Paul Ryan On Crony Capitalism

At the end of a predictably dull and meandering column in last weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan launched into an attack on crony capitalism.

She began by fingering Franklin Raines and James Johnson for having taken advantage of Fannie's and Freddie's GSE status to reap outsized bonuses while wrecking the companies and leaving them to be seized by the government at a cost to taxpayers of some $140B.

Next, Noonan mentions Paul Ryan as having the good sense to identify, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, such crony capitalism as what occurred at the GSEs.

He railed against 'corporate welfare,' which is an accurate charge.

Perhaps his most concise line, as recounted by Noonan, was this one,

"The 'true sources of inequity in this country are the corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless. The real class warfare that threatens us is 'a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.' "

Noonan concluded her piece opining,

"If more Republicans thought- and spoke- like this, the party would flourish. People would be less fearful for the future. And Mr. Obama wouldn't be seeing his numbers go up."

She's right. Thus my anger at recent news concerning my own Congressman, Leonard Lance's involvement in another bid to give more power to Fannie.

Ryan's remarks explain why those who consider themselves of common interest with the Tea Party, like me, grow disgusted with even elected Republicans. In my state, the GOP is far more liberal than it is further west. My own Representative clearly embodies that against which Paul Ryan rails.

I wonder if Ryan even acknowledges Lance and, if so, what he thinks of my Congressman.

Ryan's clear speaking and thinking suggest he could, if he has the stomach for it, eventually occupy the Oval Office. He has the sensibilities and intellect to get there. But the rest of what is required to be elected, including the sort of character assassination being visited upon Herman Cain this week by anonymous parties, could be too much for the Wisconsin Representative.

Paul Ryan's Formal Refusal To Run for President

I was busy ferrying a friend from his car's dealership to his home last night, for which he bought me dinner. So I missed seeing any Fox News programs and, thus, also missed coverage of Wisconsin Congressman's official declaration that he won't be entering the GOP presidential race for 2012.

It wasn't until I read this morning's Wall Street Journal editorials that I learned of this recent development. In concert with that editorial's sentiments, I'm happy that Ryan plans to remain in the House, assuming he wins his district again next year (for the eighth time).

Much has been made of Ryan's articulate manner of explaining the necessity of entitlement and tax reforms. But, as we've seen from Wonderboy, there can be an actual loss of force in the Oval Office, whereas being a powerful committee chairman in the House or Senate can be a force multiplier, for good or bad.

In Ryan's case, were the Senate and/or Oval Office to be won by the GOP in 2012, he would definitely be able to extend his influence from his House position.

It's an irony of the American system that a Representative like Ryan has only to win a single district in order to be returned to the House and, if in the majority, have great effect on national policy. Even being a Senator means, for many states, a much more challenging and expensive campaign just to, again, be one of many in a legislature with not really a tremendously larger influence than a Representative, unless the Senate is split closely enough to make every Senator the potential 60th or 41st vote.

When I was growing up in central Illinois, both GOP Congressional leaders lived within 20 miles of me. Bob Michel was the ineffectual House GOP Minority leader, while Everett Dirksen had the same position in the Senate. Neither ever ran for president, but both had surprising influence as a result of holding fairly safe seats for decades in a then solidly-GOP downstate Illinois.

But running for and winning the White House is an entirely different matter. Especially when there is an incumbent, no matter how inept and unpopular. The requirements of running a national campaign is probably not where you want said candidate to get his/her executive experience. And that could well be what happens to Paul Ryan, were he to have acceded to the requests of the GOP fundraisers who tried to recruit him into the race.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I'm reminded of Texas Senator Phill Gramm's run for president in the post-Reagan era. Though he led in money raised, Gramm never escaped the so-called 'green eyeshade' image and a sense he was, as the Wall Street Journal put it, 'running for chief accountant, rather than president.'

Ryan infuses his fiscal messages with more moral and lifestyle content, but, down deep, it's still mostly about wonkish policy details that don't actually play well in presidential campaigns.

Perhaps a different power distribution post-2012 will provide more options for Congressman Ryan. More success in his efforts to actually reverse the growth of entitlement spending. Perhaps a VP slot or a return to Madison to follow Scott Walker as governor. Or perhaps Ryan will depart the political scene, once he's successfully accomplished his work on entitlements.

