Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin claims he has a “knack for numbers.” Not long ago, he unveiled his GOP budget proposal titled “Path to Prosperity.” Rachel Maddow criticized members of the media for their fawning coverage of Ryan and his
financial “magnum opus.” Said Maddow: “If the Beltway media could stop making out with Paul Ryan for long enough to look at what’s actually in his budget proposal, they might notice that some of the important numbers in it appear to be made up.” She added: “I doubt that actual numerically based fact based information will penetrate the smoochy smoochy love bubble surrounding Paul Ryan right now…there’s this cult of him being brave and bold and doing this difficult workout every morning. What he’s just introduced is not a feature on grit versus glamour in today’s GOP. It is not a pinup. It is not the brave story of a strong boy in a tough environment. It’s the official Republican Party budget for 2012, and the numbers in it are so wrong they are occasionally funny.”
Anne Lowrey summarizes Ryan’s proposal in an article in Slate titled Model Misbehavior: Why Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up: “Tax cuts to wealthy Americans foster prosperity that moves millions of (less wealthy) Americans back to work, with increasing wages. High earnings and employment bolster tax revenue. When combined with huge cuts in domestic spending and radical changes to Medicaid and Medicare, the budget balances out in about 20 years.” Lowrey goes on to explain, however, that Ryan’s plan relied on numbers provided by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis—which have been exposed “as a bit fantastical.”
Harold Meyerson wrote the following about Ryan’s budget proposal: “The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made ‘to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.’ That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.”
Ryan claims his budget proposal is a “compassionate” one—but Pat Garofalo begs to differ. Garofalo says that the “Path to Prosperity” would “double health care costs for seniors, endanger vital Medicaid services, and likely increase taxes on the middle-class to finance tax cuts for the rich.”
E. D. Kain thinks that Ryan’s budget is not serious one. He says that it’s ideological—and suspects “that its intention is to shift the debate and make the Ryan budget the leaping off point for further budgets.”
There are many who would agree that Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” is indeed based on ideology. One might ask what the ideological foundation of his thinking was when he prepared the 2012 GOP budget.
Jonathan Chait provides us with an explanation of why Ryan’s budget helps those at the very top while hurting the middle class and the less fortunate in his Newsweek article titled War on the Weak: How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites—and the rich as our rightful rulers. In the article, Chait wrote about what has motivated both Paul Ryan and the Tea Party:
“In fact, the two streams—the furious Tea Party rebels and Ryan the earnest budget geek—both spring from the same source. And it is to that source that you must look if you want to understand what Ryan is really after, and what makes these activists so angry.
“The Tea Party began early in 2009 after an improvised rant by Rick Santelli, a CNBC commentator who called for an uprising to protest the Obama administration’s subsidizing the “losers’ mortgages.” Video of his diatribe rocketed around the country, and protesters quickly adopted both his call for a tea party and his general abhorrence of government that took from the virtuous and the successful and gave to the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt—in short, the losers. It sounded harsh, Santelli quickly conceded, but “at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rander.”
“Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.”
A couple of weeks ago, Tom Ashbrook moderated a discusson about Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan on his radio program On Point with Jonathan Chait, senior editor at The New Republic, Anne C. Heller, journalist and author of “Ayn Rand and the World She Made,” and Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks. The program was titled Ayn Rand’s Resurgence. In his summary of the program, Ashbrook wrote: “The American budget battle so far is really a battle of ideals. And at the back of a vocal chorus on the Republican/Tea Party right sits the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand.” Ashbrook and his guests talked about “what it means to have “Atlas Shrugged” in the middle of the budget debate.”
Click here to listen to the program.
In an article for The New Republic, Jonathan Chait wrote more about Ryan, his budget, and Ayn Rand:
Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan’s moral philosophy:
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” …
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience that, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict–individualism versus collectivism.”
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.
There is no doubt that Ryan has been impressed by the words and works of novelist/philosopher Rand. He declared his admiration for her in Facebook videos that he posted in 2009.
Facebook Videos Posted by Paul Ryan
Ayn Rand’s Relevance in 2009
Ayn Rand & 2009 America, Part 2
The Truth about GOP Hero Ayn Rand (Think Progress)
So there you have it—a GOP budget proposal for 2012 brought to you by Rep. Paul Ryan, acolyte and admirer of Ayn Rand. It’s a “path to prosperity” for those who are already prosperous.
SOURCES
War on the Weak: How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites—and the rich as our rightful rulers. (Newsweek)
Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand (The New Republic)
Rachel Maddow Tears Into Beltway Media For Paul Ryan Budget Coverage (Huffington Post)
Who’s hurt by Paul Ryan’s budget proposal (Washington Post)
Model Misbehavior: Why Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up (Slate)
Paul Ryan’s ‘Compassionate’ Budget Would Gut The Food Safety Net (Think Progress)
Paul Ryan And The Republican Vision (The New Republic)
The Man Behind Paul Ryan’s Budget Plan Got the Tax Cuts Wrong, Too (The Atlantic)
Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal Would Increase Public Debt Relative To Extending Current Law (Think Progress)
Paul Ryan’s Multiple Unicorns (New York Times)
What’s wrong with Paul Ryan’s budget? (Washington Examiner)
Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand (Frum Forum)
Elaine,
It is unfair for the wealthy to have to pay taxes. They should be allowed to use more of the services of the common than the rest of us because, they deserve more, because they are rich. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it??
