Paul Ryan's new attempt to conceal his attack on the social welfare system

Image: Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) (source)


Much noise was generated recently about Paul Ryan's supposed evolution on poverty. Every year, Ryan designs his ideal budget for the federal government, always calling for deep cuts to the social welfare system. In more recent iterations of his budget, he focused almost all of his enormous cuts to the social welfare system on antipoverty programs, leaving the parts of the social welfare system used by the nonpoor--like Social Security and Medicare--basically unscathed.

But when Ryan released a poverty plan last week, it featured restructured antipoverty programs--without reduced budgets. Was this an unprecedented change of heart--even a mea culpa--by the Republican wonk-in-chief? Had he reached a new understanding of poverty? Some thought so. Here, for example, is Ezra Klein's gullible write-up of Ryan's poverty plan entitled Democrats should welcome Paul Ryan's poverty plan. At the end, he concludes:

There will be charges of hypocrisy against Ryan's plan, and they're merited: his poverty plan and his budget cannot coexist in the same universe at the same time. Conservatives who spent the last few years cheering Ryan's budget are now cheering his poverty policies need to ask themselves some hard questions.

But more important than the contradictions in Ryan's plans is their progression: Ryan is refocusing himself and, perhaps, the Republican Party on reducing poverty by making the government's anti-poverty programs work better: that's a project that's both more important for the country and more amenable to compromise. Democrats should welcome it.

To his credit, Klein later interviewed a very skeptical Bob Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, who douses cold water on Klein's hope for an evolution on poverty by Ryan and the Republicans. (Klein should be lauded for his willingness to post interviews with people who convincingly refute each point of his previous columns; most would instead double down.)

Greenstein argues that every word of Paul Ryan's plan is designed to sound like a reform of antipoverty programs--plans to make them work better with the same amount of funding--but are actually designed to create opportunities to gut them in years to come. Ryan's poverty plan is a Trojan horse--a vehicle secretly designed to make a reality the deep cuts to the social welfare state he envisions in his budgets.

Paul Ryan is certainly capable of this type of deceit. As I wrote previously, deceit is utterly foundational to his career. He would be a complete unknown if he hadn't cloaked all of his budget proposals in lies. Each one of the budgets he prepares every year utilizes confusing baselines or incomplete information to hide what he actually wants to do: gut the social welfare state. Ryan's consistent efforts to win support by confusing voters and pundits reveal that even Ryan knows how unpopular his intentions are. His efforts to cloak in his 2010 budget the destruction of Medicare and taxes increases on 95% of all Americans are particularly amusing. Ryan wouldn't be a major figure if he promised budgetary miracles while delivering tax increases on 95% of Americans and a hollowed-out Medicare; he's only a major figure because he promises budgetary miracles while concealing tax increases on 95% of Americans and a hollowed-out Medicare.

Sequestration persists because it only affects the bottom tier of American welfare

Image: Beneficiaries of the bottom tier of the American welfare system (source)

Updated below

Over at Wonkblog, Brad Plumer has a very instructive round-up of Americans starting to wake up and notice the sequester.  According to survey data, an increasing minority of Americans are feeling the sequester's impact.  Some are even feeling a "major impact."

While his round-up is based on media reports and should not be considered a complete summary of everyone affected by the sequester, the examples he has unearthed are extremely telling.  Watch how, in every case he cites, the sequester only affects a small group of politically underrepresented Americans--that is, it only affects the bottom tier of America's two-tiered welfare system.  That is why the sequester will persist--not because its effects aren't bad, but because it only affects groups lacking in political influence.  If anyone doubts that fact, note that Plumer starts by pointing out that cuts to air traffic controllers were quickly reversed.  Obviously, a cut that inconveniences air travelers is a cut that affects the rich but not the poor.  Obviously, our political system cannot permit such a cut, and it was quickly reversed.  At the end, he also notes that cuts to meat inspections have been reversed; any cut that could potentially kill rich people (or at least give them diarrhea) can obviously not be permitted, either.  That it also benefits poor people is incidental to it helping the rich.

Here are the examples cited:

Confusing budget baselines is a feature, not a bug

 Image: Paul Ryan and the Path to Prosperity (source)

Dylan Matthews over at Wonkblog has made a heroic effort to compile data from the different budgets.  He details in this post why, exactly, this is so difficult:

All of which is to say is that seemingly simple questions about the budget, like “Does Obama or Ryan cut the Medicare budget more over 10 years?” are rather hard to answer honestly. And that’s leaving out dumb mistakes that get made when you’re trying to get the data out fast. For example, when I was entering numbers for Social Security yesterday, I took care to subtract out the $130 billion in cuts due to chained CPI. Only I cut them from the baseline, not the actual program spending. So what is actually a cut looked like a spending increase. Derek Thompson alerted me to the issue and it got fixed, but the damage was done.

That was a stupid mistake on my part, and I should have done better. But policymakers should do better, too. The reason we have institutions like the CBO is so we can have a common set of assumptions about what policies are going to take effect, what the economy is going to look like and so forth, to enable easier comparisons between policies. So it’s mildly infuriating when institutions like the OMB work at cross-purposes and make it harder for citizens to understand exactly which politicians want to cut what from what.

But Matthews, I think, misses the entire point.  Politicians want people to be confused about their budgets.  How could citizens support budgets if they actually knew what was in them?  I'll use Paul Ryan as an example, because he basically owes his career to being able to obscure his true intentions in confusing budgets.  Here is Paul Krugman calling him out in 2010: