August 18, 2012
The NYT ran a promotion for Representative Paul Ryan as a news story. The piece did not include a single critical comment from any of the people interviewed.
This is truly remarkable since many of Ryan proposals would add enormous costs to the economy and/or don’t seem to add up. For example, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s projections, his 2011 Medicare proposal would have increased the cost to the country of providing Medicare equivalent insurance policies by $34 trillion over Medicare’s 75-year planning period. His proposal for Social Security privatization would have added tens of billions of dollars annually to the administrative costs of Social Security.
In addition, his latest Medicare plan claims to save the same $750 billion over the next decade in Medicare as President Obama, but it does not include any of the cost control provisions. (Ryan says that he will repeal the Affordable Care Act.) He also has a budget that projects that government spending outside of Social Security and health care will be reduced to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. This is less than current spending on the military, which Representative Ryan claims he wants to maintain at or above current levels. This implies that he wants to eliminate the rest of the federal government, if it is taken seriously.
If it was not possible to find any conservatives who care about needless economic waste or blatant errors in arithmetic, the NYT should have found people with a different ideological perspective who could have made these points. Newspapers are not supposed to be used for fluff pieces for candidates, these are supposed to be written by their campaigns.
Addendum: Paul Ryan could not even figure out that it did not make sense to blame President Obama for the closure of a large GM plant in his district that took place while President Bush was still in the White House. Is this what passes as an “intellectual” in conservative circles?
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