In the future, historians and political scientists will speak of the “Ryan Gap.” That moniker will be used to measure the yawning chasm between the shining image a politician manufactures for him or herself and the brutal truth of their failed ideas and meager accomplishments.
Of course, the inspiration for that damning delta between perception and reality is departing House Speaker Paul Ryan. In his farewell address to Congress, the Wisconsin Republican signaled he was leaving the institution much as he lived in it, touting the “intellectual giants who guided me” to humbly become “just a policy guy.” Citing his hero Jack Kemp, Speaker Ryan suggested his Republican Party was the one to “offer the people superior ideas of government” because, after all, “we face no challenge which cannot be overcome by putting pen to paper on sound policy.” That’s why in the run-up to his exit the always deep, thoughtful, and earnest Mr. Ryan starred in a series of videos modestly titled “Decades in the Making: The Story of Paul Ryan and Tax Reform.” That pomposity was altogether fitting, given Ryan’s annual regurgitation of supposed policy frameworks with names like “Roadmap for America’s Future,” “The Path to Prosperity,” and the “Better Way” plan.
But from the very beginning, it was all a scam. Paul Ryan was and remains an endless self-promoter who used a friendly face, faulty math, and pure sophistry to sell a particularly vicious version of conservatism. The shiny veneer he applied to draconian Republican policies could not obscure the budgetary disasters and inescapable human hardship his policies if implemented would necessarily entail. His grandiose proposals for the privatization of Social Security, the voucherization of Medicare, multi-trillion-dollar tax cut windfalls for the wealthy, gutting the American safety net, and balancing the federal budget in 10 years all failed precisely because of their bad faith and sheer cruelty. It’s with good reason that Charles Pierce branded Paul Ryan the “zombie-eyed granny starver” while Paul Krugman labeled him simply a “flim-flam man.”
My own assessment is that Paul Ryan is the greatest fraud in American politics since Arthur Laffer first sketched his deceptive and dangerous curve on a cocktail napkin. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can judge for yourself after a quick review of the vapid, unprincipled, and disingenuous deep thoughts of the Very Serious Person himself.
Consider Rep. Ryan’s first step onto the national stage in the spring of 2009. On March 28, 2009, Ryan joined then-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and then-Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN) in unveiling the GOP’s alternative budget. But Paul Ryan’s pitch for “The Republican Road to Recovery” ran into trouble immediately. Calling for the privatization of Social Security and Medicare along with yet another tax cut payday for plutocrats, the glitzy 19-page document was largely free of specifics. When Bloomberg’s Al Hunt asked him how big the GOP budget deficit would be, Mr. Policy Guy could only offer this:
RYAN: A lot. Let's put it that way.
HUNT: Pardon me?
RYAN: Now I can't give you the specific numbers because we're still waiting for some numbers back from CBO.
Mr. Superior Ideas was fittingly back on April Fool’s Day, this time armed with the “dog ate my homework” defense. The previous week’s pamphlet was only “a marketing document,” Ryan declared, protesting that “somewhere along the line there was a misimpression given that that was our budget.”
“The thing you saw last week was not the alternative budget, this is our alternative budget.”
Ryan’s “alternative” unleashed oceans of red ink not merely because of its gigantic giveaway to the gilded class. His proposal for Americans under the age of 55 to move some of their Social Security payments into private accounts would have drained trillions from the Trust Fund for current beneficiaries. Mr. Pen to Paper, of course, had been pushing this scam for year. And as Jonathan Chait recounted, Paul Ryan made George W. Bush's "fuzzy math" over Social Security seem brilliant in comparison:
In 2005, when Bush campaigned to introduce private accounts into Social Security, Ryan fervently crusaded for the concept. He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan's plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as "irresponsible."
That was only one pillar of Paul Ryan’s plan to shred the American safety net. For the next decade, Ryan would fight his annual battle in the GOP’s never-ending war on Medicare. In 2010, Ryan offered his “Roadmap for America’s Future” in which he called for doing away with Medicare as we know it for those under age 55. Instead, the future elderly would receive an under-funded voucher to purchase private insurance. Over time, the value of that voucher would fall further and further behind the actual cost of insurance policies, as Ryan proposed that its growth be limited by GDP expansion and inflation. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that Ryan’s 2010 plan (and every subsequent iteration) would dramatically shift health care costs onto seniors. “It's hard, given the constraints of our current debate, to call something ‘rationing’ without being accused of slurring it,” Ezra Klein of the Washington Post warned, “But this is rationing, and that's not a slur.” Undeterred, the protégé of Intellectual Giants defended his Medicare scheme this way:
“Rationing happens today! The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?”
