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As he heads for the exit, his tenure in the leadership an unmitigated disaster, Paul Ryan is apparently taking to Twitter to begin his public rehabilitation campaign. Seems a bit early for that nonsense.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Ryan was lousy as a pretend wonk, lousy as a pretend leader, and lousy as Speaker. Hopefully we've seen the end of his public career.
The Self-Delusion of Paul Ryan
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Ryan was lousy as a pretend wonk, lousy as a pretend leader, and lousy as Speaker. Hopefully we've seen the end of his public career.
The Self-Delusion of Paul Ryan
Over the past 24 hours, the @SpeakerRyan Twitter account has blasted to 3.6 million followers a startlingly self-congratulatory sequence of images and videos, detailing his career over the past 20 years. Their theme: Ryan is a man of destiny, committed to reform, steeled in his “wilderness years” (yes, the sequence actually applies that Churchillian label), to deliver a triumphant victory for the American people over grubby-minded special interests.
It’s hard to reconcile this story with the world we see out our windows: a world of soaring deficits even at the top of the business cycle; a world of corporate tax cuts that have failed to deliver the promised investment boom; a world of trade wars and crashing financial markets—the worst December for U.S. equities since 1931, at the end of a year in which not one of the 15 asset classes measured by JP Morgan outperformed the consumer price index.
The fiscal conservatives out there will ask, “Hey, whatever happened to that update of the entitlement system?” Short answer: As soon as the Republicans regained the presidency in 2017, it was jettisoned entirely. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security continue unchanged.
Paul Ryan became speaker of the House of Representatives in October 2015, the first month of the 2016 fiscal year. In the last fiscal year before Ryan’s speakership, the federal government ran a deficit of $438 billion. In the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2018, the last of his speakership and a year of general prosperity, that deficit rose to $779 billion. In the current fiscal year, the deficit is expected to amount to $981 billion. In fiscal 2020, the deficit will exceed $1 trillion—even assuming there is no recession that year.
Nearly half of recent economic growth has been driven by higher levels of government spending in the Trump years—the very opposite of the promise of Ryan’s tax reform.