What Doth Ryan Want?

I am one of the least known, yet most vociferous members of the Anti-Ryan Club, which is led, more or less, by Paul Krugman and Jonathan Chait. As both Paul and Jon will tell you, Paul Ryan will say and do just about anything, as long as it allows him to maneuver himself into the spotlight, all the while proclaiming that he doesn’t want the spotlight. He just wants to get in there with the dagnab nuts and bolts and make this contraption we call a government go! They say that Congress folk, with they talk amongst themselves, label one another “show horses” and “work horses”. Never has a show horse made such a career of passing himself off as a working beast.¹

That said, why is Paulie making such a great show of his “honor” before succumbing to the Donald’s manly charms, as he surely will down the road? Well, pretty boys don’t come easy, after all, so what sort of Rolex is Paulie expecting from his daddy to be?

Paul Ryan, like Hillary Clinton and President Obama, is pretty much in the bag for Wall Street, and right now he’s functioning as Wall Street’s “man” in DC, the one guy who might be able to tame the beast that is Donald Trump. Wall Street is deadly serious about its opposition to Trump’s hostility to free trade and open immigration policies. If you want to make “serious” money these days, you have to think global. Sure, you can get pretty rich selling to 300 million people, but you can get a lot richer selling to 4 billion. Trump’s butt-kicking fantasies are pure poison to Wall Street (and to me as well). They know how much the U.S. benefits from foreign trade, how much the table is really tilted to our advantage, how the U.S. uses its unique advantages to make other countries do us favors, play by our rules, accept our currency, and speak our language. Contrary to popular superstition, our allies get no free ride from us.² Shockingly, I think Wall Street gets it right on this one.

Since xenophobia is Trump’s calling card, it’s not believable that he would openly cave on this point. But it’s not surprising that Wall Street wants some sort of reassurance—something tangible—that Trump won’t be quite the Neanderthal he says he is. And that’s what Paulie is working to get. So how much will he get? I suspect, not a lot. Because, as much as Paulie loves Wall Street, he loves the Party even more.

Afterwords
Paulie’s surrender will surely come before the Republican Convention. And then what will Wall Street do? It’s an interesting question. Wall Street does not want to be taken for granted by either party, and the Street folks surely do pine for those big fat tax cuts the Republicans keep promising them. But it seems the trade wars that Trump keeps promising are even scarier to the Street than the present “agony” of Obama’s “high” taxes.