Ryan's speech: ducked the tough issues and blamed others for the problems.

The party that claims to have all the answers on Medicare seemed to have no interest in sharing them with the American people at its convention on Wednesday. The session, devoted to the theme of “We Can Change It,” never went any deeper than that slogan or a few others: Reform Medicare. Strengthen Medicare. Protect Medicare.

 

All without the slightest hint of how that supposed reform or strengthening would take place, regarding that program and many others. “We will not duck the tough issues; we will lead,” said Representative Paul Ryan, in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination. “We will not spend four years blaming others; we will take responsibility.”

 

Sounds great, except that the speech ducked the tough issues and blamed others for the problems.

Mr. Ryan, who rose to prominence on the Republican barricades with a plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system, never uttered the word “voucher” to the convention. He said Medicare was there for his grandmother and mother, but neglected to say that he considers it too generous to be there in the same form for future grandmothers (while firmly opposing the higher taxes on the rich that could keep it strong). He never mentioned his plan to abandon Medicaid on the doorstep of the states, or that his budget wouldn’t come close to a balance for 28 years.

 

The reasons for that are clear: Details are a turn-off, at a boisterous convention or apparently in a full campaign. A New York Times poll last week showed that the Medicare plan advocated by Mr. Ryan and Mitt Romney was highly unpopular in the swing states of Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin. As soon as voters find out that the Republicans plan to offer retirees a fixed amount, they disapprove, clearly preferring the existing system.

 

The Romney campaign knows this, of course, so it has developed a counterstrategy that was fully on display at the convention for those who might have missed it on the trail: Don’t change the plans, but don’t talk about them, either. Instead, invent a phony attack on President Obama’s policies, which are public in full detail, and hope that voters get so confused that they throw up their hands and cast their vote on some other issue or on emotion.

 

The tactic was on display on Wednesday when Senator Marco Rubio of Florida solemnly told CBS News that Medicare will have to look different for a new generation. “Anyone who’s in favor of leaving it the way it is now is in favor of bankrupting it,” he said. Yet Mr. Ryan tried to frighten beneficiaries that evening by denouncing Mr. Obama for cutting $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for health care reform.

 

He didn’t say that the money would come out of hospitals and insurance companies, not benefits, and that he proposed exactly the same cut. He didn’t say that reform provides popular benefits to retirees, like the end of the prescription doughnut hole and improved preventive care. But the effect is clear: voters say in surveys that while they don’t like a Medicare voucher program, they don’t necessarily associate that with the Romney/Ryan ticket and are no less angry with Mr. Obama for his Medicare cuts. So far, the Democratic critique of Mr. Ryan’s plans has not substantially changed a very close race.

 

Mr. Ryan said he wouldn’t blame others, but the message was lost at a convention where the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, tore into Mr. Obama for spending too much time on his golf game and discussing his food preferences.

 

Did Mr. McConnell realize others were listening when he said that the country doesn’t know how the president would deal with the coming expiration of the Bush tax cuts? Mr. Obama has been explicitly clear about his plans: preserve the cuts for the middle class but not for the rich. Not mentioning that fact, and pretending that there is some doubt about it, is central to the Republican Party strategy of inventing an alternate reality.

 

Republicans also aren’t mentioning that their proposal to eliminate federal control of the Medicaid program for the poor would not only damage the health care of millions of struggling Americans but would also affect middle-class families who have relied on the program to pay for nursing home care.

 

The Romney/Ryan plan would eliminate the protection that keeps a married couple from impoverishing itself to qualify for nursing home coverage.

 

The party platform mentions a few Medicaid details, but not a word of the real plan has been uttered at the convention microphone. The best way to duck the tough issues, apparently, is simply to claim very loudly that you are doing the opposite.

New York Times editorial, August 29, 2012

Ryan's proposal will increase inequality and the deficit

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan and other deficit hawks are using scare tactics to achieve the long held Republican goal of dismantling Medicare and Medicaid and other social programs. Social Security cannot be far behind.

