What happens when a politician is more honest than his critics.
Editorial
The Wall Street Journal
8/12/2010
The immune system of the modern body politic is nothing if not resilient, and this summer all of its antibodies seem to be trained on heretofore little known Congressman Paul Ryan. That makes this a particularly instructive moment, because the attacks on the Wisconsin Republican show how deeply his radical honesty is subverting Washington’s flim-flam—to borrow a phrase.
“The flim-flam man” is what Paul Krugman called Mr. Ryan in a New York Times column last week that set a spleen-to-substance record even for him. Amid drive-by attacks on the Congressman’s ethics and integrity, Mr. Krugman savaged Mr. Ryan’s “roadmap”—his detailed, long-range proposal to equalize taxes and the size of government—as “a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.”
This might be dismissed as a familiar primal scream, except it perfectly echoes the Democratic Party’s emerging election strategy. The bills for decades of unsustainable social commitments are now coming due, especially Medicare, even as Democrats have created a vast new liability in ObamaCare. Mr. Ryan has one of the few credible plans for rationalizing the federal fisc, and his critics are so vicious because his candor exposes Washington’s illusions about the entitlement state while offering a genuine alternative. Democrats hope that demagoguing his proposals will allow them to hang on to their majorities this fall…
…The main liberal policy objection, to the extent a serious one exists, is that the roadmap would “cut working folks loose so they’ve got to fend for themselves,” as President Obama described the supposed Republican economic philosophy at a Chicago fundraiser last week.
Mr. Ryan wants to remodel Medicare by giving seniors a modified voucher to buy private insurance. Mr. Orszag, et al., concede that the roadmap would make the entitlement permanently solvent, as confirmed in an analysis by their icon the Congressional Budget Office, but they claim that the amount of the voucher would not keep pace with rising health-care costs.
This is an odd complaint for an economist like Mr. Orszag, given that more market discipline and consumer choice in health care would drive down costs as it does in all other dynamic sectors of the economy…
The entire editorial is at the Wall Street Journal.
