8/30/2012 @ 1:21AM |9,920 views
Yes, Paul Ryan Spoke the Truth About Obama's Fiscal Record at the Republican ConventionTAMPA, FL - AUGUST 29: Republican vice presidential candidate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) waves with his family during the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 29, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Progressive bloggers and TV personalities are up in arms about Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention last night. Several of their accusations revolve around Paul Ryan’s own fiscal record, and his description of President Obama’s. I asked my liberal friends on Twitter to send me an itemized list of Ryan’s alleged lies, and they kindly obliged. So far, Ryan appears to have the better of the argument.
(Disclosure: I am an outside adviser to the Romney campaign on health care issues, but the opinions in this post are mine, and do not necessarily correspond to those of the campaign.)
Dave Weigel of Slate compiled a useful list. (For a longer one, visit ThinkProgress.) Wrote Weigel, “Ryan plowed through one of the more impressive strings of whoppers we’ve seen at this level,” wrote Weigel. Here are his complaints, in order of importance.
Charge #1: Paul Ryan accused Obama of cutting Medicare by $716 billion, but Ryan’s own budget preserved those cuts.
Here’s what Ryan actually said (emphasis added):
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And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly.
You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.
In Congress, when they take out the heavy books and wall charts about Medicare, my thoughts go back to a house on Garfield Street in Janesville. My wonderful grandma, Janet, had Alzheimer’s and moved in with Mom and me. Though she felt lost at times, we did all the little things that made her feel loved.
We had help from Medicare, and it was there, just like it’s there for my Mom today. Medicare is a promise, and we will honor it. A Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare, for my Mom’s generation, for my generation, and for my kids and yours.
So our opponents can consider themselves on notice. In this election, on this issue, the usual posturing on the Left isn’t going to work. Mitt Romney and I know the difference between protecting a program, and raiding it. Ladies and gentlemen, our nation needs this debate. We want this debate. We will win this debate.
Here are the facts. It’s true that Ryan’s budgets in 2011 and 2012 preserved Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare. However, there is a huge difference between cutting Medicare by $716 billion to fund $1.9 trillion in new health spending, as Obamacare did, and cutting Medicare by $716 billion to shore up the solvency of the Medicare program itself, as the Ryan budget sought to do.
Secondly, the Romney Medicare plan fully repeals Obamacare, including the $716 billion in Medicare cuts.
APOTHEFACT JUDGMENT: Ryan is correct. Ryan makes the appropriate distinction between improving Medicare’s solvency and cutting its spending to fund spending elsewhere.
Charge #2: Paul Ryan criticized Obama for ignoring the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. But Ryan voted against those recommendations himself.
Here’s what Ryan said (emphasis added):
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He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.
Republicans stepped up with good-faith reforms and solutions equal to the problems. How did the president respond? By doing nothing – nothing except to dodge and demagogue the issue.
It’s true that Paul Ryan voted against the Simpson-Bowles recommendations. He did so because Simpson-Bowles raised taxes while doing little to nothing about health-care spending, the biggest driver of growing deficits. However, by rejecting Simpson-Bowles, Ryan felt morally obligated to put forth his own plan, and did so—several times, in the form of his Path to Prosperity and his 2011 and 2012 House budget resolutions.
Notably, he took advantage of his tenure on the Bowles-Simpson commission to forge a bipartisan compromise with Bill Clinton’s budget chief, Alice Rivlin, on Medicare reform.
By contrast, President Obama scuttled a bipartisan Congressional deal to achieve long-term fiscal reform. A few months ago, President Obama sent a budget to Congress for fiscal year 2013, that did not bother to attempt to balance the budget, and was defeated unanimously in both houses, failing to even get a single Democratic vote.
Here’s what Erskine Bowles, President Clinton’s former chief of staff and the leader of President Obama’s deficit commission, had to say about Paul Ryan in September of 2011:
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I’m telling you, this guy is amazing. I always thought I was okay with arithmetic. This guy can run circles around me. He is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did by four trillion dollars.
By contrast, here is what Bowles said about Obama’s budget:
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The president came out with his own plan. And the president, as you remember, came out with a budget. And I don’t think anybody took that budget very seriously. The Senate voted against it 97 to nothing.