His budget bill would end the guarantee provided by Medicare and Medicaid to the elderly and the poor, which has been provided by the federal government with society’s clear assent since 1965. The elderly, in particular, would be cut adrift by Mr. Ryan. People now under 55 would be required to pay at least $6,400 more for health care when they qualified for Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

 Fully two-thirds of his $4.3 trillion in budget cuts would come from low-income programs.It would:

• cut food stamps by $127 billion, or 20 percent, over the next 10 years, increasing hunger among the poor. 
• cut Pell grants for all 9.4 million student recipients next year, removing as many as one million of them from the program altogether.
• remove more than 100,000 low-income children from Head Start
• slash job-training programs for the unemployed desperate to learn new skills.

Ryan's analysis that profligate spending on the poor and middle class is bankrupting America is a lie.

Only a decade ago the United States was running a surplus projected to be $5.2 trillion over ten years.

The current and projected deficits are largely the product of Bush era tax cuts (1.65 trillion that went mainly to the super rich) two wars ($1 trillion and counting) and the Great Recession which was caused by the Republican's manic pursuit of financial deregulation. See the graph and youtube video below for more details.

Ryan supported every single one of these deficit driving policies making his concern over the deficit impossible to swallow.

Ryan also proposes $2.9 trillion in tax cuts by lowering tax rates for the rich and corporations. People with incomes over $1 million would receive average tax cuts of $125,000.

This is not a serious deficit reduction plan. It is a budget that accelerates the nation's redistribution of wealth and income, already at historic highs, to the haves by undermining the nation's social compact with its poor and working middle classes.

There is no social security crisis

Alarmists like Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan inaccurately claim that the Social Security System is on the verge of bankruptcy. This is patently untrue.

The Social Security System is currently running a surplus and will continue to do so for several years.

As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes: ...there is no Social Security crisis. There is a foreseeable problem with the program’s long-term financing, but it can be fixed with changes that do no harm to its elderly beneficiaries. One obvious step would be to raise the cap on payroll taxes (currently $106,000) so that wealthy earners shoulder a fairer share of the burden."

Herbert's column is linked here.

Deficit reduction will perpetuate mass unemployment

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman warns that if deficit hawks like Wisconsin's Republican Congressman Paul Ryan get their way mass unemployment will continue:

What worries me most about the U.S. situation right now is the rising clamor from inflation hawks, who want the Fed to raise rates (and the federal government to pull back from stimulus) even though employment has barely started to recover. If they get their way, they’ll perpetuate mass unemployment. But that’s not all. America’s public debt will be manageable if we eventually return to vigorous growth and moderate inflation. But if the tight-money people prevail, that won’t happen — and all bets will be off.

Ryan's budget busting Roadmap privatizes social security

For weeks, Congressman Paul Ryan has been praised for being innovative, responsible and even courageous for his analysis of the nation's fiscal problems.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has a more critical view writing that the Ryan's Roadmap wouldn't balance the budget, but would provide a windfall to the wealthiest Americans while privatizing Social Security. We've seen these kind of Robin Hood of the Rich policies before and they are hardly courageous. They might not help main street, but they are sure to please Goldman Sachs.

Krugman writes:

Naturally, Ryan’s response to these revelations has been a hissy fit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — which has always, in my experience, been impeccably honest and careful in its work — does the point by point rebuttal.

But I’d like to follow up on small but revealing point: Ryan’s claim that diverting a substantial share of payroll taxes receipts into individual accounts does not constitute partial privatization of Social Security You see, there’s a history here.

Back when the Cato Institute first began pushing for individual Social Security accounts, it called its push, well, The Project on Social Security Privatization. As the Bush administration got ready to make its privatization push, however, it became clear that “privatization” polled badly. So the project was renamed The Project on Social Security Choice. And Republicans began bristling at any suggestions that they were proposing privatization, calling that a slander. Really.

Wait, it gets better. Cato engaged in Orwellian tactics — deleting the term “privatization” from older web posts and even from records of old conferences. But they were sloppy; there were traces of the true history throughout. I don’t know if they’re still continuing the practice.

