Archive for the ‘Paul Ryan’ Category

BY KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ

Paul Ryan has been taking fire on the topic of the morality of his budget, including from some Catholic bishops. He ably discusses how his budget tries to apply the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, as he did in an exchange of letters with now-Cardinal Dolan last year.

“One in six Americans are in poverty today,” Congressman Ryan told Raymond Arroyo on EWTN’s The World Over in an interview Thursday, “yet we’ve thrown so much money at these programs. Why don’t we fix these programs so that they actually work to break the cycle of poverty?”

“If we keep growing government in debt,” Ryan continued, “we will crowd out the civil society — those charities, those churches, those institutions in our local communities that do the most to actually have a human touch to help people in need. That’s what we want to empower. That’s what we want to improve on.”

Of course, the current administration seeks to even more directly crowd out some of those charities and churches, by telling them they have to violate their consciences in order to serve people.

Which is a Ryan point too: These budgetary debates “are matters for prudential judgment. . . . People of good will can have differences of opinion on these kinds of issues — there’s plenty of room to disagree about how to advance the common good, advance these principles.” That’s what the laity in public life are called to do. Ryan is not presenting himself as the poster boy for Catholic social thought, but as a Catholic in public life taking Catholic moral principles seriously. “I cannot claim exclusive justification for my political philosophy and point of view on economics using the social magisterium any more than a liberal can for theirs,” Ryan said. “We have difference of opinions about how to use these principles to the problems and policies of the day. It’s not as if we are talking about violating a core principle like life or religious liberty here.”

That last point is an important one. While these criticisms are not new, it’s hard not to see some of the attacks on the Ryan budget as a distraction from the religious-liberty battle, to make sure the bishops’ conference doesn’t look like “the Tea Party at prayer,” as one columnist coined a convenient phrase earlier this year. And it’s hard not to miss that the most prominent Catholic politician taking aim at Ryan, Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, is a regular at abortion-rights rallies who voted against prohibiting partial-birth abortion; given that, her accusation that people will be “eviscerated” by his budget suggests a certain moral blindness.
The Arroyo interview is worth watching:The Arroyo interview is worth watching:

Ryan was also on Catholic radio this week talking budget and morality. And expect more next week from Representative Ryan on these moral matters when he speaks at Georgetown.

At the core of our nation’s ills lies the belief among Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, PCers, and everyone else who opposes God AND the wisdom of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and their elucidation in the Federalist Papers and writings of Thomas Jefferson: “We know better than them!” In short, the hubristic iconoclasm of a large, mostly historically, politically, economically, and philosophically ignorant portion of our population expresses itself in the passionate belief that modern wo/men with less intelligence, intellect, knowledge, wisdom, and genius than our framers actually knows better than they did, primarily because we’re “more modern.” Balderdash. THINK: If this ignorantly Progressive population truly knew better than Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, Adams, Smith, Jay, and their ilk, would we find ourselves with over 40,000,000 Americans on foodstamps, 14,000,000 unemployed, as many homeless and indigents as we have, so many home foreclosures, the federal government in DEBT to the tune of $14,295,000,000,000 AND having un-funded liabilities for Entitlements totaling $113,385,000,000,000? Absolutely not! As Bill Clinton taught us, “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” The iconoclastic hubris of Progressives is bankrupting our nation AND incurring God’s wrath as we commit infanticide to the tune of 50,000,000 and counting. May America repent SO THAT God may bless us again!

 

Was the election moved to next month, or June? We ask because President Obama’s extraordinary
response to Paul Ryan’s budget yesterday—with its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions—was the kind Presidents usually out- source to some junior lieutenant.

Mr. Obama’s funda­mentally political document would have been unusual even for a Vice President in the fervor of a campaign.

The immediate political goal was to inocu­late the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignor­ing its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $373 trillion budget in February that increased spending and lifted the 2012 deficit to a record $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republi­cans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.

 

Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an al­ternative to rival Mr. Ryan’s plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, re­peatedly vilifying them as un-American. ‘Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America’ he said, supposedly pitting “chil­dren with autism or Down’s syndrome” against “every millionaire and billionaire in our soci­ety.” The President was not attempting to join the debate Mr. Ryan has started, but to close it off just as it begins and annihilate any possi­bility of good-faith cooperation.

Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which “starts,” he said, “by being honest about what’s causing our deficit.” The speech he chose to deliver was among the most dishonest in decades, even by modern political standards.