But the Journal editorial was, I think, correct to congratulate him on knowing his limits and choosing to avoid the temptation of a presidential campaign, no matter how much others wish he'd have agreed.

Paul Ryan On The Latest Senate "Gang of Six" Proposal

On Tuesday evening, I caught Paul Ryan's interview on Sean Hannity's Fox News program. It was quite revealing.

I think I was most surprised and, in a way, heartened, by Ryan's reference to an old House saying,

'The other party is your adversary but the Senate is the enemy.'

And so it seems this week.

Smarmy Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, who never met a tax hike he didn't like, declares earnestly that his mix of taxes increases, called 'reform' by the suspect Conrad, entitlement 'reforms,' and spending cuts will address the country's deficit problems.

But Conrad already tips his hand by piling on other issues to what is a spending problem, not a deficit problem, per se.

What is inexplicable is why Tom Coburn joined this latest travesty.

Ryan was quite sanguine and blunt in saying that the alleged several trillion dollars of lower deficits from the Senate plan were neither clear nor specific, with no details whatsoever on what spending was to be cut. But what was clear is that the Senators are playing games, claiming cuts from 'baselines,' rather than absolute cuts. The Senate, meaning Conrad, hasn't passed a budget in 800+ days, or nearly three years.

Since the House originates funding bills, and Ryan is chairman of it's Budget Committee, I take Ryan's comments to heart. He doesn't trust the Senate, and he doesn't mention party affiliation.

Once more, I find solace in the midst of this comedy involving the debt limit by seeing the Founders' checks and balances at work.

It seems to me that Ryan sees the Senate as detached from reality, not focused on what Ryan and his freshman, Tea Party-backed colleagues, understand, which is that, more than anything else, Americans want federal spending cut.

Yes, entitlement and tax reform are good things to accomplish. But lumping them in with the debt limit and spending cuts suggests that all these items are negotiable.

I think Ryan and his House colleagues realize what Senators do not, i.e., the debt limit issue is about current and near-term spending. Not taxes or entitlements, per se.

From Ryan's answers to Hannity, it doesn't seem likely that House GOP members are interested in budging from passing a debt limit increase only upon cutting current and near-term spending significantly. Period. Rand Paul was interviewed on Sean Hannity's program last night, and his position is essentially identical to Ryan's positions. Paul castigated Conrad's so-called 'plan,' saying it's not a plan and legislation written to implement it would result in another multi-thousand-page bill finished only hours before a vote to pass it, like the stimulus and health care bills.

Right now I'm hearing Democratic blowhard Barney Frank whine and complain about House GOP members, calling them inflexible, too conservative, etc. In short, they are getting in the way of his need to wastefully spend more of your tax dollars, and whatever borrowed Chinese money he needs, too.

Thanks to the Constitution's checks and balances, Wonderboy's attempt to rush through tax increases and future spending cuts that will never occur, in order to get his debt limit increase, look unlikely to succeed.

Alan Blinder's Smear of Paul Ryan & His 2012 Budget Proposal

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a political editorial by Princeton's Alan Blinder entitled Paul Ryan's Reverse Robin Hood Budget. The piece was notable because Blinder is an economist, yet the bulk of the article is unsubstantiated political attacks on Ryan and his 2012 budget proposal.

Here's how Blinder began his screed,

"Why do I oppose Rep. Pauly Ryan's plan for reducing the federal budget deficit, the one House Republicans approved overwhelmingly last week? Let me count the ways. Actually, since there is not enough space on this page to count them all, let me just hit the highlights."

He does, however, understand the key issue, when he writes,

"The no-so-hidden agenda is clear: to shrink the government drastically."

Blinder describes Wonderboy's second, reaction budget, as "another huge improvement over the Ryan plan."

Unlike an economically-oriented piece by, say, John B. Taylor, Alan Reynolds or Brian Wesbury, Blinder simply goes political, with a few selected statistics to support whatever he is ranting over in a particular paragraph.

That's odd, since Blinder is usually given space on the Journal's editorial pages for economics pieces.

Since he didn't bother to ground his editorial in economics, Blinder may be fairly judged on simply the politics and logic of his arguments.

Looking back over the past few weeks of posts, including this one concerning irrational expectations for social spending programs, as well as posts discussing Journal editorials by Taylor, Reynolds and Phil Gramm, it's easy to see that Blinder is one of those liberals living in a dream world.

