The fact that Time magazine named “The Protester” its Person of the Year was maybe a little surprising. Totally unsurprising, though, was the choice of a runners-up: Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a hero to many in the corporate media for his bold calls to slash government spending on the poor.
It’s hard to know where to start with reporter David Von Drehle’s tribute. But let’s try here:
Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America’s rapidly rising public debt.
Dealing with the rising debt. Remember that idea.
He goes on:
The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe. Did he deliver a perfect plan? Not even he claims that. But Ryan, 41, offered a budget that began to convey the scale of change necessary to defuse the American debt bomb: Sweeping tax reform. Unprecedented spending freezes. Most important, a thorough reinvention of federal entitlements.
Ryan’s plan isn’t perfect? And he admitted this? What a guy! Ryan’s heroic stance, readers learn, caused fury in both parties. Republicans were forced to make difficult choices, while “Democrats howled at the sacrilege and Ryan’s refusal to raise income tax rates on the wealthy.”
Ryan’s is a “tough budget” that “brought President Obama down from his cloud of happy talk about windmills and high-speed trains to acknowledge that America has a plateful of peas to choke down after its binge at the dessert bar.” That’s right–massive cuts in social spending are good for you, just like eating your veggies.
The crux of the whole piece comes down to this:
Ryan’s dramatic proposal would not have gained any traction if it did not address a widely acknowledged problem: Over the next two generations, the U.S. government is on track to spend many tens of trillions of dollars more than it plans to raise. Unless changes are made, that will force so much borrowing that interest payments alone will sink the federal budget.
Thankfully, Time tells us, Paul Ryan has “the courage to look the future in the eye. It is a seer’s work to glimpse around the corner and sound an alarm.”
The piece closes by noting that this brave bold plan “wouldn’t balance the federal budget until 2040. The prophet of 2011 will be 70 years old.”
Wait a second. I thought this was a bold deficit-reducing roadmap to deal with the debt?
The secret to the Ryan plan–the thing media don’t talk about much–is that it doesn’t do the thing they say they like about it– namely, reduce the deficit. As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times, the projected deficit in 2020 under the Ryan plan would be
about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible–which you shouldn’t–the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.
Or as James Horney of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities wrote of Ryan (4/8/11):
Despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history–two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes–the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That’s because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.
Dean Baker writes that “Representative Ryan’s program would imply a massive upward redistribution to the one percent.” Maybe that explains why he’s a Time runner-up. If “The Protester” is the Person of the Year, journalistic “balance” requires saying nice things about the One Percent.
A pretty shaky balance when one “person” gets a few condescending pseudoprops, while being undermined the rest of the Time …
And the other receives fully sincere kudos, and 24/7 support …
Wouldn’t you say?
The fact that Ryan’s budget includes massive tax breaks for the rich shows that he isn’t serious about this. Just as with the many examples in *The Shock Doctrine*, Ryan is using the supposed debt crisis to ram through things on the right’s wish list–in this case, tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class. There is nothing serious about this plan. It is just the same old Republican policies packaged as a budget.
How is it that the mainstream media cannot see that Ryan is not serious?
Your comment here, and its obligatory repeat posting on your “Questionable Content” blog, is not just trivial this time, it’s meaningless, wouldn’t you say, Doug?
I’ve explained this once, and won’t do so again, so you can take your finger off the SNARK button, George, because it will be to no avail.
WordPress, which is the platform for both my and this blog, automatically generates linkbacks, or whatever they’re called, among blogs. I don’t create the QC item, only the comment.
If you know of a way to stop that, tell me about it. I have no interest in the QC post showing here.
You might have considered that possibility before going all Hannity here.
Good point. Good explanation, Doug. Still think your comments here could be a tad more, what, serious? In any case, I’m out of here for good. So best wishes (really) and keep up the good fight against the bad media.
If sincerely meant, I appreciate the wishes, George.
And I’m sincerely serious about what I post. I’m not sure why you’d think otherwise.
Corpress complicity is literally dead serious stuff. People die from the lies, and for whatever criticisms I may have of FAIR, they’ve provided useful intel on those lies to me for something like twenty-five years, and that’s a service I deeply appreciate.
So that’s why I’m here, at my dinky little blog, and out in the wider world, trying to add whatever I can to the cause.
I often wish the synapses fired more effectively, but you work with what you got.
Haha “The Prophet” more like a devil.
And the Luce legacy lives on.
Yes, Ryan’s a deficit slasher but in ways most Americans won’t like. He pushed for an amendment that would make it impossible to raise taxes but would require the government to balance the budget through spending cuts. It was estimated that such an amendment would result in the loss of millions of jobs. Yet, when it came time to vote on a different amendment that would raise the taxes on the uber rich to balance the budget, Ryan voted “no.”
He’d rather millions of Americans lose their jobs than demand one penny more in taxes from the 1%. Of course, who can forget his voucher program to replace Medicare? This would have given the opportunity for seniors to say to their health care providers: “But….but…I have a coupon.”