(Ryan, of course, was ignoring the real culprit. At a time when 50 million American were uninsured, another 25 million underinsured, and millions more at risk of being dropped for pre-existing conditions or new illnesses, private insurers were the true gatekeepers ensuring “rationing happens today!”)
By 2016, now-Speaker Ryan made a number of changes to his Medicare rationing scheme to prevent insurers from cherry-picking their customers and to help his voucher (now rebranded a “premium support”) keep up with the cost of medical inflation. In his new approach, future Medicare beneficiaries would visit health insurance exchanges where they could use their premium support subsidies to purchase coverage from a private carrier or traditional government Medicare. Private insurers could receive risk corridor payments, just as they do today for Medicare Part D prescription coverage and Medicare Advantage. If all of that sounds like Obamacare with a public option, that’s because, in essence, it is. Alice Rivlin, who worked with Ryan on crafting an earlier version of his voucherization scheme, acknowledged as much, even if Ryan wouldn’t. As Klein again reported:
If Ryan-Rivlin will unleash ferocious innovation that holds costs down, then so too should the Affordable Care Act. So at the end of our conversation, I asked Rivlin, who supported PPACA [Obamacare], if I was missing something. She laughed. "I keep talking to Paul and trying to convince him of that," she said. "But even if he agreed with me, he couldn't say so."
But what Paul Ryan would say about Obamacare and Medicare is this: The roughly $700 billion in savings from Medicare Advantage and Medicare providers that the Affordable Care Act used to help fund Obamacare constituted, according to Ryan, a “raid on Medicare.” By 2016, the same Paul Ryan proposing to ration Medicare by turning into an under-funded voucher scheme decried the Obama administration's "$800 billion raid of the program," which he summed up this way:
"Obamacare's plan for Medicare was to raid and ration."
As it turns out, every House GOP budget Ryan authored since 2011—all of which enjoyed 95 percent support among congressional Republicans—has continued that supposed “raid.” In fact, every GOP Obamacare repeal bill during the Trump presidency has maintained those same savings. After all, without them, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan would have another $1 trillion hole to fill over the next decade.
And when it comes to blowing holes in the federal budget, nobody blew more than Paul Ryan.
In what would become an almost annual ritual, Paul Ryan would propose massive tax cuts for the rich, cuts so large they would add $5 to $7 trillion in new national debt over just 10 years. To help stem this hemorrhage of red ink from the United States Treasury he himself would create, Ryan would promise to “broaden the base” while lowering tax rates. That is, Ryan would close or curtail some of the $1.5 trillion in tax revenue Uncle Sam loses each to deductions, loopholes, and other “tax expenditures.” And as he promised with his running mate Mitt Romney in 2012:
The president, he said, has "refused to make difficult decisions." By contrast, he vowed, "The commitment Mitt Romney and I make to you is this: We won't duck the tough issues. We will lead” …
"We can turn this thing around," Ryan said. "Real solutions can be delivered. But it will take leadership -- and the courage to tell you the truth."
But when it came to naming a single deduction he would close to fill the $6 trillion budgetary canyon created by their tax cut plans, Paul Ryan never had the courage to tell the truth. Then, as before and since, Paul Ryan ducked on making the politically tough call. That March, House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough:
“Get rid of the special interest loopholes, special deductions, lower everybody's tax rates, bring in at least as much revenue to the government but grow the economy and create jobs, and get spending under control so we can pay off this debt.”
Not content to rest there, Ryan guaranteed he would leave “middle-income tax write-offs” in place and “Close the tax shelters and loopholes that are disproportionately used by the wealthy so that we can get more tax revenue by having a broader tax base with lower rates.” And just how would the Courageous Mr. Ryan do that?
"We want to do this in the light of day and in front of everybody. So the Ways and Means Committee, which is in charge of the tax system, sent us the plan here, which is a 10 and 25 percent bracket for individuals and small businesses, and then they want to have hearings and, in light of day, show how they would go about doing this."
Unfortunately for Romney-Ryan, there simply were not (and are not) enough tax breaks solely used by the wealthy to offer the GOP ticket’s $6 trillion in red ink. Pressed on the CBS program Face the Nation, Paul Ryan again pleaded the Fifth:
"That's what the Ways & Means Committee is supposed to do. That's not the job of the Budget Committee," Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. "What we're saying is, we want to do this in the light of day, not in some backroom deal. We want to have hearings in the Ways & Means Committee that Chairman Dave Camp has already started that work, to say what tax benefits should go."