In any case, Ryan’s attempt to deny that what his own movement used to call privatization is, in fact, privatization should settle the question of his sincerity.

Wisconsin's unemployed need jobs!

The nation lost another 36,000 jobs last month bringing the total job loss to 8.4 million jobs since the recession began. More than 15 million Americans are officially unemployed!

Forty percent of the unemployed have been without work for more than six months. If we include those working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment and those who have given up looking for work (discouraged workers) 29 million (16.8%) are either unemployed or unemployed. And that's only part of the story.

We are short another 2.7 million jobs, positions that are needed to absorb the 100,000 workers entering the labor market every month.

Last week Republican Senator Jim Bunning, who lost his fastball years ago, held up 100,000 Americans' unemployment checks because he claimed to be concerned about the growing federal deficit.

And Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, defended Bunning arguing unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

There are more than six unemployed workers for every job opening and the number of long- term unemployed is greater than at any time since the Great Depression. Yet Kyl feigns concern that extending unemployment benefits discourages people from working. This is truly amazing!

Republicans like Bunning and Wisconsin's own Paul Ryan, and moderate Democrats helped create the nation's river of red ink by supporting President Bush's $1.8 trillion high income tax cuts and the trillion dollar invasion of Iraq. Now they in the name of fiscal responsibility they want to ignore the more pressing 11.1 million jobs deficit. To fill that hole, while keeping up with a growing work force, requires the creation of more than 400,000 new jobs a month for three years — wildly in excess of even the most optimistic projections.

America's working people and their families are hurting and no one in Washington DC or Madison seem to be listening.

Congress is working on a very modest bill that will provide tax credits, at best an ineffective form of stimulus, to businesses that hire new workers. But as Milwaukee's Congresswoman Gwen Moore said when she voted against the bill:

I’ve talked with employers and small business owners in Milwaukee, and they resoundingly told me that the tax credits in this bill will not help them hire new people. What they need are customers – customers with money to spend. And customers need jobs.

Job creating legislation needs to be targeted to areas with persistent unemployment like we have in Milwaukee, and I’ve been advocating to make sure that we focus on the areas that need it most. This bill does exactly the opposite.

I am working with my colleagues to make sure that no one forgets about the folks in communities where unemployment is more than double the national average.

A jobs bill needs to actually create jobs.

The nation needs a real jobs bill that includes an extension of unemployment benefits which account for only 0.07% of the GDP and direct aid to state and local governments. Extending unemployment benefits is not only the right thing to do for people who are unemployed through not fault of their own, but it is one of the best forms of economic stimulus because the money will be immediately spent. Without increased federal aid to the states and local governments, they will be forced to slash their spending and lay-off even more workers, including firefighters, police officers, other first responders and teachers, further depressing consumption and private sector growth driven by government purchases.

The Wisconsin Legislature has also done very little to address the state's job gap. At a minimum it ought to help low-wage and part-time workers by passing an increase in the state's minimum wage which it has been sitting on for over a year.

A jobs bill should, as Moore said, create jobs. There is important work that needs to be done in this country, rebuilding the deteriorating infrastructure of roads, bridges, levees, parks, urban water system, and schools, and there are unemployed workers who want to work! Public investments like these would not only put people back to work, but lay the basis for long term economic growth. What are our elected officials waiting for?

When politicians say they are focused on jobs, jobs, jobs they should mean more than their own.

Focus on deficit reduction ignores unemployed

Budget deficit hawks, including Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, have been successful in shifting the nation's focus from our unacceptably high rate of unemployment to the deficit.

Noble prize winning economist Paul Krugman says the reason is partisan "politics."

The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride, and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?

The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.

For the fact is that thanks to deficit hysteria, Washington now has its priorities all wrong: all the talk is about how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there’s hardly any willingness to tackle mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction — and millions of Americans will pay the price.

The entire op ed is linked.

