Josh Barro, who writes for the Business Insider (which describes me perfectly), is not uniformly an idiot. He just writes like one with alarming frequency. A few weeks ago, Mr. Barro chose to descant on the “great tragedy” of Paul Ryan. Well, excuse me while I kiss the sky, and then vomit.
Sorry, Josh. To be a tragic hero, one must needs be, you know, a hero, not a time-serving, ass-kissing heel. It’s true that Paulie Boy was never able to achieve his “vision” of tax-free millionaires running rampant over the hapless poor, a new “Gilded Age”, as it were, but then, he never tried. According to Josh,
Ryan seemed to understand better than most Republicans that you can’t truly cut taxes without cutting spending. The “starve the beast” strategy of the 1980s and the 2000s failed to spur meaningful reductions in government spending. If the government borrows to spend now, it will just tax later.
Well, if by “seemed to understand” you mean “talk one way and vote the other,” yeah. Ryan did talk about cutting spending, but he never did. He voted for all the massive spending during the Bush Administration—the “balls to the wall” military spending associated with Bush Administration’s utterly disastrous invasion of Iraq and the similarly “balls to the wall” domestic spending the Bush Administration used to keep Congress from wondering what the hell we were getting for all the money we were spending overseas.
Josh seems not have noticed Paulie’s numerous little “tricks”, like denouncing President Obama for not accepting the tedious “Simpson-Bowles” deficit reduction plan that Ryan himself voted against, or Ryan’s use, in his own plan, of the cuts in Medicare spending that were part of the Affordable Care Act, which, of course, Ryan also opposed. Or the fact that, when Ryan ran with Romney on the Republicans’ 2012 presidential ticket, Ryan took the Medicare cuts out of his plan, and then put them back in again after he and Romney lost, and then bragged that during the election “seniors” supported his plan—well, one of them, at least.
Barro describes the tax cut engineered by Ryan in the first year of the Trump Administration as both Ryan’s “signature achievement” and a “Pyrrhic victory,” because he couldn’t stop the Republican Congress from voting for a huge increase in spending at the same time. I guess Josh “forgot” that the bill itself, originally intended to be revenue-neutral, will instead pound at least a $1.5 trillion hole in the budget over the next 10 years, because it’s stuffed with endless giveaways to the rich. An intelligent revision of the corporate income tax law was perfectly feasible. But that isn’t what Ryan wrote, and what Ryan passed.
Barro has written a second column, enumerating those few Republicans who, he says, have survived Trump with their dignity intact. “The most obvious dignity-retainers,” he says, “are Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. They have been mindful of their power as the most moderate Republicans in a closely divided body, and they’ve leveraged that power to shape policy.”
Well, no, they aren’t. It’s true that both senators voted against the “screw the poor” revision of the Affordable Care Act that Lyin’ Paulie Ryan put together, but they turned right around and voted for Paulie’s equally execrable tax cut bill, legislation they could not have read because Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hadn’t quite finished writing it when the vote was held. The tax cut bill, particularly the way it was jammed through the Senate, was an utter travesty of the legislative process. Collins and Murkowski could have opposed it on those grounds alone, regardless of content. Had they done so, the Trump Administration would have suffered a significant injury—in particular, a loss of confidence among the donor class, who are, after all, the folks who are paying for this thing. But Collins and Murkowski surrendered all their actual power as legislators in return for mere status. Trump was kind to them, after all. He let them live.
Afterwords
Barro tabs UN ambassador Nikki Haley as “most dignified,” more or less: “She has also managed to break publicly with the administration, burnish her own political profile, and not get fired.” Of course, the policies she advocated were tossed in the trash, but that’s a minor detail.
