Dean Baker is talking about you:
I want to join those in commending Representative Ryan, but for a slightly different reason. Representative Ryan has provided a valuable service to the country by tossing out piece of warmed over dreck, that calls for a massive upward redistribution from the nation’s workers to the rich. This is clear to anyone who reads it.
***The reason why this is so useful is that there is nothing in the Ryan plan that has not been circulated in policy circles for decades. Almost everything in the plan has been tried and failed. The plan ignores obvious economic realities, such as the bubble-induced recession that has left 25 million people unemployed or underemployed. It doesn’t lay a glove on the rich and powerful, while threatening to undermine the limited economic security enjoyed by tens of millions of middle class families.
Yet many pundits will applaud the plan as brave, innovative and creative. In making these pronouncements these pundits will immediately reveal themselves as worthless hacks who either lack the ability or desire to do their own thinking. Their endorsement of the Ryan plan will be like a scarlet letter permanently marking them as someone who has no place in a serious policy discussion. For this reason we owe Mr. Ryan a real debt of gratitude.
Pretty much.
Dave
Ryan’s plan is horseshit. And fuck Sully for acting like it is a “serious” plan. The pisser is that we all can come up with a real plan that actually works. Here’s mine. It’s a sad state of affairs when anyone with access to the internet and five minutes of time to spend playing with a widget can craft a more serious budget that a leading Republican in the House.
Johannes
THIS. I had forgotten, in Sully’s defense of basic human rights and earth-bound logic during the Bush Reign of Error just what an eager Thatcherite he is, and how happy is is to export pain onto those less fortunate for him in the name of a principle that has been tried and found wanting repeatedly. He’s not insane–which is enough to drum him out of modern conservatism–but he is often unbearably smug and comfortably wrapped in the folds of his own entitlement.
alwhite
Napoleon
Weisberg is supporting the Ryan plan?
BR
@Dave:
This.
And you picked basically what I would have picked. Except just for kicks I would have wanted to add a “reduce military spending by 5% per year for two decades”.
Dave
@BR: I was hoping for the “Put Republicans in dunk tanks and charge $10 a ball” option. That would likely be all we’d need.
PeakVT
Silly Sully is a menace to the Republic. But to be fair, most pundits are.
Whenver somebody gets around to fixing the link to the Daily Douchebag, please move it to the “Blogs We Monitor and Mock” section.
General Stuck
You know who else was brave, innovative and creative?
General Goldilocks
Xenocrates
Well said, Mr. Cole, and we must all hope that you are correct. I would really like to know how it is that the deficit, 30 years from now, is so much more important than getting America back to work. It’s amazing how good the Rethugs are at disguising the REAL problems facing this country. Screw them, and all their enablers. Baker has it right; they are all irredeemable pieces of shit.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
I can’t be the only one who thinks The Atlantic is better off for Sully no longer being there. Now if only they would get rid of McMegan…
General Stuck
Maybe we should just start calling Ryan – Little Big Man
Sentient Puddle
On that note, another fun fact is that Ryan’s proposal repeals the financial reform bill of last year. Because clearly, making it easier for big banks to fail and demand bailouts helps reduce our deficit!
I haven’t really read through what his proposals for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are, but I think it’s safe to say that they’re also moronic.
Jack
I recently stopped reading Sullivan (when he returned from his illness-induced hiatus) because he has turned into a pathetic Marie Antoinette-like figure.
It’s amazing how people forget, if they ever knew, what it’s like to not have health care security, income security, and hope for the future of yourself and your family.
nepat
Finally. And amen.
piratedan
c’mon guys, we all know that taxes never solved anything, kinda like violence, y’know?
Waldo
Yep, the plan is courageous — in the same way a purse-snatching in broad daylight is courageous.
The chief difference being that few people stand around applauding the latter.
Erik Vanderhoff
Dean Baker makes me smile.
NonyNony
@Dave:
OMG.
We have a way to balance the budget right here.
Constitutional amendment time people –
For 3 months out of every year (June, July and August) Congressmen and Senators shall be required to attend daily events in their home state/district where attendees will be allowed to pay a fee of no less than 0.1% of their total income to hurl rotten fruit and/or boneless meat at their legislators. Senators and Congressmen are required to attend these events for 7 days a week, 8 hours a day over the course of this 3 month period for no compensation outside of their Congressional salaries. Revenues are paid directly to the Treasury and added directly to the general fund.