Specifically, he has fallen into the Democratic party's deception that has been underway since 1935, when Social Security began. Simply put, unsustainable social welfare promises were made by some half-witted members of Congress, to be implemented in one of the nation's, if not the world's worst-designed systems.

Once these promises had been in place for 30 years, they became immutable social compacts. Sacred promises from a federal government newly-empowered in the 1930s and by WWII.

The trouble is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as designed, were never sustainable or affordable. At best, they should have been designed as current-year funded social spending in the manner of proportional contribution, not defined benefits.

Further, they should have been billed as good-faith attempts by the federal government to help the least fortunate in the country, to the ability that the rest of the citizens could afford, modified going forward by best ideas.

Instead, we got a set-in-cement, common-pool, defined benefit approach for the ages.

Someone of Blinder's intellect and education should know better than to demagogue Ryan's plan as unfair and mean-spirited. The truth is, Ryan is right when he says that if we don't radically alter these programs now, they'll never survive another 25 years without bankrupting the US.

It's pointless to compare an existing plan which recognizes reality with 50 year old promises grounded in ignorance and false assumptions.

Irrational Expectations Concerning Medicare

Since Paul Ryan's budget was released, liberal Democrats have been howling that it will impoverish seniors while giving more tax breaks to the wealthy.

I cannot help but see this as a case in which liberals have chosen to ignore something which is quite obvious, i.e., since the 1930s, Congress has enacted three similarly- and badly-designed social welfare programs- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid- which have largely accounted for the large, uncontrollable federal spending increases which have resulted in unsustainable, unaffordable federal deficits and net externally-held debt.

Over the past week, I've heard various liberal pundits, journalists and Congress members bemoan how Ryan's plan 'will make seniors pay more for health care,' without acknowledging that the promises which have been made via the various welfare programs were always unaffordable in the long term.

For example, Social Security was intended as a safety net program for the few seniors left without private savings to fund their old age. However, once people knew of the existence of the program- surprise- they began to save less, substituting consumption for savings. Thus, a safety net was turned into an entitlement on which most seniors began to depend for old age pension income, rather than saving for it themselves.

Eighty-some years on, America has finally come to the end of the road in terms of continuing to borrow from the rest of the world to fund its social program spending.

In the meantime, I have just viewed, for the second time in a year, a 2009 program detailing the corroding infrastructure of the US. People in the program ask, rhetorically, how and why the US has let its roads, bridges, water and sewer systems become so decrepit.

That's easy.

Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid.

The fall off in large-scale civil engineering projects, except for the interstate highway system, dates, more or less, from after WWII. By the end of the 1960s, the federal government had expanded its scope, staff and spending to encompass ever more social programs, while tangible infrastructure became less important.

It's my contention that our nation has, in effect, whether explicitly or implicitly, chosen to consume its early-mid-twentieth century infrastructure, by not re-investing in it, while using the money not spent on that to fund lavish retirement and health care programs.

Medicare was never sustainable nor affordable as designed. It's a false choice to suggest that Ryan's replacement of the current open-ended, general-fund-based defined benefit approach by a defined contribution, insurance payment subsidy approach, represents an unfair or unnecessary cut in benefits to the affected.

The choice, as Ryan contends, and his Democratic collaborator, Alice Rivlin, agrees, is between this change, and the end of the program within a decade or so.

To continue to complain that Republicans are cutting benefits for seniors, the ill or poor, misses the point.

Having legislated and then promised citizens levels of social spending which were never sustainable forever, it's not realistic for liberals to voice this complaint.

To return to our Framers' views, what these three programs have done is what Jefferson believed to be the worst thing a generation could do to a following one- bequeath it a debt for money spent. In this case, it wasn't spent on infrastructure, but intangible, fleeting lifestyle expenses for several generations of Americans. Money which can't be recouped and will leave no lasting tangible trace.

Wonderboy Picks On The Wrong People

With his formal re-election campaign announced, Wonderboy has lost no time in taking shots at various and sundry people on the political scene.

On Sunday, his attack dog and political campaign manager, David Plouffe, made the round of Sunday talk shows. Among his barbs were smirking comments that Americans 'will never hire Donald Trump' to be president. He said some other rather unkind things, as well. But I found his desultory dismissal not of Trump, per se, but of American voters' preferences, insulting.

