I feel like I’ve already written too much — probably way too much — about Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. But Ezra Klein makes a point today that’s been in the back of my mind too: Ryan’s plan is not only not bipartisan, it’s deliberately constructed to be as offensive to Democrats as it’s possible to be:
Ryan’s budget adds a bunch of extraneous, ideological priorities into the deficit reduction talks. He privatizes Medicare, which costs money. He repeals the resolution authority in Dodd-Frank. He reorients our energy strategy away from renewables and toward domestic production of fossil fuels. He locks in the Bush tax cuts. Most of these decisions are largely unrelated to the deficit, and/or increase it. But they’re polarizing — Republicans love them and Democrats hate them — and by bringing them into the discussion, it’ll make it ultimately harder to come to a deal. Both sides are only willing to compromise on so much, and when you add a lot of items that should [not] have been included in the first place, you run the risk of hitting people’s limits before you’re able to deal with the core issues.
In any kind of serious proposal, you’d expect the author to at least make a few nods in the direction of bipartisanship. They might be fake, but at least they’d be there. But not Ryan. His proposal is a 100% tea party wet dream: Do away with one of the Democratic Party’s signature achievements of the 20th century. Slash spending on social programs for the poor. Use the reduced spending to make room for tax cuts on corporations and the rich. Put a hard cap on federal outlays that’s almost absurdly low. Give the Pentagon everything it wants. And stitch it all together with supply-side voodoo economics and budget projections so laughable they’re almost designed to be insulting.
But as Ezra points out after reading through the details, it’s even worse than that. Just in case any moderate Democrats might be inclined to tentatively say something nice about his plan, it’s studded with other calculated insults. Repeal Dodd-Frank! Repeal Obamacare! Drill baby drill!
I don’t know what motivates Ryan, but it’s certainly not a genuine search for plausible grounds for negotiation. Instead, he’s produced a document carefully crafted to produce a universally negative reaction from Democrats, presumably because he thinks that will make Democrats look intransigent while the Beltway press is busily thinking up new ways to praise Ryan for his courage and gutsiness.
So far that calculation seems to be paying off. For more, see David Corn on what you get when you Google “Paul Ryan budget serious.”
