James Pethokoukis is that rarity of rarities, a sensible conservative who is actually sensible. Even harder to believe, Jim actually hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute, aka “Fruitcake Central.” But his most recent post, titled, with supreme intellectual dishonesty, “Is the GOP changing its stance on entitlement reform?”, Jim demonstrates he can lie like Paul Wolfowitz.
Jim’s biggest lie comes up front, in the headline itself, because Jim pretends that, in the past, everyone “knew” that Republicans stood for entitlement reform. Why, “Paul Ryan made his name as a policy wonk because of his support for Medicare reform. And recall that President Bush unsuccessfully pushed for Social Security reform.”
Uh, really? Let’s start with Paulie. Ryan’s balanced budget “plan” explicitly exempted Social Security from any cuts at all, a sticky issue over which Jim passes in silence, and his “plan” for Medicare reform consisted of “ordering” the 117th Congress, ten years down the road, to cut it, the likelihood of that happening amounting to precisely zero.
Even richer was Ryan’s hypocrisy regarding ObamaCare. To make his budget “plan” come out right, he counted all the savings envisioned by ObamaCare even while voting repeatedly to repeal it. When he ran for vice president with Mitt Romney, he deleted these savings from his new “plan,” because Romney was promising no cuts to Medicare whatsoever. After he and Mitt lost the election, Ryan put the ObamaCare cuts back in.
As for George Bush “pushing” for Social Security “reform,” that’s accurate as far as it goes, but only as far as it goes, because Republicans in Congress refused to introduce legislation that would enact it. Furthermore, what Bush was pushing for was the partial privatization of Social Security, which would have exacerbated the program’s solvency problems rather than reducing them, which is probably not what Pethokoukis means by entitlement “reform.”
Oh, and I guess that Jimbo also forgot about the bill that George did pass, along with a Republican Congress, the one that expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs, adding trillions of dollars to the program’s long-term liabilities, without providing a penny of funding. “We didn’t worry about paying for things in those days,” “explained” Sen. Orrin Hatch.
So, with that record, why is Pethokoukis pretending to be amazed to discover that today’s Republicans have no intention of cutting Social Security or Medicare? Because the only way to find fiscal virtue in the Republican Party is to invent it?
