Paul Ryan's Entire Career Was a Cash Grab for Billionaires
Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0
Each New Year's, my wife and I indulge one of our favorite traditions: the
household purge. We scour our closets for stuff that's just taking up space,
quietly draining our home's energy, and move it along. I can't recommend it
enough.
This year, America's doing the same thing - and putting House Speaker Paul
Ryan out on the curb.
For years, the ten-term Wisconsin Republican - who's retiring as Democrats
prepare to take over the House - enjoyed an improbable reputation as a
"deficit hawk" and "deep thinker" about fiscal issues.
Year after year, as House budget chairman, Ryan would roll out his latest
"blueprint." He'd literally roll up his sleeves for the cameras and detail
his latest plans to slash rich people's taxes and scale back public services
for everyone else.
For a while, mainstream liberals greeted Ryan as a serious interlocutor.
They treated his plans to privatize Medicare, eviscerate Social Security,
and shred the safety net as valid viewpoints in the Adult Conversation they
wanted politics to be. Even if you didn't agree with him, they said, you had
to admit Ryan "had a plan" to "deal with the debt."
That scam propelled Ryan to the House speakership in 2015. Then the long con
really took off.
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For five straight years before Ryan took over, deficits had declined. By the
time he gave his self-satisfied farewell, they'd increased by $343 billion -
a product of Ryan's tax breaks for corporations and millionaires, which will
cost $2 trillion over the next decade.
Thanks to the very deficit he created, Ryan then left office warning that
Congress needed to cut - you guessed it - Medicare and Social Security. (No
doubt he's still stinging from his 2017 failure to throw 24 million
Americans off their health care - a feat of pure sociopathy he actually said
he'd been dreaming about since he "was drinking out of kegs.")
Ryan was never a serious thinker and he didn't care about debt. He was a
frat bro from a wealthy family who read a lot of Ayn Rand, a writer who
called it "a disease" to do anything good for "the primordial savages" who
made up "the collective" - i.e., the public.
A bad model for public servants, if you ask me.
True to his training, Ryan presided over a massive cash grab by America's
billionaires and left the rest of us "savages" to pick at the scraps. No
wonder Ryan never mounted that "principled conservative" challenge to Donald
Trump in 2016 - on this they agreed entirely.
Ryan's crimes go beyond what fits in spreadsheets. After signing off on over
$700 billion for the Pentagon - no austerity for that agency, which has
never passed an audit - Ryan concluded his speakership with an act of pure
villainy. He tucked a provision into this year's Farm Bill that prevented
even a debate on ending U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen.
The UN calls that war the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet. It's
caused over 85,000 children to starve to death. Almost miraculously, after
years of inaction, the U.S. Senate just concluded a remarkable bipartisan
vote to get the U.S. out of it.
In stymieing that effort with low procedural tricks, Ryan "used the Farm
Bill to starve children," as The American Conservative put it.
The silver lining is that Ryan's villainy - like Trump's - spurred the
growth of powerful movements to expand health care, rebalance the economy,
and get the U.S. out of immoral wars. Lawmakers from those movements -
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and others - and a new
House majority can now get to work burying Ryan's legacy forever.
No one who isn't a billionaire - or a bombmaker - will miss him.
Peter Certo / OtherWords
In