 

The inflection point now is how to update the 20th-century entitlement state so that it is affordable. With incremental change, Mr. Ryan is trying maintain a social safety net and the economic growth necessary to finance it. Mr. Obama presented what some might call the false choice of merely preserving the govern­ment we have with no realistic plan for doing so, aside from proposing $4 billion in phantom deficit reduction over a gimmicky 12-year bud­get window that makes that reduction seem larger than it really is.

 

Mr. Obama said that the typical political proposal to rationalize Medicare’s gargantuan liabilities is that it is “just a matter of elimi­nating waste and abuse.” His own plan is to double down on the program’s price controls and Gosplan-like central planning. All Medi­care decisions will be turned over to and routed through an unelected commission cre­ated by Obamacare—which will supposedly ferret out “unnecessary spending.” Is that the same as “waste and abuse”?

 

Fifteen members will serve on the Indepen­dent Payment Advisory Board, all appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. If per capita costs grow by more than GDP plus 0.5%, this board would get more power, includ­ing an automatic budget sequester to enforce its rulings. So 15 Solons sitting in a room with the power of the purse will evidently find ways to control Medicare spending that no one has ever thought of before ahd that supposedly won’t harm seniors’ care, even as the largest cohort of the baby boom generation retires and starts to collect benefits.

 

Mr. Obama really went off on Mr. Ryan’s

plan to increase health-care competition and give consumers more control, barely stopping short of calling it murderous. It’s hardly beyond criticism or debate, but the Ryan plan is neither Big Rock Candy Mountain nor corrosive to basic democratic consent.

 

Mr. Obama came out for further cuts in the defense budget, but where? His plan is to ask Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen “to find additional sav­ings/’ whatever those might be, after a “funda­mental review.” These mystery cuts would fol­low two separate, recent rounds of deep cuts that were supposed to stave off further Penta­gon triage amid several wars and escalating national security threats.

Mr. Obama rallied the left with a summons for major tax increases on “the rich.” Every U.S. fiscal trouble, he claimed, flows from the Bush tax cuts “for the wealthiest 2%,” conve­niently passing over what he euphemistically called his own “series of emergency steps that saved millions of jobs.” Apparently that means the $814 billion stimulus that failed and a new multitrillion-dollar entitlement in Obamacare that had nothing to do with jobs.

 

Under the Obama tax plan, the Bush rates would be repealed for the top brackets. Yet the “cost” of extending all the Bush rates in 2011 over 10 years was about $3.7 trillion. Some $3 trillion of that was for everything but the top brackets—and Mr. Obama says he want to extend those rates forever. Ac­cording to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire tax­able income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1,582 trillion, Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far

from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.

 

Mr. Obama sought more tax-hike cover un­der his deficit commission, seeming to em­brace its proposal to limit tax deductions and other loopholes. But the commission wanted to do so in order to lower rates for a more effi­cient and competitive code with a broader base. Mr. Obama wants to pocket the tax in­crease and devote the revenues to deficit re­duction and therefore more spending. So that’s three significant tax increases—via higher top brackets, Obamacare and tax expenditures, and no doubt more to come.

 

Lastly, Mr. Obama came out for a debt “fail­safe,” which will require the White House and Congress to hash out a deal if by the end of the decade debt is not declining as a share of the economy. But under his plan any deal must ex­clude Social Security, Medicare or low-income programs. So that means more tax increases or else “making government smarter, leaner and more effective.” Which, now that he mentioned it, sounds a lot like cutting “waste and abuse.” Mr. Obama ludicrously claimed that Mr. Ryan favors “a fundamentally different Amer­ica than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history.” Nothing is likelier to bring that future about than the President’s political in­difference in the midst of a fiscal crisis.

By Jeff T. Allen

We are facing a tipping point.  There will soon be a crisis affecting US citizens beyond any experienced since the Great Depression.  And it may happen within the year.  This past week three awful developments put a dagger into the hope for a growth-led recovery, which held promise of possibly averting a debt and currency implosion crushing the American economy.

The first was a little-noticed, but tragic, series of events in the newly elected House of Representatives.  The speaker, Mr. Boehner, had given the task of fashioning the majority’s spending cut agenda to Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), a rising conservative star representing the vocal wing of fiscal conservatives in the House. Promising to cut $100 billion of government spending, Mr. Boehner spoke before the elections of the urgency to produce immediately when Republicans took control.