As it turned out, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) produced a tax reform proposal that was both actually revenue-neutral and specified every loophole he’d close in order to achieve it. Predictably, impact on lower and middle-income Americans would be painful. So, Brave Sir Paul turned tail and fled:
While applauding Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp's "courage" for releasing a comprehensive tax overhaul on Wednesday, Ryan (R-Wis.) ducked questions on the proposal's substance. He simply said he's excited to start a conversation about rewriting the tax code.
"This is the beginning of a good debate," Ryan said in an interview.
Having failed on the first two approaches to tax reform, Paul Ryan opted for a third. Facing the politically unpopular math of daunting deficits or killing much-loved tax breaks, Ryan instead decided to change the way math works.
Hoping to fulfill a decades-long conservative dream, the incoming speaker pushed the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to adopt so-called “dynamic scoring.” While routine “static scoring” looks at the budgetary cost of legislation, dynamic scoring tries to take into account the extra revenue produced by the additional economic growth (or “macroeconomic effects”) a bill might generate. This way, Republicans could give their wealthy donors huge tax cuts while magically producing the extra revenue to offset the inevitable deficits. In this way, Republicans like Paul Ryan have insisted for over four decades, “tax cuts pay for themselves.” As he put it in 2014, “The scorekeeping we use is not correct.”
Ryan argued that the CBO today only runs "static" analyses that don't consider the possibility that legislation may have an impact on people that changes the economy.
"It usually assumes the economy will stay the same, no matter how much government taxes or spends," Ryan said of the CBO. "Think about that. We all know that that is not true. People respond to incentives."
In 2015, Republicans got their wish. With control of both the House and the Senate, the new GOP majority selected former Bureau of Labor Statistics analyst Keith Hall to run CBO. But it wasn’t long before Hall had bad news for Ryan and Company. As Hall put it in 2015:
"No, the evidence is that tax cuts do not pay for themselves. And our models that we're doing, our macroeconomic effects, show that."
Indeed. When Speaker Ryan was pushing what became the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” President Trump signed into law, Hall’s Congressional Budget Office warned “our macroeconomic effects” won’t offset the yawning deficits. The “static” price tag for the Trump/Ryan/McConnell tax plan was $1.9 trillion over a decade. The “dynamic” hole is still forecast at $1.5 trillion.
So, the serious, earnest, thoughtful, policy wonk Paul Ryan came up with a new talking point.
On November 3, 2017, the speaker’s website issued this update: “BREAKING: Analysis Finds House Tax Plan Would Create 890,000 New Jobs.” Citing the analysis by the reliably right-leaning Tax Foundation, Team Ryan crowed that over the ensuing decade, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would result in “890,000 more full-time equivalent jobs, 3.5 percent increase in size of the U.S. Economy [and] 2.7 percent higher wages for workers. (The Tax Foundation’s assessment of the Senate bill put the employment gain at 925,000 over 10 years.) On Nov. 7, Ryan excitedly tweeted the jobs number again, this time conveniently rounding up:
Nearly 1 million new, full-time jobs will be created by the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act. See how many jobs will be created in your state.
If that figure sounds low, it should. For example, the CBO concluded by the second quarter of 2010, President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus program had generated 3.3 million jobs. It’s no wonder Matthew Yglesias asked Paul Ryan:
Is creating 1,000,000 jobs with a $1,500,000,000,000 tax cut impressive?
The answer for those of you who walked in late is “no.”
But this kind of ridiculous employment math is all in day’s work for Policy Man Paul Ryan. As TPM asked of Ryan’s budget in April 2011, “2.8% unemployment? $150 billon a year in new economic growth? Tax revenues that rise with tax cuts?” If that doesn’t sound like an outcome CBO would forecast, that’s because it didn’t. Ryan instead turned to the right-wing Heritage Foundation to help prepare his “fact-based budget.” Democrats, Ryan insisted, had resorted to “budget gimmicks.”
To be sure, Congressman Paul Ryan has been a man of principle—but which principle tended to vary with the date and weather. For example, Ryan repeatedly criticized the Fed for its "quantitative easing" program designed to help jumpstart the struggling U.S. economy. Despite the utter absence of U.S. inflation then or since, then-House Budget Chairman Ryan warned, "the inflation dynamic can be quick to materialize and painful to eradicate once it takes hold." Even though inflation was running well below 2 percent at the time, Ryan slammed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in 2011:
Mr. Ryan all but accused Mr. Bernanke of devaluing the dollar, saying, "There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency."