He therefore, after a lot of pressure from folks like me, he came out with a new budget framework. And in that budget framework, he cuts the budget by four trillion dollars over twelve years. And, to be candid, this four trillion dollars cut was very heavily back-end loaded. So, that if you looked at it on a ten-year basis and compared apples to apples, it really was about a two and a half trillion dollar cut.
APOTHEFACT JUDGMENT: Ryan is correct. Ryan’s credibility on deficit reduction is on the record, and has been endorsed by prominent Democrats. By contrast, Obama’s FY 2013 budget didn’t garner a single vote in Congress.
Charge #3: Paul Ryan blamed Obama for Standard & Poor’s downgrade of American government debt from AAA to AA+, but Paul Ryan is actually to blame because he resisted tax increases that would have closed the deficit.
Here is what Ryan said: President Obama’s term “began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America.”
I suppose it’s true that you can blame Ryan and the rest of the GOP for opposing trillions in tax increases, but it’s conversely true that you can blame Democrats for opposing spending cuts. At the end of the day, the question is who has been more constructive on the question of improving our long-term fiscal situation.
APOTHEFACT JUDGMENT: Ryan is correct that Obama has presided over this historic downgrade, but Republicans deserve a meaningful proportion of the blame for the fiscal situation that Obama inherited and then made worse.
Charge #4: Paul Ryan opposed the stimulus, but he lobbied for stimulus grants that went to his district.
Here is what Ryan said (emphasis added):
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The first troubling sign came with the stimulus. It was President Obama’s first and best shot at fixing the economy, at a time when he got everything he wanted under one-party rule. It cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government.
It went to companies like Solyndra, with their gold-plated connections, subsidized jobs, and make-believe markets. The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.
What did the taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus? More debt. That money wasn’t just spent and wasted – it was borrowed, spent, and wasted.
We can debate the merits of the stimulus, but I certainly share Ryan’s view that the stimulus was a case of political patronage and corporate welfare at its worst. It is also true that Ryan did seek some stimulus money for his district after the law was passed. Ryan had initially said that he had not taken any stimulus money, but was forced to correct that record after it turned out that his staff had sought stimulus money for two of his constituents.
In addition, Ryan voted for a similarly misguided temporary stimulus package under President Bush.
The substantive question is: once a stimulus is a fait accompli, is it immoral for a Congressman to ensure that his constituents’ federal tax dollars are redirected back into his district? To me, that’s not a big deal, but others may disagree.
APOTHEFACT JUDGMENT: Ryan is correct in his criticisms of the Obama stimulus, but it is true that Ryan voted for wasteful spending measures in the 2000s. In the minds of many, including me, Ryan’s courage in taking on entitlement reform redeems those earlier failures. But others may disagree.
Parting thoughts
Finally, Weigel and a number of other commentators complained about the Janesville General Motors plant that Ryan cited in his speech. Ryan pointed out that Obama promised that, under his administration, “this plant will be here for another hundred years.” But it closed in December 2008, before President Obama was inaugurated, and didn’t reopen under President Obama’s GM bailout, which is the focus of Ryan’s criticism. As this is a health-care and fiscal blog, I’m going to let others argue about that one.
If there are other things about Paul Ryan’s speech that you want me to write about, put them in the comments and I’ll add updates. In the meantime, I’m going to bed.
Follow Avik on Twitter at @aviksaroy.
UPDATE: Jonathan Adler of National Review offers these observations about the Janesville GM plant closing:
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Pundits and fact-checkers are claiming that Paul Ryan misrepresented the history of the Janesville, Wisconsin General Motors plant in his convention speech. The primary charge is that the plant closed when Bush was still President. It seems the fact-checkers need to double-check their facts, however. While GM first announced plans to shutter the plant in 2008, the plant was not actually idled until 2009 (as reported here and noted here), and the shut-down schedule was faster than GM had initially announced. In 2008 GM said it would close the plant by 2010. What many of the “fact-checkers” missed is that an auto plant can produce more than one thing, so ending one production line need not lead to an actual plant closure. Conn Carroll has the rundown of the actual facts here. (More at Twitchy.)
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This article is available online at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/08/30/yes-paul-ryan-spoke-the-truth-about-obamas-fiscal-record/ 