I smell a winner here – this is the kind of amendment that could pass with full-on Teabagger support. Which of them wouldn’t want to fly to Nancy Pelosi’s district and hurl a rotten tomato at her? I could see political junkies taking summer tours through the country just to throw fruit at the mugs of every politician that has pissed them off over the last year – think of the TOURISM REVENUE! (Of course this might provide a perverse incentive for states to come up with the most obnoxious representatives they can to draw the biggest crowds in the summer, but they seem to be doing that already without the incentive, so I doubt it would hurt).
This needs to happen. For so many reasons this needs to happen.
eemom
@Johannes:
fixeteth
Captain Howdy
Why is Sullivan considered a serious thinker in the first place? What are his economics bona fides? When has he shown the slightest evidence that his warmed-over opinions are based on anything beyond Reagan-love ?
Joe Beese
Digby sees the Ryan plan as a way to make the Catfood Commission’s recommendations the new middle ground.
4tehlulz
God knows that the scarlet letter of Iraq War support was devastating to the chattering class. You would think these n00b pundits would have learned from that.
Roger Moore
Great, John. Now you just have to move Sully from your Blogroll to your “Blogs We Monitor And Mock As Needed” list to show that you actually mean it.
Comrade Javamanphil
@NonyNony: Frankly, I’d pay double to hurl the same stuff at most any member of the pundit class.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@4tehlulz:
If only. Instead we got “wrong for the right reasons” and “Right for the wrong reasons”, and thus the serious people were still serious, the unserious hippies were still unserious hippies, and we’re about scheduled for another redux of that right now.
Being correct on any issue in this country is not only political detriment, but grounds for expulsion and possible purging.
General Stuck
@Joe Beese:
The Catfood Commission is past history, dead as Franco, and without producing an official report. It only lives in certain quarters of the liberal fever swamp.
lacp
Along with Naked Capitalism, Dean Baker’s Beat the Press is an email I always enjoy getting.
MagicPanda
90% of the time, I just don’t get the Sullivan bashing, but I am 100% with you on this one. His fulsome praise of the Ryan plan would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
Mike in NC
If Michelle Bachmann endorsed the Ryan budget bullshit, Sully would do a 180 and praise her as the 2nd coming of Margaret Thatcher. What a useful idiot.
Ana Gama
@Mike in NC: Well, Palin is endorsing it. Let’s see his reaction to that.
Evinfuilt
Why can’t we get someone “serious”to come it with a truly progressive budget plan. I would love to see a full dog and pony show that shows progressive ideals. A budget that rewrites the entire tax code back. That puts a proper safety net back in place. Like Ryans it doesn’t have to happen, but we can start negotiating from there to clinton levels instead of from insane to insane.
And yes, a want a magical unicorn too.
PeakVT
Latest from Wisconsin:
Precincts D. Prosser J. Kloppenburg
3620/3630 738,228 50% 738,368 50%
eemom
@General Stuck:
but General — let us pause for a moment to fully appreciate the extent to which Beese’s obsessive Obama-hatred has evolved into full fledged paranoia.
As we all know, the Catfood Commission was Obama’s evil plot with the rich to stick it to everybody else. The Ryan plan as “a way” to make Catfood work means……..Obama is secretly the author of the Ryan plan!
Lord have mercy, is there no end to the cunning ingenuity of this evil eleventy-dimensional chess playing Kenyan devil??
singfoom
But but but, you can’t call Ryan’s proposal not serious when he’s “putting his political life on the line”!!!
You have to offer your own plan or you’re just shooting down his.
YOU DARN MEAN LIBRULZ!!!
Ok, I’m done concern troll channelling. This plan is complete horseshit and will accomplish nothing. It’s just thing to toss out to the base and the public so they can see the Republicans are “doing something” and talking about “ideas”.
Sure, it doesn’t matter that like the quote in the OP that all of this has been tried before and failed. That’s not the point. The appearance of serious thinking substitutes for actual thinking.
Par for the course when the Republican party has renounced reason and scientific inquiry as “liberal”.
FlipYrWhig
@Joe Beese: If Digby wrung her hands any more she’d be a mangle.