But five years later, Ryan refused to give credit to President Obama for the economic turnaround (one which, it should be pointed out, blew past the six percent jobless rate Mitt Romney had promised by the end of his first term). As The Hill reported:
Instead of crediting Obama for any of the economic gains that have occurred in the last seven years, Ryan argued that the Federal Reserve's policies pushed the recovery.
The principled Mr. Ryan also stood firm on the question of raising the debt ceiling. Agreeing with then-Speaker John Boehner that failure to expand Uncle Sam’s borrowing authority would produce “a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy,” Congressman Ryan argued in 2011 that “You can’t not raise the debt ceiling.” But during the second GOP debt ceiling hostage-taking in 2013, Ryan voted no. Why? Because it was a “missed opportunity' for policy makers to address the growing debt.” In between, Mr. Debt Cutter voted against the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles debt commission on which he sat because its proposals included raising taxes.)
“A confident America leads the world,” Speaker Ryan proclaimed on Wednesday, “Not with bluster, but with steady, principled action.” By “bluster,” it’s safe to assume, Ryan was referring to the current occupant of the Oval Office. Before Trump got there, Paul Ryan stated some principles of his own. When Trump refused to disavow the endorsement of former Klansman David Duke, Ryan piously declared, “This party does not prey on people's prejudices.”
In that case, Paul Ryan hasn’t been paying attention to the past 50 years of Republican politics, including his own. After all, the self-proclaimed anti-poverty champion has repeatedly trafficked in the language of “makers and takers” while warning about “turning the safety net into a hammock.” But that’s not all. Ignoring the data showing intractable poverty in the United States disproportionately impacts rural, southern counties, Ryan in 2014 turned to the racial whistle instead:
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
In Paul Ryan’s culture, apparently, it is customary to lie about federal anti-poverty efforts. This week, as he has for years, had this to say about his “personal mission” of lifting people out of poverty:
Four years ago, when our nation marked the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, we exposed some hard truths.
For all the billions spent, and all the bureaucracies and programs created, the needle had barely moved.
It’s not true and, moreover, Paul Ryan knows it’s not true. Every time he says it, his critics point out that official poverty metrics don’t include the impact of the very anti-poverty programs they were designed to combat. (As CBPP put it in 2014, “Using a more comprehensive measure of poverty that analysts broadly favor, known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), Columbia University researchers recently found that poverty had fallen markedly, from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012.”) Nevertheless, the soon-to-be ex-speaker dispensed this treacle in his farewell address:
“I believe firmly that solving our poverty challenges once and for all will require not just a great undertaking, but a great rethinking of how we help the most vulnerable among us.”
A good place to start that “rethinking” process is by jettisoning every budget document Paul Ryan ever produced. After all, as CBPP found, in various incarnations the Ryan budgets found 62 percent of their non-defense spending cuts from programs serving people with low to modest incomes. Ultimately, Jonathan Cohn and Arthur Delaney lamented, “Paul Ryan’s whole career was about sticking it to the poor and elderly.”
Well, maybe not his entire career. After all, the same Ezra Klein who was dazzled by Ryan in 2010 now expresses buyer’s remorse over the man whose legacy is “debt and disappointment.” For Ronald Brownstein and Mark Leibovich, Paul Ryan’s post-mortem will be his Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. But Speaker Ryan will always have his record of service to American women, a record which includes his principled stand in 2000 against the “health of the mother.” As he explained during a debate on a so-called “partial birth” abortion ban, Ryan rose to counter his Wisconsin Democratic colleague Tammy Baldwin’s comments on the rare intact dilation and extraction procedure which had been used only 1,200 times that year:
“Mr. Speaker. I just have to take issue with the comments that have been preceding this debate. This is not a political issue. This is a human issue. Let me just say this to all of my colleagues who are about to vote on this issue, on the motion to recommit. The health exception is a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it. The health exception would render this ban virtually meaningless.”
“Virtually meaningless” may be the perfect epitaph for Paul Ryan’s congressional legacy. Bad ideas sold with bad math and bad faith are the hallmark of the man who presented himself as the Ideas Man of the Party of Lincoln. As it turned out, the motto for this supposedly serious, thoughtful, analytical, and ground-breaking intellect of the Republican Party turned out to be something hardly Lincolnesque:
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that’s our target market.”
It was altogether fitting that Paul Waldman greeted word of Ryan’s April decision not to run for re-election by concluding, “A scam of a party says goodbye to its top fraud.” But if you think you won’t have Paul Ryan to kick around anymore, don’t be so sure. After cashing in on Wall Street like his fellow “Young Gun” Eric Cantor, he’ll doubtless be back with his eyes focused on the White House.
And when that happens, just remember to “mind the gap”—the Ryan Gap, that is.