Trump may be a buffoon, but Wonderboy is still president. It's unseemly for him to arrogantly, especially through his minions, dismiss other candidates before the fact.

Then there came Wonderboy's own personal ambush of Paul Ryan. I happened to catch a clip of him being interviewed after the president's vaunted budget address yesterday afternoon. Ryan had been invited to sit in the front row, along with, from what I could see from the video, other GOP House budgetary notaries.

Instead of the 'olive branch' Ryan said he'd been told would be on offer, Wonderboy instead personally savaged Ryan's proposal in his talk.

I think this time, the First Rookie has picked on the wrong guy. Ryan is a smart, affable, self-effacing, genuinely well-intentioned Representative. He's not smarmy, nor is he some 50-year old hack.

Of all the people Wonderboy may have chosen to target, I think Ryan is not the right one. He already showed his fear of the Wisconsin Congressman way back during the infamous Blair House health care summit. If you recall, when Ryan had the camera and was in the midst of making a very telling point, Wonderboy pointedly called an aide over and began to confer, thus drawing every camera off of Ryan and to himself. He was probably telling the aide which basketball games to Tivo that evening.

My point, however, is that a sitting president running for re-election has a delicate task. He can't appear too political or mean-spirited.

Both of which Wonderboy has managed to do in just one week.

Ryan, for the record, said that instead of an olive branch, he felt he'd merely seen the 'campaigner in chief' on display yesterday afternoon.

Paul Ryan & Alice Rivlin's Defined Contribution Fix for Medicare

I have read a few references recently to Paul Ryan's and Alice Rivlin's new Medicare idea which is quite close to my own beliefs, expressed in earlier posts, that the program should never have been anything but a defined-contribution voucher approach. This National Review piece sheds more light on Ryan's and Rivlin's proposal. It reads, in part,

"Rep. Ryan has written an explanation of his approach for the Economix blog that you can find here:



In order to make good on Medicare’s promise, I’ve put forward reforms that offer future seniors the same health coverage options I enjoy as a member of Congress. My reform plan makes no changes for those 55 and older, as efforts to save this program ought not disrupt benefits for those in and near retirement. For those now under the age of 55, Medicare would provide seniors with a payment, a list of Medicare-approved coverage options and the ability to choose a plan that works best for them. The Medicare payment would be adjusted so that the wealthy receive a lower subsidy, the sick would receive a higher payment if their conditions worsen, and lower-income seniors would receive additional assistance to cover out-of-pocket costs.



It is possible that Rivlin-Ryan will prove so inadequate to providing decent coverage for Medicare beneficiaries that political pressure to make the benefit more generous will prove overwhelming, a charge that has been levied against the payment reductions under PPACA. It is also possible that a fixed subsidy and voucher-like structure will improve the cost-effectiveness of medical care. The real debate we’re having is over which approach is more likely to yield greater cost-effectiveness over time: a centralized, IPAB-driven approach or a decentralized discovery process.



I fear that Alice Rivlin and Rep. Paul Ryan are in for a bumpy ride. They are taking on deeply entrenched ideas and deeply entrenched constituencies. I’ve been told that some version of Rivlin-Ryan may become a central part of a Republican budget proposal. If that really is true, congressional conservatives will have proven those of us who’ve at various points doubted their seriousness and sincerity about reforming the welfare state wrong. We’ll see."


At issue, it seems, are two points.

One is that, left to decide how to spend scarce, defined contribution dollars from the government on their health care, people may actually choose to forgo things they'd otherwise consume if unconstrained financially.

Wow, is that a surprise?

The second is that we may just have to learn to live with overall national constraints on what government can afford to pay in subsidies to people for medical care. Not every person will be able to get the government to pay for fixing every ailment.

Which would be why it's wise to let people have control over the allocation of scarce resources for medical care provided by the government.

If people can't figure this out, then we're toast. A nation can't remain competitive when it's largest expenditures are transfer payments from younger, working taxpayers to older, retired, non-value-adding seniors.

Sorry, but that's just common sense. There's no way we can afford this notion, as I explained in this post, that the aged or retired are somehow above sharing economic sacrifices with the rest of the nation.

State of the Union Addresses

Last night was, of course, State of the Union night.

Wonderboy delivered what was described as a typical, boring, long-winded hour and a half monologue. I wasn't about to subject myself to such torture. His henchwoman, political operative Valerie Jarrett, pre-announced that he'd be talking about more spending, disguised as "investment."