Jobs deficit requires bold action

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, unemployment has increased by 5.8%, the biggest increase since the Great Depression. The ranks of the long term unemployed (those laid off for more than six months) has soared to 5.6. million, also a post-depression peak. While Republicans like Congressman Paul Ryan, and Blue Dog Democrats hyperventilate about the threat of inflation and the federal deficit, America's working people are experiencing a real jobs deficit!

As the New York Times Bob Herbert notes:

Wall Street can boast about recovery all it wants, much of America remains trapped in economic hell.

It will take a monumental leadership effort by the administration and Congress to spark the kind of changes necessary to transform this wretched employment landscape. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute has written: “By itself, the private sector is unable to create jobs in the numbers the United States needs to obtain a robust, full economic recovery.”

...we need to rethink our entire approach to employment. Conventional efforts to kick-start economic growth are dwarfed by the vast scale of the problem. Bold new efforts — creative efforts — are needed.

Herbert's piece is linked.

Ryan ignors the unemployed to fight phantom foe

When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics issues its February unemployment report on Friday expect more bad news.

My back of the envelope analysis projects that employers eliminated almost 700,000 jobs in February which will cause the unemployment rate to rise to 8%, the highest rate since the recession of 1981.

In January 2009 employers slashed 598,000 jobs. It was the worst monthly job loss since December 1974, and brought job losses to 1.8 million in just the last three months, or half of the 3.6 million jobs that have been lost since the beginning of 2008.

The job loss since November is the biggest 3-month drop since immediately after the end of World War II, when defense contractors were shutting down for conversion to civilian production.

January's job loss caused the unemployment rate to rise to 7.6%, its highest level since September, 1992.

As bad as the unemployment rate is, it only tells part of the story for people struggling to find jobs. The January report also showed that 2.6 million people had been out of work for more than six months, the most long-term unemployed since 1983.

And that number only counts those still looking for work. The so-called underemployment rate, which includes those who have stopped looking for work (discouraged workers) and people working only part-time that want full-time positions, climbed to 13.9% from 13.5% in December. That is the highest rate for this measure since the Labor Department first started tracking it in 1994.

Despite these gloomy number Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (R) continues to oppose efforts to jump start the economy.

Ryan voted in lock step with his Party in opposing the stimulus package that provides help to the unemployed and their families by increasing unemployment benefits and food stamps and expanding eligibility, increasing Pell Grants, and investing in job creating infrastructure projects and education. Ryan's fiscal conservatism, incidentally, is new. When his Party was in power he voted for the 2001 and 2003 high income tax cuts which caused more than 50% of the Bush era record deficits.

Instead of voting for legislation that helps unemployed workers and their families, Ryan has waging war against an imaginary boogie man, stagflation that even he admits does not currently exist.

Nouriel Roubini, the NYU economics professor know as Dr. Gloom because he correctly predicted the current recession more than a year before it began, argues, contrary to Ryan' imaginary stagflation, that without even more aggressive federal action "this ugly U-shaped recession may turn into a more virulent L-shaped near-depression or stag-deflation (a deadly combination of economic stagnation and price deflation like the one Japan experienced in the 1990s after its real estate and equity bubbles burst."

Ryan has also criticized the President's proposed budget. "If there's anything that economists on the left and the right agree on, that supply-siders, classic economists and Keynesians agree on, you don't raise taxes in a recession," said Rep. Ryan. "This budget is raising taxes in a recession." Ryan was joined in his opposition by among others the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's most powerful trade group.

Ryan is either badly misinformed or deliberating misleading the public.

The economic stimulus package signed into law by Obama last week enacted one of the largest tax cuts ever, which made good on Obama's campaign promise to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. The first benefits from these cuts should be seen no later than April 1, 2009.

Obama has proposed increasing marginal tax rates on the richest 5%, people earning over $250,000 annually, and on hedge fund executives who have used tax loopholes to pay lower rates than middle income Americans. As Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag said, "Folks need to actually look at the budget document." To avoid raising taxes during the recession, these increases will not take effect until 2011.

The ranks of the unemployed are growing. People in Wisconsin are losing their jobs, their healthcare and their homes. It's time for Congressman Ryan to worry less about imaginary problems and phantom tax increases and devote his attention to the real problems facing Wisconsin's increasingly beleaguered working families.