How do people like this manage to get in office with many staying there, election after election?
So, what is it with the Nincompoop and these media hacks? I’m going to give Von Drehle the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s not a complete moron, but it’s tough. What he writes is the kind of stuff you expect to hear on a daily basis from true simpletons and dopes like O’Reilly and Hannity and Beck. Ryan’s just another ignorant, greedy, half-bright libertarian (he loves Ayn Rand; he reportedly makes his staffers read one of her very bad novels, Atlas Shrugged) who’s got as little interest in fairness, history, and democracy as Osama bin Laden or Benito Mussolini. It’s the same tired, rotten bullshit over and over–super-hack greed-head politician, dumber than a handful of gravel, achieves mind-bogglingly inappropriate praise and cover from bad actors pretending to be journalists. Now I see that the Nincompoop is throwing it down with Ron Wyden (!) in an attempt to destroy Medicare. Stay tuned for more bad, bad, journalism.
When was there an all-call for every nut job out there to run for political office in America? When did I miss that?
RE: TIME and its cover photo, and the picture. The protester chosen looked Middle Eastern, which is certainly true. However, this seemed to be the year of the Protesters from the World, so I wish a montage of all countires experiencing this WORLD WIDE movement could have been expressed also. I did miss seeing America in that picture. certainly Zuccotti Park, and Wisconsin.
Speaking of Wisconsin, leads, of course, to Paul Ryan. Now, I did look up his bio on Wikipedia just a few minutes ago. I am sorry that you, Mr. Ryan, feels that the social safety net needs to be cut to balance a budget. I did notice on that bio that Paul himself received a part of social security , the survivors benefits, when his father died. The bio did note that Paul saved that money for college and tuition. Wow, that was a good choice, although I guess he didn’t really need it to live on while he was growing up then? However, I think this is a good thing for American children to receive, even if they don’t actually need the money at that time. One never knows what life will fling, so saving was a good thing. I’d like other kids to have that same opportunity.
I also read about social security that 40% of Americans over 65 use social security. that means that the other 60% must receive it for survivors or disability, I guess. Still, I would not argue against that, because the least a citizen should expect from its nation is to be fed, housed and clothed, although medical would be good too.
I don’t agree with you, Paul, on wanting to slash the social safety net. How a nation treats the “least” among them is really the best PR campaign that any nation could ask for in how it presents itself to the world, especially if those citizens are treated with respect.
I also noted , Paul, that you once worked for Oscar Mayer in the cold cuts producing area. Sorry, Paul, but that is a great set up line….you seemed to have NOT left the “cold cuts” behind. Did you know that in Spanish, cold cuts = “fiambre?” That’s slang for dead body in some Spanish countries. You should probably cut that out of your bio, because it’s just too tempting of a straight line for what you seem to want to do to the safety net. ‘COLD CUTS?” Yes, it seems so.
I also, Paul, went to your bio which you produced and read about your Dec. 15th trip to Afghanistan. You did mention that childhood deaths over the last 10 years had improved by 25 %, and that 8 million were in schools, including 2.9 million of those being girls. I applaud the concern for children and also have no problem in using our resources to help them build back up what we tore down. However, Paul, PLEASE, please, please, treat American kids as well. Remember, it’s the best PR that any nation can ask for, and I think we still have a lot of work to do in that area.
As long as I don’t end up as a “cold cut” on Paul Ryan’s plate. American citizens are not just turkeys waiting to be plucked by C.E.O.’s and the corporate welfare state.
As a ‘non-represented’ constituent of Paul Ryan’s (he represents virtually nothing that I agree with), I have to say I agree ‘110%’ with the above article & comments. Ryan is nothing more than just another opportunistic libertarian-leaning Republican, of modest realpolitik intelligence, who thinks he can get by on his fresh looks and stale ideas. It’s the same type of crap that’s going to economically take us back to the 1930s, but too many (15-25% of the electorate would be my estimate) of my fellow cheddar-heads that are ‘independents’ just don’t pay as much attention to politics as they do sports/hunting (males) or family intricacies/melodramas (females), so they end up casually voting on the basis of TV spots/talking-head TV/right-wing squawk radio/and our increasingly conservative newspapers. They just chalk up all this political debate to ‘oh, that’s just politicians talking – – they’re all alike, there’s no difference’ between them. Many of them then may subsequently lose what may have been a decent job and find that — voila, there’s very few decent jobs left, much less available thanks to our national supply-side policies of the last 30+ yrs.
Let’s state the obvious: Time is a blatant propaganda tool of the 1%.
Dean, I would say that money is the tool of the 1% as well. Until we get money out of politics, I am not hopeful of any real changes, domestically and internationally.
Get a load of that non-existent forehead. Every day in his shower Ryan sings his one and only song: “If I only had a brain.” It’s right from central casting and on to the yellow brick road.
LLL