Post-speech punditry this morning clearly identified the First Rookie's attempt to move to the center, pre-empt House Republicans on cutting spending, and generally aim for a Clintonesque triangulation for 2012 re-election.

No surprises there.

Here's Paul Ryan's official GOP response to Wonderboy's speech.

Ryan exhibits in this clip why he's considered an eventual potential Presidential candidate. Considering Bobby Jindahl's disastrous appearance last year, and rumors of Chris Christie's declining an invitation to be this year's respondent, the Wisconsin Congressman's consent might be considered an act of bravery.

That said, I think he does an excellent job concisely expressing the new, frugal message of Congressional Republicans.

Sarah Palin Backs Paul Ryan's "Roadmap"

Sarah Palin's plans to eventually run for the Republican presidential nomination were reinforced with her Wall Street Journal editorial on December 10th endorsing Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future.

By contrasting Ryan's Roadmap with the recent Bowles-Simpson Commission's recommendations, Palin hopes to demonstrate an appreciation for the policy nuances contained in both, as well as re-stating her conservative bona fides.

The difference between the two plans is fundamentally ideological. The former attempts to square the deficit circle by jiggering various details of existing programs- social spending and taxation- while Ryan engages in wholesale programmatic changes to provide for more individual responsibility and less borrowing and federal spending.

In fact, Palin does many a service by concisely and clearly re-stating Ryan's recommendations in just a few paragraphs. In doing so, she allies herself with those calling for an overhaul of federal social programs which exhibit such poor, 1930's era design. I've written about this in prior posts.

Social Security is surely one of the most poorly-designed old-age insurance schemes ever. It contains no total spending constraints, employs a single communal pot of so-called assets from which to play uncapped, unlimited claims, and featured no conditional payout changes based on the forecasted financial solvency and sustainability of the program.

This insane model was then carbon-copied for Medicare and Medicaid, when all three could just as easily have been designed as personal, portable defined-contribution schemes.

There's much about Palin that I don't trust in the context of her being president. But her clear-cut explication of Ryan's plan, and solid support of it probably helps the overall GOP presidential primary campaign environment by challenging other candidates to match her unequivocal endorsement of Ryan's Roadmap.

Paul Ryan's WSJ Manifesto

House member Paul Ryan (R-WI) and AEI president Arthur C. Brooks co-authored an impressive editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled The Size of Government and the Choice This Fall.

Here are some of the most illuminating passages from their piece,

"In response to what each of us has written in the preceding months, we have heard again and again that the choice we pose is too stark. New York Times columnist David Brooks (no relation) finds our approach too Manichaean, and the Schumpeter columnist in The Economist objected that, "You can have a big state with a well-functioning free market."

Data support the proposition that Americans like generous government programs and don't want to lose them. So while 70% of Americans told pollsters at the Pew Research Center in 2009 they agreed that "people are better off in a free market economy, even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time," large majorities favor keeping our social insurance programs intact. This leads conventional thinkers to claim that a welfare state is what we truly want, regardless of whether or not we mouth platitudes about "freedom" and "entrepreneurship."

But these claims miss the point. What we must choose is our aspiration, not whether we want to zero out the state. Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma's Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," reminded us that the state has legitimate—and critical—functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

This is made abundantly clear in surveys such as the one conducted by the Ayers-McHenry polling firm in 2009, which asked a large group of Americans, "Overall, would you prefer larger government with more services and higher taxes, or smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes?" To this question, 21% favored the former, while 69% preferred the latter.

Unfortunately, many political leaders from both parties in recent years have purposively obscured the fundamental choice we must make by focusing on individual spending issues and programs while ignoring the big picture of America's free enterprise culture. In this way, redistribution and statism always win out over limited government and private markets.

Why not lift the safety net a few rungs higher up the income ladder? Go ahead, slap a little tariff on some Chinese goods in the name of protecting a favored industry. More generous pensions for teachers? Hey, it's only a few million tax dollars—and think of the kids, after all.

Individually, these things might sound fine. Multiply them and add them all up, though, and you have a system that most Americans manifestly oppose—one that creates a crushing burden of debt and teaches our children and grandchildren that government is the solution to all our problems. Seventy percent of us want stronger free enterprise, but the other 30% keep moving us closer toward an unacceptably statist America—one acceptable government program at a time.