Wisconsin needs economic stimulus that assists workers and the economy

Since January, the economy has shed 1.3 million private sector jobs, over half a million in the last two months. More than ten million Americans are now out of work including tens of thousands in Wisconsin.

Not only are workers losing they jobs, they are having a harder time finding new ones. The number of people who are involuntarily working part-time has dramatically increased, by 544,000 in October, bringing the two-month rise to a record 844,000. The U-6 index, the broadest measure of labor market slack, rose to 11.8 percent, tying the rate for January 1994 (when the measure was first established) as the highest on record.

The percentage of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) rose by 1.2 percentage points to 22.3 percent. It had been 17.9 percent just a year ago. And the average duration of unemployment increased by 1.3 weeks to 19.7 weeks. The two-month rise of 2.3 weeks in average duration is the sharpest increase ever.

For those remaining on the job, wages and hours of work have declined. As a result, consumer spending, the economy's engine for almost three decades, has fallen (by a 3.1% annual rate) for the first time since 1974.

The recession is causing a precipitous decline in state and local government revenues. Wisconsin is facing a record $5 billion budget deficit; New York $12.5 billion. California recently cut its spending by $7 billion.

Nationally states and local government will be forced to slash spending by $100 billion because they are required to balance their budgets. The consequent reduction in demand will make what is already a very nasty recession even worse.

Congress needs to enact a stimulus plan immediately. It should be based on three principals:

1) minimizing the human suffering that is caused by widespread unemployment and underemployment;

2) generating the biggest and quickest bang for the buck;

3) increasing investments in strategic areas that strengthen the economy in the long run.

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan's proposal to cut investment taxes misses the boat on all counts. Ryan and his Republican brethren, including President Bush, remain ideologically committed to the notion that the only acceptable federal response is to cut investment taxes. This approach is wrong on three counts.

• First, cutting capital gains and dividend taxes which are already taxed at lower rates than earned income won't help the 10 million people who have lost their jobs or those who can't find full time work.


• Second, tax cuts on non-existent profits and dividends won't stimulate the economy because unearned (investment) income has plummeted with the real economy's decline. Ryan's proposal amounts to little more than a brazen attempt to use the crisis to enact tax breaks for very wealthy people.


• Third, cutting investment taxes is ineffective because in an economy where credit markets remain tight, interests rates high and consumer demand is declining, business tax cuts won't stimulate increased investment. Businesses don't invest in research and development or new plant and equipment unless there is a demand for what they produce. Yet, consumer spending fell last quarter for the first time since the early 1970's. And that didn't include the impact of the credit crunch which hit in October. We need to stimulate demand (public and private) which will jump start the economy and allow investors to respond to the market.

The current economy demands a stimulus package that will provide immediate relief to the unemployed and provide maximum economic bang for the buck.

Most of the money from the original tax rebate stimulus was saved rather than spent thus blunting its stimulative benefit. By comparison, other options—such as infrastructure spending on deteriorating roads, bridges, mass transit and sewer systems, aid to states, increased food stamps, and unemployment insurance (UI) benefits—are much more cost-effective because they are more likely to channel money directly into the economy.

Mark Zandi from Moody’s Economy.com estimates that each dollar of refundable tax rebates only boosts GDP by about $1.26, while each dollar of infrastructure spending could provide a $1.59 boost.

Not only are many of these stimulus options more effective than tax rebates, but they also have the added benefit of assisting those hardest hit by the downturn, ensuring necessary public services are provided and tackling long-standing infrastructure needs that would lower transportation costs, decrease traffic, and increase future business productivity.

Zandi’s analysis also shows what doesn’t work as stimulus: a variety of tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals which cost over twice as much as they return to the economy. Yet, these are the very breaks that Congressman Ryan and President Bush support.

