Paul Ryan is an absolute joke: The facts and numbers make it clear — GOP economic plans are an absol

Paul Ryan is an absolute joke: The facts and numbers make it clear — GOP economic plans are an absolute fantasy

by Paul Rosenberg at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/02/paul_ryan_is_an_absolute_joke_the_facts_and_numbers_make_it_clear_gop_economic_plans_are_an_absolute_fantasy/

"SNIP.............


In one way Ryan is willing to dig more deeply — he’s willing to at least talk about policy in a reasonable-sounding way. But in the end, that “reasonable-sounding way” is not far removed from truthiness. The problem is, a lot of elites in both parties just eat that sort of truthiness up. And therein lies a danger more subtle and profound than the garish dangers grabbing campaign headlines every day. When bipartisan elites come together and agree on how to cure poverty, for example, it’s instinctively less revolting than talk about “winners” and “losers” or “makers” and “takers”. But since their policies are all doomed to fail, they are more of a political narcotic than anything else, which is to say, their allure is immediate, while their danger takes time to mature.

Case in point: In early December, Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute claimed to have produced a bipartisan consensus plan for reducing poverty. There was only one tiny problem with it: it wouldn’t work. Indeed, the same could be said about the mish-mash of GOP ideas aired under Paul Ryan’s leadership in January at the Kemp Foundation poverty forum in Columbia, South Carolina. While some ideas — like expanding the earned income tax credit — could help marginally, GOP tax and budget plans would decimate safety net programs, which have increased their poverty-cutting effectiveness nearly tenfold since 1967. Ryan’s widely-favored plan to block-grant programs to the states would very likely increase poverty, not reduce it. No matter. When it comes to fighting poverty, the last thing our political class cares about is something that actually works. The image of action is all that really matters. Results are irrelevant. America’s sky-high poverty rate must remain a personal problem of the poor, which different leaders, from time to time, will heroically try to do something about — or at least think about it. And when they’re feeling really moral, they’ll even get bipartisan about it.

Here at Salon, Sean Illing criticized the delusional futility of Ryan’s policy making efforts:


The GOP isn’t a “proposition party,” because that’s not what Republican voters want. Getting things done in Congress is impossible without compromise, and that’s a heresy in today’s GOP.

It’s not surprising that neither Donald Trump nor Ted Cruz attended this event.



................SNIP"