StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-ryans-leap-a-rush-of-deficit-demagoguery/2011/04/07/AFUfOXxC_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Here is The Good Doctor (TGD) attacking  ‘deficit demagoguery’ in defense of the dubious economics of Representative Paul Ryan.  By the accounts of other Conservative thinkers, Cockeyed Platonist and The Great Will, Ryan is the seminal economic thinker and planner of 21^st Century America and the next and future leader of 2012: the man to beat the timid New Democrat presently occupying the White House. But Paul Krugman finds him to be a bit of the usual Conservative economic humbug. TGD mentions in the defense of Ryan’s budget proposal, the welfare reform of President Clinton 1996, but perhaps some more recent statistics would be beneficial as regards childhood poverty in America. Below is a link to a July 2010 article that is revelatory of the actual condition of poor children. But let me first quote from the article:

‘How many children in America live in poverty? It's an important question. According to the federal government, 14 million children in the United States officially live in poverty. That's 19 percent of all children, and what's worse, that number has been on the rise. There are 2.5 million more children living in poverty in America now than in 2000.’

http://news.change.org/stories/the-shocking-statistics-on-child-poverty

Do we need any further exacerbation of the problem, or any inexcusable apologetics for the state of some of our children, and their dire prospects for the future? Or that the ‘Welfare Reform’ of 1996 was pure New Democratic mendacity.  

TGD goes on to defend Mr. Ryan’s plan as ‘classic tax reform’, while others seem absolutely doubtful as to the believability of  his proposal, except as a charade, as pantomime economics, engaged in by a desperate, leaderless Party playing on the real fears of voters: a continuing Republican political trope. The last couple of paragraphs of his essay are worth quoting in full:

‘Ryan’s overall plan tilts at every windmill imaginable, including corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies. The only thing left out is Social Security. Which proves only that Ryan is not completely suicidal.

But the blueprint is brave and profoundly forward-looking. It seeks nothing less than to adapt the currently unsustainable welfare state to the demographic realities of the 21st century. Will it survive the inevitable barrage of mindless, election-driven, 30-second attack ads (see above)? Alternate question: Does Obama have half of Ryan’s courage?

I think not (on both counts). But let’s hope so.’

Not the usual Neo-Conservative bellicosity that TGD puts on display, but in its own way at least as destructive.

 

   

     

To Jumper of South Carolina,
Thank you for your eloquent and moving reply to the Paul Krugman column of April 7,2011' Ludicrous and Cruel'. A great letter, a reminder to us all, of our history of struggle against the inherent feudalism at the center of Conservatism!
Best regards,
StephenKMackSD

Fake Progressive (FP) has become an American Institution with her very popular website, whose origin was a desire to answer to the Right Wing and to elect a Democrat to the Presidency. She has been a decided success but there are questions about her methods, such as her promotion of the idea and practice of something called ‘Citizen Journalists’.  Now, the central concern is that these ‘Citizen Journalists’ provided content for her web site gratis, without pay. But in the face of the astronomical sale price of her site to AOL and her assumption to an executive position: doubt has entered the minds of many of her former supporters and political allies, fueled by FP’s defensive even combative stance, when confronted with the reality of her own behavior and how that helped shape her policies. Is she really a political ally and follower of Milton Friedman? Is FP simply another Empire Builder, a tradition in American Life?  Or are these questions  superfluous; too little, too late?      

“The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made “to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/opinion/05brooks.html?src=me&ref=homepage

Here is Cockeyed Platonist ( CP)  acting, in this episode of The American Political Melodrama, as Paul Ryan’s campaign manager . He issues this memo to the campaign staff, in preparation to the big announcement,  that Mr. Ryan will run for President. Now, we must all stick to the script, is the imperative in this unapologetic encomium.  The temptation is too great to pass up quoting the first short sentence of this document.   ‘ It was the season of fiscal perestroika.’  Why limit yourself to a simpler word, when this beauty is waiting to be used, as the rhetorical luxury item that it is? Why, it could dress up even the most dismal essay! The title of his opinion piece is truly a nonpareil: ‘The Moment of Truth’’.  Savor it’s redolence, out of the comic books of your childhood, of super-heroes and villains locked in mortal combat.

The need for Austerity is the key idea that CP and Mr. Ryan adopt: but we can look to American Capitalism as a measure of the ethical/political necessity of the practice of that puritan virtue?  Let us take the case of General Electric which paid no Income Tax for the year 2010 but, in fact, claimed a 3.2 billion dollar tax credit. One might observe that G.E. didn’t even count it ‘offshore profits’ in this calculation, which is within the law, but none the less telling.

Next let us review the costs of our Colonial Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; but where can one find, accurate, up to date information? How many trillions of dollars will be spent? We do not know exactly but we have a very good idea, given the pioneering work of Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. Does the necessary austerity even touch these self-destructive, reckless and fiscally imprudent foreign entanglements?  Let me surmise that these expenditures are sacrosanct and absolutely necessary, in the Conservative World View. As to what one of CP’s colleagues at The New York Times, Paul Krugman, has to say of Mr. Ryan and his austerity plan, I have provided a link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/opinion/06krugman.html

Hardly surprising that Mr. Krugman holds a less adulatory view of Mr. Ryan’s talent as economic planner, theorist, and legislator. But his essay needs no extraneous comment, pro or con. The last two sentences of CP’s latest essay are rich in his particular variety of rhetorical gems: ‘Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.’ The American Political Melodrama embraces The American Political Romance.