The Congress needs to shift its focus from Wall Street to Main Street and craft a stimulus package that grows the economy from the bottom up, provides emergency aid to states and local government and invests in the nation's infrastructure. Such an approach will not only create jobs and help those who need it the most, but prevent state and local spending cuts that would make the recession worse and have the added benefit of rebuilding the nation's deteriorating infrastructure creating the basis for long term economic growth and a shared prosperity.

The time to act is now!

Ryan health plan raises taxes and protects insurance and drug companies

On May 21, Congressman Paul Ryan released his “Roadmap for America’s Future”, which includes a health insurance reform proposal that is nearly identical to the one proposed by Senator John McCain.

The proposal has been widely praised by Republican commentators and has elevated Ryan's status among the party's elite. Local talk show radio hosts have used the proposal to promote Ryan's long shot vice presidential candidacy.

Ryan's health care proposal is neither new or courageous. If adopted, it would move the country further away from quality, affordable health care for everyone.

It starts by adopting McCain’s proposal to count the value of any employer-provided health insurance as taxable income. The average comprehensive family health insurance policies cost at least $10,000 a year. So families would have to pay taxes on this amount added to their regular wages.

What will they get in return? A tax credit or payment of $5000 for a family so they can buy their own insurance. What a deal! You pay more taxes and get a credit that buys at best half the cost of a good family health insurance policy. This is health care reform?

Ryan adds other measures as well: the virtual elimination of state standards for health insurance policies, promotion of Health Savings Accounts (which means high yearly deductibles with pre-tax income—if you have enough), and totally inadequate access for those with pre-existing conditions to get the health insurance they need in the private “market”.

Remarkably, Ryan has little to say about controlling spiraling health care costs which are at the root of the nation's health care crisis.

Ryan only real proposal aimed at controlling health care inflation is to provide the public with more information about doctor and hospital pricing. Economists call this increased transparency. And who could argue with that?

But this is not a new idea and it won't reduce rising health care costs because it does not address the primary cause-the market dominance of the for profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies and the profit maximizing behavior of non profit health care providers that raise costs and distort resource allocation.

Economist Robert Kuttner who studies the inefficient U.S. health care system has observed:

"The extreme failure of the United States to contain medical costs results primarily from our unique, pervasive commercialization... Profits, billing, marketing, and the gratuitous costs of private bureaucracies siphon off $400 billion to $500 billion of the $2.1 trillion spent, but the more serious and less appreciated syndrome is the set of perverse incentives produced by commercial dominance of the system."

Ryan's proposal leaves this entirely dysfunctional and inefficient structure that is dominated by insurance, pharmaceutical and large oligopolistic health care providers intact.

The Ryan-McCain approach to health care “reform” is topsy-turvy. It does not improve the current unfair, inefficient, and unsustainable health care system. Instead, it proposes to subject even more people to the tyranny and capriciousness of insurance industry dominated health care. It leaves families dependent on the mercy of insurance companies and their insatiable appetite for profit. It presumes that quality of health care will improve, but leaves that to the magical workings of the “market”. It shifts even more costs to health care consumers without a real mechanism for reducing health care costs.

"I suppose this is a good proposal if you want John McCain to choose you as his Vice Presidential running mate,” said David Newby, President of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. “But if you want health care reform which guarantees that everyone will have affordable access to the quality health care they need, you’d better look elsewhere. We don’t need Ryan/McCain tinkering with our broken health care system: we need broad reform which guarantees that everyone in America gets the health care they need, regardless of income or health status.”

Nothing new about Ryan's voodoo economics

First District Congressman Paul Ryan is generating a lot of publicity for proposing "A Road Map for America's Future."

It's not surprising that Republican insiders have enthusiastically praised Ryan's proposal. Their electoral prospects are bleak because their presumptive nominee, John McCain, is running as the heir to President Bush's failed and unpopular presidency. But the mainstream media has also parroted this unwarranted praise.

Ryan's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op ed on his proposal was entitled "A blueprint to address our financial crisis now." But if you are looking for fresh ideas on how to respond to the sub prime crisis, the explosion of home foreclosures, the bursting of the real estate bubble and the financial meltdown that followed, you will be disappointed. There is nary a word here.

