Paul Ryan’s decision to retire from the House at 48 has produced a spate of elegies. Some concluded he was no longer in sync with the Republicans’ more radical drift, others that he was sullied by his devil’s bargain wth Trump — thinking he could manage him long enough to enact his wish list without being splashed by the fallout, still others that he has become so much a creature of the swamp that he was out of step with the economically-stressed constituents of his own district and might lose his seat in November.
They night all be true. I confess I never fell for Ryan’s boyish charm, another Midwestern paladin, a Reagan-Lite whose “aw shucks” manner failed to disguise the heartlessness of his ideology. I certainly never fell for the notion that he was the intellectual leader of the Republican Party. Or if he was, it wasn’t a crowded field.
In fact, he was an anti-government zealot whose Social Security Survivor benefits paid for his miseducation at Miami of Ohio where he read Hayek, Mises, and Friedman and learned to regard any federal program, including the New Deal, as the road to serfdom and the second coming of Stalin.
As far as we know, the only novels he ever read were “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” which taught him to believe that government is best that imposes the least restraint on the one percent — people like Paul Ryan’s libertarian donors. He might have been a bit more rounded intellectually if he’d ever bumped into “The Jungle,” “The Octopus,” or Ida Tarbell.
Like many anti-government crusaders lacking irony, he left college and chose not a capitalist path but a 25-year career in Washington. He quickly fell under the sway of Jack Kemp and Arthur Laffer, the foremost purveyors of the supply side Kool-Aid that fueled the Reagan Revolution. He was also present at the creation of some of the propaganda mills that now dominate Republican orthodoxy, like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.
Ryan made it his mission in life to craft a government willing to spend lavishly on defense contracts, regulate nothing, cut taxes for the well-off, and finance the loss of revenues by deep cuts to safety-net programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare for the least among us. All this while claiming that the whole farrago would be self-financing and “end identity politics through higher wages and upward mobility for the poor and working classes,” due to an invigorated economy and the explosion of entrepreneurship.
Unfortunately for this plan, it repeatedly failed to work, racking up huge deficits. And many voters who hadn’t read “Atlas Shrugged” rather liked having a social safety net in case of trouble. If Ryan had read Fitzgerald rather than Ayn Rand he might have recognized that his enablers and the beneficiaries of his tax cutting plans — casino grifters Sheldon Adelson and Trump, the traders and lenders behind the Great Recession, and polluters like the Koch brothers — were less like Rand’s paragons of heroic capitalism, Howard Roark and John Galt, than like Tom and Daisy Buchanan; “They smashed up things…and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
But if Ryan’s program was not good for the average Joe in Janesvile, it was great for him. He became a pet of the oligarchs who showered him with millions in campaign contributions. With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, he finally got his chance to turn his donors five talents into ten when the tax billed passed.
By 2027, it is calculated Trump Tax will bestow 83% of its benefits on the top one percent of earners. It also contains special tax treatment for investments in real estate and oil and gas, which will certainly please the Koch, Kushner and Trump families, not to mention Ryan’s own wife who inherited several million dollars of investments in those sectors, a classic case of conflict of interest.
Shortly after the tax bill passed, Ryan addressed congratulatory words to the annual Koch-sponsored gathering of billionaire donors. “We would not be in this unique position if not for the hard work and devotion from everyone in the Koch network.”
And they promptly demonstrated their devotion to and appreciation of their good and faithful servant, Paul Ryan. The Kochs gave him $500,000 in campaign funds and five other donors gave Ryan $100,000 each. Unfortunately, the average American worker will get rather less of a windfall from a tax bill design to be of the plutocrats, by the plutocrats and for the plutocrats.
Predictably, the companion deficit-reducing cuts in government spending, especially entitlements, did not materialize. Giving away money is politically safe. Taking away benefits is suicidal. So, in fact trillions in new spending were approved to accompany $2 trillion less revenue.
Thus, Ryan leaves office having feathered the already plush nests of the oligarchs and has bequeathed to the country trillion dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see. In order to cooperate with Trump to achieve this fiscally nightmarish outcome, the pure Knight had to turn a blind eye to a president practicing what he himself called “textbook” racism, and “playing to people’s divisions and exploiting frustrations.” He also had to stand up and praise Trump for his “exquisite presidential leadership.”
Luckily, Ryan is a relatively young man, so he should have thirty years or more to repent his sins against the gods he worships — St. Ayn, St. Milton, and St. Friedrich. I’m sure his excuse will be that his work made the deserving rich richer, even if he didn’t get to punish the people his donors call “the takers” for being poor.