Montysano
@Sentient Puddle:
Oh for fuck’s sake… seriously? That reform bill, as passed, was a watered-down POS with no teeth whatsoever.
FlipYrWhig
@eemom: I noticed that too. It’s all contrived by Glenn Beck’s “oligarh” cabal, presumably.
b-psycho
@Mike in NC: Wouldn’t be surprised, really. He seems to mistake overwrought veering between contradictory ideals for careful, open-minded reasoning.
FlipYrWhig
@Evinfuilt:
Good idea, and I would be all for it. How about a House Progressive Caucus budget? Get it out there, make the rounds of the talk shows, tout what’s so great about it, and when it isn’t implemented in its entirety, stick it in a drawer for the next time.
FlipYrWhig
@b-psycho:
A friend of mine in high school had an old car with a primitive kind of cruise control. If you set it at 40, it would accelerate to like 50, and then coast down to 30, and then accelerate again, etc. So on average it was 40, but it was constantly lurching around and totally unsafe. Much like Sullivan.
4tehlulz
@Evinfuilt: Response = Legitimacy.
Giving the Ryan proposal any sort of response other than “SHITSUX GTFO” is a mistake.
cat48
I’ve had it with Ryan squealing “We do not have a Revenue Problem!!!!!” Doesn’t make it true, you Bastard!
Librarian
Sully just posted very positively about the Stiglitz article on inequality- without one trace of the irony that the Ryan plan that he loves so much will make that same inequality much worse. Does he have multiple personality disorder, or what?
jstokes
Sully is interesting for his ability to sometimes consider alternatives and points of view not his own. But that virtue is mostly overcome by his inability to do his own thinking aka due diligence. If you’re going to intone about balanced budgets and fiscal discipline, you’d better read the bottom line and at least know how to read a spreadsheet as well as balance sheet. Basic math. Also knowing some basic political and economic history would work (such as Dean Baker refers to). All of the “solutions” referred to in Ryan’s plan have been tried, especially under Bush (2001-2009) and failed spectacularly.
Why I stopped reading him a few months ago has less to do with his alternative viewpoint and more to do with his inability to rationally go into details with numbers based on empirical reality. (You know, the CBO and any other reality-based analysis). That problem extends down to the younger conservatives that post frequently at his site. Finally, its the element of policy hysteria in his shtick that is just not very interesting. I recall him ranting emotionally and practically launching himself off his seat on Bill Maher’s show in 2003-2005 defending the Iraq war. Two years later he was on the other side of the fence calling Bush a war criminal.
A few months ago he got back from sick leave similarly ranting about Obama’s lack of courage in confronting the national debt/deficit. Same lack of in-depth knowledge. Same emotional immaturity. It gets old.
Jim Pharo
I think Digby is quite right. Once again, the other side is simply playing at a higher level than we are. The Catfood Commission is the obvious fall-back postion here, which is wouldn’t be if the Dems in Congress had proposed a budget that slammed the rich and promised to increase aid to the poor. But such a thing will never happen on our side. So we drift ever further to the right…
Without elected liberals, we’re going nowhere…
Davis X. Machina
@Librarian: I think his preferred approach to inequality is based on homeopathic principles…
rickstersherpa
Since we often have bashed him, lets give praise where praise is due. I give the floor to Senator Baucus (who by the way catches a what to me is a critical point that the solons Sully, Brooks, and Weisberg thought was to tawdry to notice, about the crony capitalist nature of Ryan’s plan).
Senator Baucus, curtesy of Steve Benen’s blog.
“Independent experts agree the House Plan would make deep cuts to the Medicare benefits seniors count on,” said Baucus. “It would end Medicare as we know it and funnel Medicare dollars directly into private insurance companies’ pockets. Under the House plan, seniors’ coverage would be cut drastically, benefits would no longer be guaranteed and seniors’ costs would skyrocket. We can’t allow the House to balance the budget on the backs of seniors and we won’t — not on my watch.”
And Dean Baker goes into how a seniors would need to cough up an additional $30,000 a year, or more than 3,000 dollars a month to fund a private insurance plan bought with Ryan’s magic unicorn voucher, something that either Jacob Weisberg did not notice or apparently thinks is just fine. With liberals like him, who needs conservatives.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/representative-ryan-proposes-medicare-plan-under-which-seniors-would-pay-most-of-their-income-for-health-care
Butch
There are actually two articles on Slate in praise of the Ryan plan, and the other one is just as bad.