Instead, Ryan resurrects the traditional Republican bogey man,"the explosion of entitlement spending" as the "greatest threat to our nation's long term economic health."

He takes aim at Social Security and Medicare, the two most successful social welfare programs in U.S. history, using chicken little actuarial assumptions that manufacture a crisis designed to undermine popular support. (This will be the focus of separate article/blog.)

These are hardly new conservative targets. Social Security has been a focus of Republican opposition since the 1930s when conservatives opposed the creation of our national retirement and disability insurance program. Republicans also opposed establishing Medicare in 1965 arguing that it would lead down the slippery slope of national health care

The facts, of course, tell a much different story about the causes of the nation's deficits.

President Bush's high income tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 with Ryan's support are responsible for fully 47% of this decades (2001-2011) record deficits according to Congressional Budget Office data.

The $10 billion a month war in Iraq, another failed Bush policy supported by Mr. Ryan, the war in Afghanistan and homeland security account for an additional 37%.

Entitlements, only 9%.

Ryan's solution-more upper income tax cuts, including the elimination of capital gains, dividend, estate taxes and corporate income taxes- are neither bold or new.

They are a continuation of Bush's high income tax cuts.

Capital gains and dividend taxes which Ryan proposes we eliminate have already been slashed to much lower rates (15%) than earned income (35%). As a consequence, hedge fund managers who make billions of dollars managing other wealthy people's money, pay lower tax rates that auto workers, nurses and secretaries.

Warren Buffet, the third-richest man in the world, acknowledged this when he criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary or cleaning lady. Mr. Buffett reports that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made in 2006, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent.

The inheritance tax , another Ryan target, doesn't even kick in unless an estate has more than $2 million in assets. Only one percent of American estates, mainly the Rockefeller, DuPont, Vanderbilt and Kennedy's heirs, pay this tax. Ninety-nine percent of estates pay nothing.

There is no evidence that reducing these taxes leads to increased productive investment. Mr Buffett argues the opposite-that the Bush high income tax cuts have accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurts the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation.

Ryan also proposes reducing the number of income tax rates from five to two, and reducing marginal rates. He resurrects the long discredited argument that the revenue the federal government loses, estimated at $5 to $7 trillion, will be more than replaced as the economy grows and generates additional taxes.

George Herbert Walker Bush called this "voodoo economics" when it was proposed by President Reagan in 1980. The huge Reagan deficits which nearly tripled the national debt proved him right. Even N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, a proponent of tax cuts who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in the Bush White House. projects that every $1 trillion in tax cuts adds $830 billion to the national debt.

The Congressional Budget Office in a study published under conservative, economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin's leadership, estimated that tax cuts would at best stimulate enough economic growth to replace only 22 percent of lost revenue in the first five years and 32 percent in the second five. On pessimistic assumptions, the growth effects of tax cuts did nothing to offset revenue loss.

Ryan also calls for eliminating the corporate income tax and implies that it is responsible for the nation's sluggish economic growth. The facts again suggest a different story.

In the 1950 and '60 when the United States had its highest post-World War II growth rates, the nation had much higher marginal income and corporate tax rates.

The federal government invested these revenues in its people through the GI Bill, the National Defense Education Act (1958), and the expansion of higher education; in its infrastructure. including the largest public works program in the nation's history, the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act; and into research and science, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. We can thank the former for satellites, Tang and TV dinners and the later for the Internet.

These strategic investments created the human capital, the ideas for new consumer products and capital goods and the infrastructure that stimulated increased productivity, economic growth, increased wages, and the growth of the American middle class.

There is nothing bold, courageous or new in a proposal that amounts to cutting taxes on the richest Americans. The United States has pursued this course for almost thirty years. The result has been declining or stagnate wages for 80% of the country's workers, anemic growth, rising inequality, deteriorating public schools, financially strapped public universities and colleges, 47 million without health care, record deficits and a huge increase in the national debt.

Ryan's proposal to cut the taxes of the wealthiest American is neither bold or courageous. It is simply another version of voodoo economics.