We should appoint a bipartisan committee...

Bipartisanship: Between love and madness lies compromise.

Except both sides seem to think she (compromise) has become a lady of ill repute.

Not to mention, both sides seem to think compromise means "You give me everything I want."

BusinessWeek just came out with a new article: Eliminating Tax Loopholes Is the New Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

It's interesting reading and pretty much echoes what we've said here about real tax reform: nobody wants to commit political suicide.

I'm not surprised with it. Debts really increase specially when the country is in recession.

So now that Paul Ryan is the GOP nominee for veep, has anyone read his budget resolution, Path to Prosperity and what it does to the National Debt?

At the outset, I was glad that Ryan had been nominated, because I thought it would focus the election on issues instead of personalities. Ryan has a reputation as a tightfisted fiscal conservative and a policy wonk. Then I read his budget and I'm shocked. I'd never bothered to read that budget before since there was no chance of it being signed into law.


Does anyone else have a take on this budget? Having read the thing, and having seen what tax cuts do to the debt (see the chart in the original post of this thread), I have huge doubts as to its viability.

If one is comfortable making choices out of ignorance, Ryan's plan sounds good. But when you try to look into it further you find that there it has little or no substance. It is scary to me that so many people are fooled by it. I have no been able to find a single reputable economist, even conservative ones, who think it is based on sound economics.

My take in summary:

- He cuts tax rates supposedly to reduce taxes for the rich and that is supposed to produce growth. But the rich have virtually zero marginal propensity to consume. He has provided no evidence or mechanism to support his claim that the type of tax cuts he proposes will lead to growth. Nearly all reputable economists doubt it.

- He keeps secret his ideas for cutting tax deductions. That means they are either so painful or unpopular that he knows they will kill the plan or they are so small that the net effect will be a reduction of government revenue. In my opinion, anyone who proposes a bold plan must be able to support it with a consistent set of actions that actually lead to the end result. His doesn't.

- He wants to cut medicare, or at least switch to a voucher system. That means old people will either not get the health care they need or they will have to pay for it themselves without having had a lifetime to save for it (because they were promised medicare). Demographic evidence is that most people cannot afford to pay. Whether one thinks they should or not is immaterial. This country will not watch old people die of treatable conditions en masse because they can't afford care.

Personally, I do think we should cut spending (and raise taxes). I am in favor of reform of medicare and social security. I COULD support a conservative plan to get us back on track. But it would need to be a consistent plan rather than one conceived to gain votes by tricking people who don't know much. It is unfortunate.

Bill Gross, who has been critical of Obama, says Ryan's budget would be a disaster to the finances of the United States. I think that is an important assessment.

I've been trying to figure out what Mitt was smoking when he made this pick. I think choosing Ryan as the VP candidate just handed the election to Obama. I mean, I have issues with Ryan but I think he could be a good leader. In a few years I think I could even support him if he comes up with a new plan that addresses some of the inconsistencies with his current budget and answers some of the questions he so far refuses to address.

But as a VP candidate he seems to be all wrong. He is overshadowing Mitt, getting all the press. That doesn't make Mitt look good. It makes Mitt look incapable. A good VP candidate is someone who is viewed as harmless and competent but uninteresting (think Al Gore, Joe Biden, Bush Sr., even Dick Cheney.) When will the republicans learn. Ryan has some of the same problems Palin had. He is stealing the spotlight. All of the talk is about him. That might help in the short term given all of Mitt's missteps but it ultimately makes Mitt seem weak. I would expect Mitt to get a bump in popularity before falling back as the election gets closer. Yet the limited information out so far suggests that he is not getting a bump at all but Obama is.

Unless the economy really takes a dive in the next 2.5 months, I think Obama is going to have another 4 years.

I think the Republican party learned the lessons from 2008 a little too well in this case. Even Dick Cheney recently said it...the number one problem with the McCain/Palin ticket was that they picked a VP who was wholly unqualified to be president. In this case, it looks like they may have gone too far in the opposite direction; their VP nominee seems to be more qualified to be president (or at least have more clearly defined/articulated ideas about presidential policy issues) than their presidential nominee.

It's like the mother who wears white to her daughter's wedding...the MOB should never outshine the bride.

Yes. But the problem with Ryan is that, although he might make a good president some day, he comes across as being very childish and naive now. No one, not even his supporters, thought his budget had any chance of being passed. He proposed it to make a name for himself and maybe to start a dialog. But that is not a way to get things done as president. So I don't think that he would make a good president yet. In 10 years in Congress he has actually gotten very little done. And much of that time was with a friendly Whitehouse. He talks a lot but there is no substance behind it. But maybe with a little more experience he could be viable.

I don't know enough about him to form an opinion yet, so I have his budget proposal on my reading list for the weekend.


Isn't that pretty much what all politicians do?

These days? Unfortunately, yes. I miss Perot's charts.

I'm really disappointed. I thought he was a policy wonk, but he's just another politician.

What really gets to me is that he references the report by the Simpson-Bowles committee (linked above) a couple times, specifically on pages 56 and 64 of The Path to Prosperity. Ryan served on that commission and, like almost all current members of Congress who served with him, declined to sign the commission’s final document or send it to Capitol Hill for debate. That is, he is borrowing the authority of a bipartisan debt-reduction effort whose ultimate conclusions he declined to endorse. It's the usual cherry-picking of information in order to support a conclusion.

He's seen the numbers and worked on the solutions; he knows what needs to be done, but he refused to sign the document because he couldn't stomach the revenue increases. So here he is, citing the report but not that the cuts aren't enough, revenue increases are also necessary; that it's a good idea to lower tax rates overall and eliminate deductions but declining to endorse the actual reductions called out by report. And since his Path to Prosperity doesn't balance the budget for another 28 years (see my post above dated August 14), his plan basically leaves an even bigger deficit for the next generation to fix.