Paul Ryan Is Not An Economist

By Bill Maher

Paul Ryan couldn't explain his tax plan to Chris Wallace because "It would take me too long to go through all of the math." It's not the first time Ryan has had trouble trying to explain his plans and it raises an important question: is Paul Ryan a policy wonk, or does he just play one on TV?

The record suggests he just plays one on TV. He has a bachelor's degree in political science and economics. That's all. He's not a trained economist and wouldn't be qualified to teach a graduate level economics course. Most economists take him about as seriously as they do his idol, Ayn Rand.

The only people who have tagged him as a brilliant economist are journalists who aren't economists themselves and other Republicans. Why does everyone take it as a given that he's a wonk? How would they even know? He lies about everything else; doesn't it make sense that he’s lying about that, too?

I notice any time Ryan gets into trouble explaining economic issues, he starts using the word "baseline" a lot. It's not really that complicated of a word, but I think it's meant to scare people off, like, "Don’t mess with me, I'll start talking about baselines." To me, it just smacks of a guy who's trying too hard. And it's meant to end the conversation before someone who does know what they're talking about discovers he has no idea.

Ryan once told The Weekly Standard that meeting with budget actuaries was "the highlight of my day." Again, trying too hard. The reporter bought that. I don't. And is someone who enjoys talking to actuaries that much really qualified to be vice president?

Romney's awfulness as a candidate is obscuring how awful Ryan is. Look at that footage of him being booed at the AARP -- seniors don't just dislike his plan, they think he's a condescending little prick. If you thought Al Gore talked down to people, listen to Paul Ryan for five minutes. The difference is, Gore wasn't pretending -- he really did know shit.

The polls also suggest that the real disaster on the Romney/Ryan ticket might be Ryan. Around the time Ryan was picked for VP, Romney was up among seniors in Florida and Ohio; now Obama has the edge. Along with Democrats solidifying their support, the improvement with seniors is the biggest reason Obama has risen. Don't you think Ryan has something to do with that?

Rasmussen Closes the Hole

By Bill Maher

When we talk about the conservative bubble, we’re generally talking about the Fox-Rush-Drudge information bubble, and the people who reside in it. This is the information loop that allows any willing right-winger to live in a world where the opinions they already are the only ones that get recited back to them, and the opinions they will one day have get fed to them so they can later recite them and hear them being recited back again, and around and around we go, all without any having to hear any opposing viewpoints expressed beyond – possibly – those of tokens like Kirsten Powers and that old school Irish Dem who periodically loses it and tells Sean Hannity to go fuck himself. I think his name is Bob Beckel or something. And I’d like his job some day.

If you’re a conservative, wherever you turn, the bubble is there. If you want to get your news on TV, you have Fox. If you’re the type who frequents talk radio, there’s Rush, along with a dozen other Rush clones. If you want to get your news online, you get all the links you want to read assembled for you by Matt Drudge, complete with misleading headlines, bad pictures of Hillary Clinton and Michele Obama, and a smattering of racism. Anywhere a Republican wants to turn for news, there’s a friendly face. And by “friendly” I mean the “smiling veneer over the contemptible inner core.”

But there was always one hole in the bubble that continued to let in the air of reality: polling information. As in, surveys that measure what Americans actually believe, or who they plan on voting for, or what they think of ideas like privatizing Social Security, etc. Because wingnuts can go for months and not talk to anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda with airborne AIDS, but that’s because they live in rural Tennessee, and inside the information bubble.

Polling information, on the other hand, when done correctly, comes from a representative sample of everyone. What’s more, polls are often widely reported, mostly because it’s an easy article to write. Even if you do your best to live only in the Fox-Rush-Drudge information world, you’re still going to get information about what people outside the bubble think through polling data. And it can be very disconcerting for Republicans, finding out that millions of other Americans exist in the “not real America” and think they’re completely batshit.

Thankfully, Republicans now seem to have solved this problem. Enter Scott Rasmussen. He’s a Republican and a pollster. And a few years ago, it seemed Scott ran his polling outfit the way everyone else did. But somewhere along the line – and I’m guessing here – Scott saw which way the media winds were blowing and realized there was a new way to distinguish yourself in the world of political news: by taking a side.