SFAW
General Stuck –
Jack Crabb was a hell of a lot smarter and more resourceful than Ryan ever was or will be.
Now if only Ryan’s plan would suffer the same fate as Mulligan’s character did …
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
BLAH BLAH BLAH I CAN’T HEAR YOU WITH MY FINGERS IN MY EARS BLAH BLAH BLAH
Dennis SGMM
Expat Sullivan has either failed to notice, or he’s ignored, the fact that the UK’s adoption of an austerity program last Summer has not had a salutary effect on its economy. The OECD recently lowered its prediction for economic growth in the UK to 1%. One percent, folks; hardly a fucking boom. I suspect that as long as the shared sacrifice so dearly beloved by the punditocracy is shared only by the middle class and below it will be just fine.
AB
Baker’s post does a great job articulating the thoughts I had when this plan was announced. One thing that bugs me about him, though, is how he trots out “this person was wrong about X, so they have no standing to discuss Y.” That makes enough sense when Y proceeds from X, but I swear, every other Beat The Press post is whining about the style guidelines at the Washington Post or New York Times not calling for every instance of Ben Bernanke’s name to be followed by “who missed the housing bubble.”
Roger Moore
@Jim Pharo:
I think you’re overthinking it. The Republicans are doing what they always do: looking for justification for the action they want rather than solutions for the problems we have. The answer they’re looking for is tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and cuts to social programs, and they’re going to keep bitching until they get their program passed. When everyone ignored the catfood commission, they went with their next step, which was to propose even more drastic cuts themselves. There’s no deep planning, just nonstop demands for the same things.
Kirk Spencer
@Sentient Puddle:
You don’t have to read through them, just look at the demands of the past decade. Yep – privatize them. Turn them into – or over to – private corporations.
Xecky Gilchrist
Their endorsement of the Ryan plan will be like a scarlet letter permanently marking them as someone who has no place in a serious policy discussion.
And yet, that same endorsement might as well be a “You must be this tall to ride” sign for the ranks of the punditry.
SFAW
He prefers to focus on the Greek economy.
Bob
Thank you Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/#
Paul Ryan was already unserious the first time around anyway. It’s like Republicans suddenly discovered there was a problem and they’re throwing horseshit solutions out and getting recognition for showing up. This is why we shouldn’t be giving out participation trophies for kids.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@FlipYrWhig:
Yup. And you just read the latest episode of Digby Downer – womp waaaaaaaah.
SFAW
Why is that a problem? It’s no different from the ethos of the (incompetent) scientist who works backwards from the answer he/she wants, and selects data to support it. If that’s not a Rethug mindset, I don’t know what is. Especially considering most Rethugs equate “science” with “devils magically causing shit to happen for reasons I don’t understand nor care to”.
Dennis SGMM
Has anyone bothered to ask the oh-so-serious Congressman Ryan for a list of insurance companies that would provide Medicare-equivalent coverage to someone 65 or older for $8,000? There aren’t any? How unserious.
Tom Q
@singfoom: “You have to offer your own plan or youâre just shooting down his.”
Sorry to go all Godwin, but don’t you get the feeling, if our press was around during the early days of the Reich, any liberal who objected to internment camps would have been asked, “So, what’s YOUR plan to solve the Jewish problem?”
SFAW
Or, to quote Niemoeller:
“First they came for the supporters of Ryan’s serious/courageous budget proposal, and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t support Ryan’s proposal.
But after they got rid of all those imbeciles who supported it, the country got a whole lot better and more rational. And I’m OK with that.”
Roger Moore
@Tom Q:
The flip side, is that it isn’t actually very hard to come up with a sane counter-proposal. As EDK pointed out yesterday, you can do much better than Ryan by returning taxes and defense spending to Clinton era rates. Boom, problem goes away without requiring any unicorns. The only thing between us and that solution is the
Whiny Toddler PartyGOP.b-psycho
@AB:
When the head of the Federal Reserve — a position where you’re expected to know about these things — is someone who completely ignored it, yet keeps their job, I can only imagine how frustrating it is to an economist that didn’t miss it.
