugged' and the influence of Ayn Rand on Ryan is a good starting point. From my personal perspective, Ayn Rand was much maligned as a feminist emerging in a male-controlled and misogynistic U.S. culture. What I mean is, if you look at her writing in the context of when she wrote it, you find an extremely strong and opinionated person who had survived the early hell of the emerging Soviet Union, happened to be female and not afraid to say her piece... yet, had to do so in a world with new and rapidly evolving media (especially TV) where it was quite a score to put her in front of a camera and see what happens. In other words, Ayn Rand was one of the earliest prototypes for Anne Coulter and Sarah Palin. But, more important than that, Ayn Rand wrote about the individual vs. the collective state; tried to define the balance of power. There is not much (maybe nothing?) in her writing that reflected any sense of the fragility of the environment; it all seemed to assume the environment was limitless, that technology could always produce a solution, and the only 'conflict' was whether it was up to individuals to engineer that environment, or up to 'groups' such as governments, committees or businesses. Groups were always portrayed as interfering with rational outcomes. This has not changed; today, though, those groups include Fox News (an analog to the too-powerful newspaper in 'Fountainhead'), and the elected officials who, perhaps in relation to the unlimited campaign monies, have become more brazenly and less deniably the perpetual lobbyists and manipulators Rand so clearly despised.
Of course, a complication with all of this is that Ayn Rand's philosophy pre-dates the many incidents that have since revealed the limits of technology. A short list includes thalidomide, DDT (Silent Spring) and other persistent organic man-made chemicals, a few frightening toxic waste sites such as Love Canal and Times Beach, first HFC's destroying the ozone layer then CO2 destroying our climate, etc. Turns out many of the great techno-fixes of a couple generations ago were really well marketed, but had down-sides we failed to acknowledge until years later.
So, who is Paul Ryan? Looks like he is yet another front-man for accelerating the demise of the Middle Class. Here is a link showing the U.S. Federal revenues from 1950 to 2010.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/revenue....
Note that personal income tax has stayed relatively steady, at around 42% of the total federal revenues. Two taxes that have gone down are corporate and excise. And they have gone down lots, which shifts paying for government services away from businesses and onto individuals. To have this pattern, and couple it with still lower taxes on the highest income levels, is simply unconscionable.
BTW, those excise taxes. Here is another graph, showing U.S. Federal excise tax collections; indicates that the effective tax rate falls heavily on the lower income brackets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Effective_Federal_Excise_Tax_Rate_by_Income_Group_(2007).jpg
The disturbing takeaway for this voter: over the past sixty years, our U.S. federal tax system has pampered money (the richest individuals, and businesses), shifting costs to the middle class and those with less ability to pay. And, the current Money-Ryan ticket seeks to shift that still further. Just wrong.
If Ryan was serious about real tax reform, he would advocate for increasing both corporate and excise taxes, even to the point of nearly eliminating personal income tax, especially at the lower-middle income levels. His taxing structure would place taxes squarely on consumption, so as to create the market incentives to conserve energy and other limited resources. The present governmental subsidies and incentives toward activities such as private/corporate jet travel would be gone.
August 17, 2012 12:44pm
Is this the same Ryan who attended college on the survivor benefits of his father who died while Ryan was young? He wouldn't have been able to do that if SS were a private retirement account as he proposes.