You see, polls, when done accurately, have a way of creating a narrative about what people actually want or think, or what may eventually happen. And this narrative is largely immune from the partisans on either side because, well, it just is. Because polls are the temperature of reality. If your candidate is down 8 points in a poll a few weeks out before the election, the story starts becoming about how you’re going to lose, and how everyone knows it, and how you might as well stay home on election day because it’s hopeless. Which is effective, or harmful, depending on which side you’re on. Because lots of people are looking for an excuse not to vote anyway and “My Candidate is down 9 points as of yesterday” is a pretty good one.

These narratives are particularly dangerous for Republicans. And that’s where Rasmussen polling comes in. By designing his to polls to lean Republican, he allows Republicans inside the bubble to continue breathing the air inside the bubble. Ex: When other polls show Obama pulling away from Romney, release a poll that says he isn’t:

Mission accomplished.

You see, now when people inside the bubble get confronted with what people think outside they bubble you can say, “No, according to a poll out today, they don’t think that!” Narrative averted! Thanks, Scott Rasmussen!

There’s only one problem with this, of course. And that’s that the bubble has now plugged its leak. Remaining contact with the outside world is even more limited. Republicans now not only have their own information loop, but their own polling company to deny what everyone outside the bubble thinks, too.

In Defense of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan

By Bill Maher

I'll say this on their behalf: all of those tax loopholes that they pretend they want to close in order to make their tax plan work -- but won't name before the election, and probably won't close anyway after the election, assuming they won -- probably should be closed. They're all things most economists agree are inefficiencies that distort the market and we’d be better off without them.

Here's the thing: you can rarely get rid of any benefit the government gives to its citizens. Whether it's farm subsidies or home mortgage deductions or Medicare prescription drug benefits that aren't paid for or defense contracts, once they're given, they're almost never rescinded. And they add up.

But at least they're talking about closing them (while not talking about closing them). It's slightly more than the Democrats do.

There. I said something nice about Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

Chump Change

By Bill Maher

There's nothing wrong with change, but there’s also nothing inherently right with change -- if the "change" you're being offered is "Rich people stop paying taxes and let’s see what happens."

If I had been running the Democratic Convention, I would have barely mentioned Obama at all -- you know, like the Republicans did with Romney -- and I would've put up a 100-by-100 foot poster of Mitt Romney and George Bush and never take it down.

You know the Republican Party's "debt clock"?  I would put up this number: 0.82%.

That's Mitt Romney’s tax rate if Paul Ryan’s latest budget became law. 0.82%. As in "less than 1%."
Maybe you don't think that's a problem. An effectively zero percent tax rate on investment, speculation and inherited wealth. But I'll bet most people do think it's a problem, and that's an argument Democrats can win.

Let’s Get Fiscal

By Bill Maher

When Republicans aren't inventing straw men to attack President Obama (he hates success, he hates capitalism, he thinks Americans are stuck in their station in life, he's always apologizing for America, etc.) they're almost always attacking him for paying for his programs. Which, I know, sounds crazy because it's the fiscally responsible thing to do, and the Republicans are supposed to be the party of the fiscally responsible. But they're hypocrites like that. The standard isn't truth. It's saying anything that makes Obama look like a socialist who hates America. See: Dinesh D'Souza.

Take the attacks on Obama’s Medicare cuts. According to the Romney campaign, the $716 billion in Medicare cuts comes out of senior benefits (not true) that today's seniors paid into all of their lives (partially true because they use far more in benefits than they ever paid in) and then used that money to fund Obamacare.

...Okay, the last part is true. They used the savings from the Medicare cuts to providers and hospitals to offset the costs of Obamacare. Because unlike all of those programs and wars and tax cuts during the Bush administration, Obamacare is actually paid for. You see, in the fiscally responsible world that's supposed to be a good thing. It means you're not adding to the deficit. But when it comes to fiscal responsibility, Republicans are clearly frauds, so what do you expect? It's not as if they're going to say, "Okay, maybe we screwed up last time, but trust me -- this time is going to be different!"