Paul Ryan Borrows a Page from Ayn Rand’s “Morality” (Roosevelt Institute)
http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/paul-ryan-borrows-page-ayn-rand-s-morality
Excerpts:
Take a look at the Rand-inspired roots of the GOP budget before heading to the theater to watch Atlas Shrugged.
I have always thought that, contrary to the popular belief that politicians say one thing and do another, they actually tell us what they intend to do. One such clear signal is Representative Paul Ryan’s open admiration for writer Ayn Rand.
Ryan’s budget plan is a cold and often selfish effort. It transfers the tax burden to middle- and working-class Americans by lowering the top federal tax rate from 35% to 25%; it all but eviscerates Medicare and Medicaid by replacing direct payments with an ineffective voucher program topping off at $15,000; and seeks to abolish the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). But the harshness of this proposal should be no surprise to anyone who comprehends his worship of Ayn Rand. She saw making money as the highest virtue, where wealth is an end unto itself and not a means to living a wise, reasonable and agreeably well life. This, more than anything, explains what is missing from Paul Ryan’s models of both freedom and societal morality: the concept of selflessness.
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And Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. And this to me is what matters the most: it is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or that the health care plan does not work, or this or that policy reason. It is the morality of what is occurring right now; and how it offends the morality of individuals working for their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed that is under attack.
In other words, altruism deters excellence. Only selfishness breeds true success.
The immediate flaw in such thinking is that commercial achievement does not happen in a vacuum. Giants of industry would not get far if they didn’t have workers to contribute their effort to the creator’s vision. The “free will to produce” would mean nothing if there were no government to enforce contracts or create roadways — and, ironically, railways — without enabling legislation. (In “Atlas Shrugged”, the protagonist Dagny Taggart is the granddaughter of Nathanial Taggart, who supposedly created a railroad without any help whatsoever, including governmental intervention.)
JuDeB
1, May 8, 2011 at 11:32 pm
Ayn Rand’s novels are economic pornography. The Randians masturbate to them with the Invisible Hand of the market.
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I like the word usage and I’m going to borrow it.
(If this appears twice, my apologies)
Rich,
I think many of the Randians just use it for an excuse to be greedy.
Ayn Rand’s novels are economic pornography. The Randians masturbate to them with the Invisible Hand of the market.
I have to ask why even outspoken pundits don’t connect the Randians to the cult they are. Years from now, historians will wonder how a cult that basically functioned along the lines of Scientology, with a failed screenwriter as its oracle came to be so powerful, when so many of its ideas proved to be so wrong.
Pete,
Amen!
their plan will do about as good as “atlas shruggs” the movie.
that’s the difference between a fundamentalist and a randian/galtian. one thinks they’re gonna fly into the air and watch civilation crumble and the other thinks that if/when they go hide in a mineshaft/mancave civilation will crumble.
both think the rest of us can’t get along without them
i think we’d do just fine
Elaine,
Facts never get in Ryan’s way!
Undercover Pine Lawn officer arrested for driving drunk in police car.
Boynton Beach police officer charged with tasing fellow officer.
Mike S. & rafflaw,
Beware of true believers! Who needs facts when one has faith? I don’t think “believers” like Ryan actually care to look into the future to consider what impact their budgets/decisions would have on the future of this country.
Elaine,
Maybe Ryan can get the students on Glee to help him add up his numbers correctly!
geazer,
Close–but no cigar! It’s Ryan. Too bad Ryan can’t sing like Morrison–and too bad Ryan isn’t as proficient with numbers as he professes to be.
Elaine,
Great job! I not sure that I can agree with Mike S. that Mr. Ryan is a true believer and doesn’t comprehend the impact on seniors and the middle class and poor. I think just the opposite. Because Ryan is a true believer, he doesn’t care about anyone except the wealthy and his corporate masters. Everyone else is just getting in the way.
Re: This picture of Ryan that you are using: Are you sure that you’re not mistaking him for Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) from Glee?
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-amcCfKD6B_A/TWxzOenCuVI/AAAAAAAAH_4/8P2MV8EFmWo/s320/Matthew-Morrison-Summer-Rain.jpg
Mike S.,
There have been so many comments left at the other Ayn Rand thread that my screen freezes every time I try to load the page.
Be sure to sign the petition at the RNC to keep the Republicans focused on this plan. It represents the true Republican ideology and they shouldn’t back away from it just because seniors, the middle class, most children and poor people will be victimized by it.
This country can’t afford all those seniors, poor people and children.
https://supportryanbudget.gop.com/
Ryan is a true believer to the point that he can’t comprehend that what he is saying is not only nonsense, but his budget would lead to the downfall of America as we know it. As a look at the fantastical notions Ryan follows, the discussion on the Ayn Rand and Christianity thread provides the erudition of Buddha and Tony C. demolishing Rand’s ridiculous notions in detail and which is counterpointed by the attempt at defense of Rand by poster Roco which illuminates the lack of depth of the Randist’s position.
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/04/23/ayn-rand-and-christianity/
“Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin claims he has a ‘knack for numbers.’ ”
What’s that he said? that he’s “in the nick for numbers”? Oh. Never mind. I guess that’s just my fond imagination…