Paul Ryan: Portrait of a radical

Radical. Extreme; favoring fundamental or revolutionary change in current practices, conditions, or institutions.

When I Googled the words “Romney” and “radical” together, the metrics yielded 7.9 million views. When I Googled “Ryan” and “radical” together, the number of views rocketed to 25.3 million.

I write this only three days after Governor Mitt Romney picked Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate for the 2012 presidential campaign. The liberal media, which had already cast Ryan as an ideologue, now has added more brush strokes to his portrait as a radical. On the very day of Ryan’s selection, a Washington Post headline blared “With Ryan Pick, Romney doubles down on economic radicalism.” The New York Times called the now infamous “Ryan Plan” a brutal alternative to the Simpson-Bowles fiscal reform commission and copied President Obama’s attack on the Ryan plan as “social Darwinism” trusting in the dubious mercies of the marketplace. Not to be outdone, the Huffington Post painted Ryan as a rising star, “… but given his extremist views, it’s more porn than rock.”

The snarling cartoon character of the congressman portrayed by the liberal media casts him as taking the country backwards by pursuing the “reckless economic and social policies of the Bush administration.” Andy Ostroy, writing in HuffPost Politics, paired Ryan together with Romney as “… the sons of privilege … who lack empathy for those in need and who abhor government spending which helps those who don’t have rich daddies to give them jobs.”

So how radical is Paul Ryan? The Ryan plan, called the “Path to Prosperity,” does call for spending and deficit reductions not just in discretionary expenditures but also in entitlements. Ryan dares to touch the third-rail of politics by echoing what the trustees of Medicare are saying: the program is on the road to bankruptcy. The congressman proposes to safeguard Medicare by guaranteeing that those older than 55 retain their entitlement but offers options to those younger than 55 about their future health-care and retirement options. Erskine Bowles, the co-chair of the Simpson Bowles Commission, called Ryan’s Medicare plan “honest” and “serious.” The choice is up to the individual, a truly radical idea compared to the 80-year-old New Deal concept that one-size-fits-all.

As for the Ryan plan, it takes three decades to achieve its goal of balancing the budget. It doesn’t sound too radical to me, when our neighbors to the north only took one decade to balance the national books. “Path to Prosperity” also assumes that future Congressional leadership will exhibit restraint in spending to keep the country on the path to the radical idea of spending only what you can afford, an assumption that challenges Washington, D.C.’s historic record.

Let me paint a different picture of radical. President Obama claims that his administration “created” 4 million private-sector jobs. That goes beyond the classic definition of “chutzpah.” The idea that government creates jobs in the private sector goes to the top
of the list of radical ideas.

Where I do give the Obama Administration credit for creating “jobs” is in the field of disability. During his tenure, the number of people in the U.S. classified as “disabled” has grown about 20 percent. What’s more extraordinary than the rapid growth is the fact that it occurred during a severe economic recession, when typically the disabled rolls recede. What we are witnessing is a movement of those who received unemployment benefits for 99 weeks transferring swiftly to permanent government benefits. David Autor, economics professor at MIT, and Mark Duggan, professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School of Business, say that Social Security disability insurance “…appears in practice to function like a non-employability insurance program for a subset of beneficiaries.”

Here’s a radical idea promoted by our sitting president: Rich people don’t pay their fair share. The National Taxpayers Union says that the top 1 percent of federal income taxpayers (incomes in excess of $343,927) contributed 37.73 percent of federal income tax collected in 2009, the latest year for which full data is collected. The bottom 50 percent (incomes below $32,396) paid 2.2 percent. Since 1980, the federal income-tax burden on the top 1 percent has risen by nearly 38 percent, while the tax burden on the bottom 40 percent has fallen by more than 40 percent. Today, half of American taxpayers pay no federal income tax. Now, that’s radical.

Paul Ryan’s radical ideas include suggesting that our national greatness does not begin and end with government. He also doesn’t believe our national problems stem from a reckless promotion of free-market principles and global capitalism. The road to an American recovery is not assured if the top 1 percent would simply stop whining about higher taxes. Ryan has the audacity to say that our future depends on tackling the economic elephant in the room that the Beltway has ignored for too long. He’s a true radical because he doesn’t want to kick the can down the road any longer, burdening future generations with our profligacy.

The “Path to Prosperity” is radical to progressives because the plan dramatically reduces the role of government in our society and puts the emphasis back on individual liberties and choice.

The latest poll from John Zogby, managing director of JZ Analytics, conducted since the announcement of Ryan joining the Republican ticket  put Romney even with Obama, a five-point improvement for Romney since Zogby’s last poll a few weeks earlier. 

Ryan is not just a budget wonk; he’s a forceful communicator who can take complex issues and simplify them for the public to understand. The next three months will be a contest of facts against demagoguery, political sanity against fear-mongering.

Painting Paul Ryan as a bomb-throwing radical won’t work. I’m betting this November that the American people will see through the three-card monte which passes for our current economic policy and vote to put the country on a sound track.

Now that’s a radical portrait worth preserving.       

Norman Poltenson is publisher of The Central New York Business Journal. Contact him at npoltenson@cnybj.com