The Ryan Choice
Paul
Ryan is the reverse of Sarah Palin. She was all right-wing flash without much
substance. He’s all right-wing substance without much flash.
Ryan
is not a firebrand. He’s not smarmy. He doesn’t ooze contempt for opponents or
ridicule those who disagree with him. In style and tone, he doesn’t even sound
like an ideologue – until you listen to what he has to say.
It’s
here — in Ryan’s views and policy judgments — we find the true ideologue. More
than any other politician today, Paul Ryan exemplifies the social Darwinism at
the core of today’s Republican Party: Reward the rich, penalize the poor, let everyone
else fend for themselves. Dog eat dog.
Ryan’s
views are crystallized in the budget he produced for House Republicans last
March as chairman of the House Budget committee. That budget would cut $3.3
trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would
be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation’s poor – forcing
states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income
people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget
and Policy Priorities.
Ryan’s
budget would also reduce food stamps for poor families by 17 percent ($135
billion) over the decade, leading to a significant increase in hunger –
particularly among children. It would also reduce housing assistance, job
training, and Pell grants for college tuition.
In
all, 62 percent of the budget cuts proposed by Ryan would come from low-income
programs.
The
Ryan plan would also turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won’t possibly
keep up with rising health-care costs – thereby shifting those costs on to
seniors.
At
the same time, Ryan would provide a substantial tax cut to the very rich – who
are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s total
income. Today’s 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150
million of us put together.
Ryan’s
views are pure social Darwinism. As William Graham Sumner, the progenitor of
social Darwinism in America, put it in the 1880s: “Civilization has a simple choice.”
It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest” or “not-liberty,
equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and
favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors
all its worst members.”
Is
this Mitt Romney’s view as well?
Some
believe Romney chose Ryan solely in order to drum up enthusiasm on the right.
Since most Americans have already made up their minds about whom they’ll vote
for, and the polls show Americans highly polarized – with an almost equal
number supporting Romney as Obama — the winner will be determined by how many
on either side take the trouble to vote. So in picking Ryan, Romney is
motivating his rightwing base to get to the polls, and pull everyone else they
can along with them.
But
there’s reason to believe Romney also agrees with Ryan’s social Darwinism.
Romney accuses President Obama of creating an “entitlement society” and thinks
government shouldn’t help distressed homeowners but instead let the market “hit
the bottom.” And although Romney has carefully avoided specifics in his own
economic plan, he has said he’s “very supportive” of Ryan’s budget plan. “It’s
a bold and exciting effort, an excellent piece of work, very much needed … very
consistent with what I put out earlier.”
Romney
hasn’t put out much but the budget he’s proposed would, according to the Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, throw ten million low-income people off the
benefits rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year,
or both.
At
the same time, Romney wants to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts to the
wealthy, reduce corporate income taxes, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax
reductions would increase the incomes of people earning more than $1 million a
year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.
Oh,
did I say that Romney and Ryan also want to repeal President Obama’s healthcare
law, thereby leaving fifty million Americans without health insurance?
Social
Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social
cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for
example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil
Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest… the working out of a law of nature
and of God.”
The
social Darwinism of that era also undermined all efforts to build a more
broadly based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very
few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone
else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.
Not
until the twentieth century did America reject social Darwinism. We created a
large middle class that became the engine of our economy and our democracy. We
built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward, often through no fault
of their own.
We
designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market
greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods – public schools, public
universities, public transportation, public parks, public health – that made us
all better off.
In
short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on our own in a competitive
contest for survival.
But
choosing Ryan, Romney has raised for the nation the starkest of choices: Do we
want to return to that earlier time, or are we willing and able to move forward
— toward a democracy and an economy that works for us all?
Robert
Reich
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