Cut to Mitt Romney in Ohio: "We're going to finally have to do something that Republicans have spoken about for a long time and for a while we didn't do it. When we had the lead, we let people down. We need to make sure we don't let them down this time. I will cut the deficit and get us on track to a balanced budget."

...By slashing taxes for the rich and hiking defense spending.

Which brings us to the charge that Obama is raising taxes on the middle class. Which isn't really true because Obama's lowered taxes on the middle class. But like all of Romney and Ryan's lies, they're really not lies. They're wildly misleading claims hooked on to some small kernel of truth. Otherwise known as being "slimy."

This is how Paul Ryan gets to say that Obama went to that GM plant in his hometown and said it would stay open, and then it closed. Not mentioning, of course, that it closed before Obama took office, or that Ryan himself had lobbied GM to keep the plant open. But it is true that Obama went there in 2008 during the campaign and said something about keeping the plant open. That part is true. And that's enough truth to suggest that he's responsible for closing it. When you're a sleaze.

Same thing with the middle class tax increase. The kernel of truth there is that, as part of Obamacare, those who don't buy insurance have to pay a penalty, or as John Roberts calls it "a tax." And some of those people will be in the middle class. Hence, "middle class tax increase." See how they did that?

But that's basically how Obamacare is paid for: a combination of cuts to Medicare providers and through a series of tax increases. Which, again, is the fiscally responsible thing to do -- to pay for your programs. But the Romney campaign uses that kernel to suggest that Obama has raised the taxes on everyone in the middle class, when the truth is he's lowered them, except for people who won't buy health insurance. Also known as free riders.

Health care mandate? The mechanism we use to pay for all of those people with pre-existing conditions everyone wants to cover. Because in life, benefits come with costs.

"Cap and trade" is also part of this conservative attack. But again, these are taxes going to address a serious problem -- the world catching fire. Or think of it this way: if your roof leaks, you have to spend money to fix it. Your car won't start, same thing: you have to pay money to fix it. Only in the conservative bubble can you address serious problems by not paying for them -- i.e. cutting taxes.

The problem with all of this is that the Democrats, being the party that pays for their programs -- dare I say the "party of fiscal responsibility" -- comes with a political price. And it's that we're a "tastes great, less filling" country that has gotten used to putting everything we do on the national credit card. We didn't pay for Iraq, Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, the prescription drug entitlement program -- none of it. Which is sweet! Especially if you're going to die before the bill comes due.

You see, if you give voters stuff for free, they like it a lot better than when you give them something and charge them the cost of that thing you just gave them. Which used to be called responsible, but now is called "socialism."

Paul Maul

 By Bill Maher

There are a few “facts” about Paul Ryan that the press keeps repeating that I think we need to grind into dust: 

First, they keep referring to the “Ryan budget.”  There is no Ryan budget.  A budget has numbers attached to it that economists can “score.” The Ryan “budget” is a budget in the way that my doodle of a rocket ship on a cocktail napkin is a blueprint for NASA.

Second, they call him an intellectual. Now, I’m not saying he’s a dummy – he’s not. People equating him to Palin are just wrong on that score. He can read and write and he eats beans with a fork instead of his fingers. Plus, he uses words like “epistemology” in conversation, and he actually knows what they mean. But that still doesn’t make him an intellectual – that just makes him smarter than Sam Brownback. He’s the one guy in the GOP who actually cares about policy, so he’s their intellectual by default.

When Ryan was a 19-year-old intern on the Hill, he was given two books: one by Jude Wanniski and one by George Gilder, the two founders of supply side-economics. These books were discredited looney-tunes nonsense when Ryan got them 23 years ago, yet he devoured them and marked them up with little scribbles in the margins and he still believes their crap to this day. That’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals don’t stop learning at age 19.  

Third, the press acts as if Ryan is some sort of effective legislator. But, according to the Huffington Post, he’s only passed two bills into law in the 13 years he’s been in Congress.  One was to rename a post office in his district after Les Aspin. The other was to reduce the taxes on hunting bows. Why hunting bows? Because Paul Ryan is an expert bow hunter. He goes through arrows like you go through condoms. He was tired of paying the sky-high Federal Arrow Surcharge or whatever it is, so he fixed it. Because that’s what Objectivists do.