The poster boy for the latest moral mischief is Congressman Paul Ryan, an Ayn Rand devotee whom Krugman aptly dubbed "the flimflam man." One might be strongly inclined towards an expressivist interpretation of "moral obligation" when one hears Rep. Ryan describe his attack on medical care for the elderly and the poor as a matter of "moral obligation." Here again Krugman:
[This is] going to be just like the Social Security fight, only worse: once again, Very Serious People will pretend not to notice that the Republican plan is a giant game of bait-and-switch, dismantling a key piece of the social safety net in favor of a privatized system, claiming that this is necessary to save money, but never acknowledging that privatization in itself actually costs money. And we’ll have endless obfuscation, both-sides-have-a-point reporting that misses the key point, which is that the putative savings come entirely from benefit cuts somewhere in the distant future that would, in all likelihood, never actually materialize. (What do you think will happen when retirees in 2025 discover that their Medicare vouchers aren’t enough to buy insurance?)
Economist Dean Baker comments:
Congressman Paul Ryan is the new darling of both the Republican Party and the major media outlets. He has put forward bold plans for dismantling Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congressman Ryan is prepared to tell tens of millions of workers that they can no longer count on a secure retirement and decent health care in their old age. In Washington policy circles, this passes for courage.
Outside of Washington, people have a different conception of bravery. After all, over the last three decades the policies crafted in Washington have led to the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of the population has seen is share of national income increase by close to 10 percentage points. This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as Representative Ryan might say, $90 trillion over the next 75 years. That's almost $300,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
This is also amusingly apt:
Paul Ryan doesn't care about the deficit. Republicans don't care about the deficit. They care about tax cuts for rich people, and some of them are also feudal sadists who want poor people to suffer.
The only hope, I'm afraid, for this desperately dysfunctional country is that the short-sighted plutocracy's vicious attacks on the elderly, the poor, and unionized workers (not to mention public universities!) are going to finally turn the population decisively against the reactionary Republicans, and consign the venal Reagan legacy to the dustbin of history. That is a hope, in any case, even if it proves unrealistic.
UPDATE: A useful analysis of the latest reactionary craziness.
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