Perhaps February 3rd was the day Paul Ryan actually realized that he was not only woefully ill-equipped for this political moment but also severely out of touch with the country he was charged with leading.
“A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week," he gleefully wrote on Twitter that day, touting the supposed middle-class spoils of the $1.5 trillion GOP tax cut. "She said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year,” he added, sharing one anecdote from an AP report that he had somehow deemed worthy.
Ryan famously deleted his $1.50 PR disaster within hours, while the teacher, Julia Ketchum, gave follow up interviews saying the tweet "cracked me up" since there was "very little change" to her paycheck. Her yearly Costco membership was "the only thing" she could think of the meager increase would cover.
But it was too late, even for the Republican faithful. Ryan's approval ratings among GOP voters—which had gotten a legitimate bump following the tax overhaul—plummeted, from 49 percent in early February to 32 percent now. He hasn't recovered since.
What's interesting about Ryan's favorability rating above is how conflicted Republicans are about him. If you compare him to Mitch McConnell, for instance, conservative voters want to like Ryan. Before his early February tweet pulled the mask off the GOP scam that Republicans somehow identified with middle-class Americans and were trying to help them, Ryan actually reached a 49 percent approval rating; whereas McConnell's faltering star tops out at 25 percent this year before it begins to fall again in concert with Ryan's precipitous tweet.
Republicans want to like Ryan, but he just doesn't add up to the hype. It turns out the blue-eyed boy from Wisconsin has actually been driving a dagger through the heartland ever since he made his play for national prominence in 2008 with the introduction of his "Roadmap for America's Future," which was nothing more than a repackaging of the GOP's trickle-down scamonomics of the '80s for a new generation.
In it, Ryan laid out a choice between two futures. In one "fiscal path," he predicted the retirement systems would go bankrupt, future generations would be saddled with crushing debt, and the U.S. economy would be "crippled"—left behind by the rest of the world. (Remember, it was May 2008 and our economy was about to flirt with total disaster.)
The other future, using Ryan's numbers, were impossibly rosy—promising “health and retirement security for all Americans," abolishment of the debt burden on future generations, and economic competitiveness for the 21st Century.
Ryan then touted a CBO scoring of his plan that found "GNP per person would be a full 85 percent higher than if we remain on the current course." What he didn't say, as Paul Krugman later noted, was that all the CBO had scored were his spending cuts, not the corresponding revenue losses from the taxes he planned to slash.
In other words, Ryan had only supplied the CBO with half of the equation.
But as Will Wilkinson noted in the New York Times, the diagnosis from Ryan, who reportedly talked about the debt “in apocalyptic terms," helped shape the grievances the Tea Party would transform into a politics of destruction. The somewhat quaint, decades-long debate about the optimal size of the government became obsolete. Bigger government wasn't just bad, it was robbing Americans of their rightful future in the sun on every level.
That also became the rallying cry for an era of GOP lawmakers at the state level for whom no tax cut or spending decrease could ever be too deep. While Ryan's vision was perhaps hamstrung at the federal level, Republican governors across the country proceeded to slash both taxes and spending right as their constituents needed government services more than ever.
To make matters worse, when the jobs started coming back in the wake of the recession, they largely came back in large metropolises and the surrounding areas. The frustration and dismay that settled into citizens living in regions of the country who were seeing the least help from their politicians created the perfect opening for someone like Donald Trump to exploit. As Wilkinson writes:
Mr. Trump spotted opportunity in the injured dignity of the Republican base and the feckless irrelevance of the establishment’s agenda. He told Republicans shaken by the reality and risk of downward mobility that they were the only Americans who counted, and that they had been cheated and betrayed.
Not to mention the fact that Trump scapegoated people of color and foreigners and immigrants, in particular, for the pain many white Americans were experiencing. By the time Trump was elected and the GOP was fully situated to capitalize on Ryan's fuzzy math, the prescription he had been pushing was wildly out of step with what the regions hardest hit by the recession actually needed.
Meanwhile, many tens of millions of loyal Republicans in struggling regions came to rely on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance and disability benefits just to scrape by. By 2016, the last thing grass-roots Republicans wanted was yet another bloodless, ideologically rigid iteration of the stale Reagan formula. But thanks to the intellectual leadership of dogmatically small-government conservatives like Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, that’s mostly what they got.
In fact, what Ryan managed to do once he had the power to do it was push through the side of his equation the CBO had never originally analyzed—the tax cuts and corresponding revenue losses the CBO now projects will add $1.9 trillion to the debt over the next decade, boosting federal debt to nearly 100 percent of GDP by 2028.
According to the report, the tax law would cost the government $2.3 trillion in revenues, but economic growth would offset that figure by about $461 billion.
That fiscal recklessness, in turn, threatens to hollow out the very public services that Americans in the heartland so desperately still need. As Paul Krugman noted:
The single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted.
If there's a silver lining here, it might be found in recent news of the teacher walkouts in several red states and the widespread support they are getting from the broader public. Even in southern states, as many as 57 percent of voters said they would be willing to pay higher taxes for education resources, according to an NBC survey released this week. Sustained gutsy protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky have all yielded gains in the past month despite the intentions of Republican governors in those states. Some political observers even conjecture that the disconnect between voters and Republican lawmakers on taxes and spending is providing an opening for Democratic candidates in red states this fall.
As for the other promises of Ryan's 2008 plan, he's done nothing but hobble America's "health and retirement security" while saddling future generations with debt at a time when the unemployment rate was already hovering just north of 4 percent as the GOP tax cut passed (damned near full employment for those people counted as looking for work).
In the meantime, Ryan has sat idly by as the monster he helped create rips whatever was once sacred about the foundations of our republic out from under us.
At the national level, few if any leaders have proven more outmatched by the job the country actually needed them to do than Paul Ryan. And now, Ryan says, he would like to retreat to Janesville, Wisconsin, with the nearly $85,000 pension he will soon receive and delight in spending time with his kids.
Good riddance, Paul Ryan, you and your bankrupt "ideas" helped bankrupt the country for everyone else.
Hopefully, that will be painfully clear to everyone by the time he tries to return to public life.