Millions of Americans instinctively look to our leaders for a defense of our culture of free enterprise. Instead, we get more and more publicly funded gewgaws and shiny government novelties to distract us. For example, the administration stills touts the success of programs such as "Cash for Clunkers" in handing out borrowed money to citizens while propping up a favored industry. Yet Rasmussen found 54% of Americans opposed the program (only 35% favored it). Plenty of people may have availed themselves of that notorious boondoggle, but a large majority understand we were basically just asking our children (who will have to pay the $3 billion back) to buy us new cars—and that's not right.

More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship."

There are several things to admire about this editorial.

First, Ryan and Brooks explicitly acknowledge some role for government in maintaining minimal social programs for economic safety nets. They dismiss the notion of arbitrarily dissolving existing social compacts unilaterally. But they do shine a bright spotlight on the process by which "smooth-talking politicians" rob us of liberty, one expensive program at a time.

Second, the authors note the continuing contradiction between the ever more-expensive welfare state that federal legislators are giving voters, and the voters' own preference for just the opposite.

Third, they make a very clear example of what folly programs like "Cash for Clunkers" was. They note that it simply borrowed money from foreigners, to be repaid by our children, so that some Americans could get a better deal on a car last year.

Looked at in the aggregate, recent creeping socialism by both parties in Washington is easily seen through the lens of Ryan's and Brooks' prose.

They are right to call this coming mid-term election a critically important one for voters. They can explicitly choose to remain on the path to socialism, or to stop and retrace the nation's steps toward a society of greater opportunity and freedom.

Paul Ryan: Canary In The Coal Mine?

The lead staff editorial in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago was entitled Washington vs. Paul Ryan. Very apropos.

The occasion of the piece was liberal economist Paul Krugman's calling Ryan "the flim-flam man" in his New York Times column of the prior week.

Krugman further alleged that Ryan's "roadmap" to fiscal responsibility was,

"a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America's fiscal future."

For the sin of acknowledging that Medicare is, as presently run, insolvent, and should be replaced by a voucher for purchase of insurance to provide the same services, Ryan is being crucified by Democrats, and ignored by many of his own Republican colleagues.

As with so many contemporary issues in Washington, this is one having many facets: macroeconomic, deficit, government control, and the loss of individual liberty, to name just a few.

The Journal editorial put it this way,

"In that sense, Mr. Ryan is really presenting Washington with a philosophical choice between ever-more indebted government and a plan to pay for the promises we've made while still preserving free markets and economic growth. The firehose of invective pointed at Mr. Ryan is in part an effort to scare voters and in part an effort to prevent voters from understanding that there is in fact a choice."

Ironic, in that virtually every non-partisan pundit you see on, say, CNBC, endorses Congress taking meaningful steps to address Medicare and other out of control spending. Yet, when Ryan offers realistic approaches to doing so, members of both parties react in predictably, unproductive partisan manners.

Democrats paint Ryan as a demon who is trying to destroy Medicare and old-age benefits, while members of his own party try to distance themselves from his comprehensive views and proposals for many needed government budget excesses.

Ryan doesn't confine himself to the usual 'waste cutting' solutions, but goes after the big stuff. As the quoted editorial passage notes, the real gut issues of who controls choice, how spending is done, and how services are provided.

I've argued in a prior post regarding ObamaCare that it is based on three horribly-flawed program designs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. All feature general pots of taxpayer funds out of which individuals are paid on a sort of first-come, first-served basis. Individualized accounts would have been a far more rational approach.

Unfortunately, our federal government is too-often run by people, both elected and civil service, who weren't the brightest candles on the cake, so to speak. Thus, these social welfare programs were designed and run under unrealistic assumptions of ever-increasing tax revenues and voter appetite for social spending. Not to mention ever-increasing appetites of global investors for US debt obligations.

None of these turned out to be true for as long as these programs have to run.

Whether you like Ryan's proposals or not, he deserves credit for saying what he thinks is right for the country, despite his own party members' attempt to acknowledge this. In a Congress dominated by power struggles between the parties, rather than either one focusing on lasting, sustainable solutions for serious problems involving federal deficits, spending, taxes and personal liberties, Ryan stands out as someone who is willing to take positions on issues his colleagues would prefer to ignore.

He deserves much better than Krugman's attacks. But, then, that's all Krugman seems to understand how to do.