Out of a $3.8 trillion government spending agenda, the wonkish Mr. Ryan, considered by many to be the best hope for fiscal conservatives, revealed proposed cuts of a whopping $74 billion.  After some tense meetings, (referred to as a “revolt” by some media) newly elected conservative congressmen convinced the leadership to commit to unspecified cuts of an additional $26 billion. The actual “cuts” from any such legislation will, of course, be less once the appropriate political log rolling and deal-making are done- let’s call it $50 billion (while the deficit grows by $26 billion during the week it takes to discuss it). So go the hopes for serious spending restraint from our newly elected wave of rabid, anti-big government Republicans. They may deliver cuts 1.3% of total spending that is itself approximately 90% greater than collected taxes.  Let’s mark this spending reduction effort as an epic fail, at a time when epic success is almost required for survival.

The second awful development to occur last week was the employment report from the Labor Department, describing employment conditions in the U.S. economy in January, 2011.  The report was packed with statistics, all pointing to anemic growth with a modest pickup in manufacturingemployment.  The little-noticed (not by the bond market) aspect of the report was the “benchmark” revisions, an attempt to get the total picture more accurate each year than simply adding up all the monthly change numbers.  This year’s benchmark revisions showed two alarming things: a decline from previously reported employment in December 2010 of nearly 500,000 jobs, and a reduction in the workforce of a similar amount.

Coupled with insistence from the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that the Fed intended to continue “quantitative easing” (a euphemism for monetizing the bonded debt of the federal government), the employment data caused bond holders to assume there will be no end to the red ink.  Ten-year U.S. bonds lost a full percent of their value, declining a total of 18% since Bernanke announced the acceleration of Fed policy in August 2010. The yield on these bonds has increased from an ultra-low 2.4% in August to 3.65% today, as the Fed repeatedly describes inflation in the U.S. as too low.

In context, a 3.7% yield does not appear high by historical standards. In our current predicament, however, it is heading toward Armageddon.  If interest rates on our debt rise by 1% it means our interest payments rise by more than $100 billion dollars annually (not including the interest payments owed to the Social Security Trust Fund–see below).  As global liquidity and deficit spending have accelerated, food and commodity prices have skyrocketed, sending many prices up 25-50% worldwide since August.  In some countries (Tunisia and Egypt among them) rice prices and cooking oil have doubled.  Copper is up 40% in that time.  If global inflation expectations take hold with tenacity, as they have many times in past periods of “easy money” by our Fed and Congress, interest rates may easily rise to 5-6%, an event which will blow an additional $300-500 billion hole in a budget already beyond sanity.  Can our creditors give the U.S. a nod on $2 trillion of new debt each year without any plan to fix it? Remember, there is plenty of past experience with U.S. debt yielding 7-8%, a potential expenditure on our current debt of nearly 100% of tax receipts to pay interest alone should yields go there.

 

The third development of the last week which received much less press than the Egyptian crisis is the “new normal” in Social Security.  The CBO released a report disclosing that the net cash flow for the Social Security trust fund — excluding interest received from the book entry bonds it holds in U.S. debt — will be negative $56 billion in 2011, and for every year hence even more so.  This is the trainwreck that was supposed to happen in 2020. It is upon us now.  Any limp action by conservatives to bring this program into solvency can be expected only to slow the raging river of red ink this behemoth program (along with its twin Godzilla, Medicare) spills on U.S. citizens. With no political will to fix them, these “entitlements” will obligate Americans to borrow more and more money from China–to honor promises we simply refuse to admit we can’t keep.

So why do these developments argue for a crisis of Great Depression proportions? Because they speak unequivocally of our pathway to insolvency, and the potential of currency failure via hyperinflation, despite the hopes of conservatives and market participants to see a halt of such direction.  Housing prices, the foundation of so much of private citizen debt loads, are destined for stagnation — not inflation — as the supply of homes is far greater than the demand — 11% of the nation’s homes stand empty today.  When the world begins to recognize that there is no fix for America’s borrowings, a fast and brutal exodus from our currency and bonds can send us a shock in mere weeks or months.

Unlike the Great Depression, however, we will enter such a shock in a weakened state, with few producers among us and record mountains of debt.  More cataclysmic is the specter of inadequate food, as less than 4% of us farm, and those that do may cease to be as productive or may not accept devalued currency as payment, should the tipping point be crossed. Corn and wheat prices in the U.S. have nearly doubled in less than 12 months, using our rapidly evaporating currency as the medium of exchange.

The time for action has passed, which may only become apparent as the “aid” of easy money becomes seen as the harm that it is. May we all be spared the worst, but I offer no such prayers for those responsible.  The harm that comes will be swifter, and more severe, than most of them thought possible.