Ruth Marcus used her Washington Post column today (5/11/16) to present the speech that House Speaker Paul Ryan should give to Republicans in order to disassociate himself from Donald Trump. She has Paul Ryan being somewhat less than honest.
Most notably, she wants Ryan to say:
I have spent my life believing in, and fighting for, the ideals of the Republican Party: limited government, fiscal responsibility, free trade and free markets, the United States’ role as the world’s most important force for peace and liberty. It is not clear to me which, if any, of those convictions Mr. Trump shares.
Ryan doesn’t want limited government; he actually wants pretty much no government. He has repeatedly introduced budgets that call for eliminating all of the federal government except Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military by 2050. His budgets provide zero funding for the Justice Department, the State Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Education Department, the National Park Service and everything else we think of as the federal government.
As a big supporter of stronger and longer patent and copyright protection, it is hard to see how Ryan can claim to be a supporter of free trade and free markets. As far as fiscal responsibility goes, Ryan has proposed huge tax cuts that would go disproportionately to the wealthy, which he claims will be offset by ending deductions which he has never named.
She also has a reference to Social Security and Medicare, with Ryan then saying that he wants to “get entitlement spending under control.” If Ryan were being honest, he would of course tell the convention that he wants to privatize both programs.
It’s not clear why Ms. Marcus thinks it’s appropriate for Ryan to misrepresent his fundamental political positions.
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (5/11/16).
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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.