Bernanke is the GOP’s guy, and shitty at the job. Yet Obama didn’t can him. If the purpose of Baker’s blog were more expansive, I imagine he’d mix up the “why isn’t WaPo pointing out that this guy should be fired?” with “why hasn’t Obama fired him?”.
Ana Gama
@Librarian:
Maybe we should refer to him as Sybil. Seems appropriate lately.
Suffern ACE
@Kirk Spencer: I’m actually fine with that. They WERE private corporations and not well managed ones at that.
Kirk Spencer
@Suffern ACE: No, they weren’t. They were GSEs. There is a very large difference between that and a private corporation.
Poorly managed? In some ways, yes, though it’s worth noting they were doing quite well till various bills removed oversight and started pushing the need for profit over their original mission.
daveNYC
@jstokes:
Exactly this. His lack of knowledge, and inability to actually run the numbers/think logically means that a lot lot of his posts are just ‘wow, idea x is really interesting and should be considered seriously’. This makes him worthless as a pundit, since he adds nothing to the discussion, and it also means that he will never lack for work as a pundit, since he will never ever call out a bad idea to the point of burning any bridges.
SFAW
What’s funny about this is that you could say the same about Glenn Reynolds. Especially the “worthless” part.
Actually, it’s probably true about a lot of right-wing pundits. But not Pantload – he comes up with the stupidest fucking ideas all on his own. (Well, if you don’t count that he asks his “readers” to do his research for him.)
AB
@b-psycho:
Maybe so. I just feel like it treads dangerously close to substituting discrediting the source for discrediting the argument. If the Fed issued a report that said the sky was blue, I’d be utterly unsurprised to wake up the next morning to Baker griping about our credulous media and how Bernanke’s inherent wrongness about everything calls for independent verification of the sky’s non-greenness.
Baker writes a lot of good stuff, and I even agree with most of it! I just think he dilutes the strength of his arguments with this particular hangup.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Librarian: It’s part of the compassionate conservative vibe. No, you don’t stop inflicting pain on the working classes, you just offer compassion. That is when you aren’t calling them no good lazy moochers.
Judas Escargot
@Captain Howdy:
You could ask the same of any of our current punditry, for the most part.
Krugman (who actually has, you know, some domain knowledge here) does an excellent job dismantling Ryan’s “plan” over the course of a few posts, in a way that anyone should be able to read and understand.
Will a single pundit address those points, sincerely, logically, empirically? No, of course not. Krugman’s an icky leftist. Ewww, cooties.
SFAW
Fixed. We are talking about Krugman, after all.
Silver
On drugs, I favor a co-pay that is a percentage of the actual cost of the drug. 20 percent would be a good start. Once you do that, patients have a real incentive to forgo the latest innovation and pick a generic.
You have to be a real evil motherfucker to write that in Sullivan’s position.
pablo
Here’s how I would personally like to see Ryan slog his budget plan.
Calouste
@Roger Moore:
+1
TenguPhule
Support for the Ryan plan should be regarded as grounds for justifiable homocide.
Calouste
@Silver:
I always thought that Maggie Thatcher was Sully’s role model, but having recently watched Wilde, I now think it’s Bosie Douglas.
Mnemosyne
@Silver:
Hey, Sully, what about those of us who have to take drugs that don’t have a generic, or where the generic doesn’t work? My boss had a severe allergic reaction to the generic for one of her medications and has to take the name brand.
Let me guess — if we didn’t want to have to pay, we shouldn’t have developed allergies to things.
Judas Escargot
@Mnemosyne:
“The Successful” don’t have allergies.
Duh.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@TenguPhule:
I don’t think the murder of someone because they’re gay can ever be justified.
b-psycho
@Silver: Someone should ask him what he’d think of a system where drugs that take advantage of tax-funded research were completely barred from gov’t monopoly grants a.k.a. “patents”…
mai naem
Sully doesn’t care, he is the rich. He is the one who its being redistributed to and he doesn’t give a crap because its all about him. Screw everybody else. Ofcourse when it had to do with his immigration status and having AIDS, we couldn’t tell him to get screwed.
singfoom
@Mnemosyne: Of course, that doesn’t even bring up the fact that major pharmaceutical companies PAY generic drug makers NOT to bring a generic to market, to extend the life of the cash cow premium drug.
And it’s completely legal, thanks to the SCOTUS.
Linky