After being completely invisible over the past few weeks, Paul Ryan re-appears in today’s WSJ to: 1) whine that the President is not negotiating with the House, 2) lie about previous debt-ceiling negotiations, 3) offer a trade of the sequester cuts for entitlement reform, 4) demand an opening of natural areas for more fossil fuel exploration, and 5) reform taxes.
Let’s get past the fact that these people haven’t been able to do much except execute a bunch of stunt votes to eliminate the ACA, we know that Ryan wants to voucherize Medicare and reduce the Social Security benefit. While spinning up his story about how Social Security was saved in 1982, all he notes is that the benefit was cut in order to extend the life of the program. That’s quite wrong, though — there was a combination of a benefit cut AND increased taxes to extend the life of the program. And even though President Obama keeps proposing chained CPI as a way to extend the life of Social Security, there is simply no one in the House who can say Yes to this proposal. They are waiting for all of their proposals to be agreed to, and aren’t interested even in incremental change.
But re-orienting their Ask to their usual list of GOP wants, they continue to muddy the water over this shutdown AND the looming debt limit crisis. At first it was defunding Obamacare, then it just devolved into a long and distasteful litany of attempts to save face. Note that he doesn’t call for a vote on a clean CR and nor does he remind his readers that the House has been refusing to negotiate with Democrats over the budget for 6 months or that the GOP plotted to take the government hostage back in the winter.
All of the stuff he lists as possible ways out are things that are already under consideration in the regular budget order. What Ryan thinks can happen is that they can gain ground towards their wish list by holding their hostages, rather than sitting down and getting back to the regular order. What I suspect Ryan and the GOP know now is that giving up their hostage means they have to not only work for a living now, but that they’ll need to settle for considerably less than their wish list.
And All Hands Off of Social Security. Congress needs to pay back the Trust Fund and they need to raise taxes so that the system can pay adequate benefits as it was designed to.