TheMillerCircle.org

We all hope, that if for no other reason than that of promoting good mental health practices, we have some threshold mechanism operating out there in subliminal space, which serves to  separate useful public discourse, from the truly stupid ideas that get advanced periodically,  so that this imaginary “stupidity filter” keeps us from wondering whether some politicians are members of the same species.  But, however low we set the bar, members of the Republican Party find a way to gain national attention for really dumb or even dumber ideas that should have been expunged by the filter. When good elevating ideas get trumped by dumb ones, it seems like we all suffer as members of the human race, wondering whether some one of the more than 80,000 chemicals we have added to the environment didn’t finally get past the blood-brain barrier and lodge within the wrong place in the nervous system (hello Atrazine!). Instead of having our “Stupidity filter” prevent idiotic, unfettered ideas from reaching public attention and commanding an unavoidable level of discourse, the Republican machine finds a way of promoting really dumb ideas, very often coming from very dumb people. Topping the list for dumb, unfettered ideas this past week was another Republican whose budgetary genius grabbed its share of the public air waves and the naive, mainstream print media. No, it was not Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, but it could have very easily been her.  This week, however, we must take our hats off to U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, Republican (what else) of Wisconsin.

He recently proposed a plan that would cut the budget deficit dramatically by 2020, through draconian cuts in taxes and spending. Normally, one would hope that the stupidity filter would have limited the exposure of this idea, by now an ancient, but persistent Republican solution. I believe this Republican retread is now in the Old Testament. But, the Washington Post made a big deal of Ryan’s  plan and reported that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) indicated that indeed, the budget deficit would be cut in half by 2020 if government adhered to his ingenious prescription. But, in one of Paul Krugman’s best op-ed pieces in some time, he points out that the CBO only calculated the budget savings based on the decrease in government spending and did not figure in the lost Federal revenues from the tax cuts. Oops! Obligingly, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center took up the issue and made the appropriate calculations, indicating that the tax losses from Ryan’s plan would be $ 4 trillion over the next decade, so adding the two figures  together–tax cuts and cuts in government programs– gives a deficit of $ 1.3 trillion or about the same as the estimate for the current fiscal plan of the Obama administration. Ryan achieves his miracle by cutting taxes on the richest 1%, while increasing taxes on everybody else. Then too there are unspecified cuts, most of which will come later by dismantling Medicare. As Krugman points out, this is the same plan that Newt Gingrich, another genius Republican, suggested in 1995, as the Republicans assumed command and control of Congress. You will want to read Krugman’s article, as my summary here doesn’t do justice to his wit, sarcasm and simple arithmetic.

RFM