The Congressional Budget Office rains cold water on poor, screwy Paul Ryan

"But if you turn it this way..."

Wisconsin Representative and GOP Budget Czar Paul Ryan is becoming something of an obsession here at  "Titanic."  But his plan to privatize Medicare and shrink the government is getting serious kudos in the press.  David Brooks, in a NY Times column, has attempted to sanctify Ryan's scheme as the "adult in the room" - an earnest voice that "serious" people ignore at their peril.  (In better than average form,  he's about half right.  Attention must be paid to the GOP's extremist foray into social nihilism.)

Brooks writes: 

The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race...

Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

This assessment - described by one wag as a "wet kiss" - is typical of the "serious" face being painted in the media and throughout the Beltway on the hustle that the zealous Congressman has hatched and that the GOP has chosen as it's fiscal cris de coeur.  And as further testament to Ryan's seriousness, serious Sarah Palin has Tweeted in with, "Serious and necessary leadership has rolled out serious and necessary reform proposal." It doesn't get more serious than that!

But sooner or later reality intrudes on most of these purely ideological enterprises and in Ryan's case it's come sooner - in the form of the staid, non-partisan Congressional Budget Office beginning to crunch his numbers. Here's the scoop from TPM Muckraker:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's initial analysis of the House GOP budget released today by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is filled with nuggets of bad news for Republicans.

In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Under the so-called "extended baseline scenario" -- a.k.a. projections based on current law -- debt held by the public will grow to 67 percent of GDP by 2022. Under the GOP plan, public debt would reach 70 percent of GDP in the same window.

In other words, the spending cuts Republicans would realize in the first 10 years would be outpaced by deficit increasing tax-cuts, which Ryan also proposes. After that, debt projections under the plan improve decade-by-decade relative to current law. That's because 2022 would mark the beginning of the Medicare privatization plan. That's when, CBO finds, "most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system."

If the current Medicare system were allowed to continue, CBO found that an average 65-year-old beneficiary's costs would be only 25 percent of what it'd be in the individual private insurance market. Under the GOP plan, those costs would jump to 68 percent.

In plain English, "the gradually increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries participating in the new premium support program [the GOP's Medicare privatization plan] would bear a much larger share of their health care costs than they would under the current program."

Ryan is proposing to increase the scope of profit-driven dysfunction in our health care system and has a "plan" to drive up deficits - and he's selling it as some sort of Through-the-Looking-Glass "fiscal conservatism."  It's clear that the pathologies of the Republican party know no bounds and Ryan's rising star in the party is a testament to just how screwy the guy actually is.

Update: It may seem hyperbolic to call "screwy" a guy who, as example, goes on MSNBC's popular "Morning Joe" and receives a nearly unanimous "commendation" at their roundtable as some sort of heroic figure in the Beltway budget battle. But that's exactly what Ryan is - screwy. No more and no less, even though he may be "commended" by Scarborough and considered "serious" by Brooks and others in the elite punditry. It's far more revealing that the conspiracy-mongering demagogue Glenn Beck had Ryan on his radio show yesterday and kicked off the interview by proclaiming, "I love you!" Ryan's words back to Beck?  "I love you."

Okay - Congressman and GOP budget czar Ryan passes out Ayn Rand mega-screeds to his House staffers and offers that he "loves" Glenn Beck, who - literally - promotes the wacky world-view of the John Birch Society.

Is this a guy who is "serious" or one who you'd have second thoughts about engaging in any discussion of current politics if he was your earnestly wing-nut cousin at a family barbecue?  Ryan is definitely coming from the far side of far-right anti-government extremism.  I call him "screwy," but maybe that's giving him too much credit. Yesterday on his "Conscience of a Liberal" blog Paul Krugman dubbed him "Ryan the Ridiculous," not out of any personal animus but simply in taking apart economic projections that the Congressman uses to rationalize his budget roadmap.  Turns out the numbers are...uh...ridiculous. HERE.