Paul Ryan's Baffling Budget

Struggling to see the future.

By James Poulos

It’s not just liberals and progressives who have difficulties with Rep. Paul Ryan’s latest budget plan. At the New York Times, the normally clement Ross Douthat goes for the jugular:

In effect, it sacrificed seriousness for “seriousness,” by promising to reach budgetary balance not over the long term (as budgets 1.0 and 2.0 did) but in a ten-year window. This is not going to happen, and more importantly there’s no reason why it needs to happen: Modest deficits are perfectly compatible with fiscal responsibility, and restructuring the biggest drivers of our long-term debt is a much more important conservative goal than holding revenues and outlays equal in the year 2023.

Justin Green warns that even if Douthat’s critique is dismissed as the ravings of a RINO, the pretty favorable climate Republicans can expect for the midterms could be changed — and not for the better — by pumping this message into the atmosphere: “Debt is a scary thing. We’ve spent the past six years dropping apocalyptic after apocalyptic warning. If we don’t change the total course of government now, we’re doomed. That requires cuts for everyone, even the aged.”

For Green, that tightens the laces on the Republicans’ “double bind,” as Matt Continetti puts it in The Weekly Standard. Continetti rather malevolently points out that the GOP is so inured to radically reforming its message and its platform because there just aren’t any big constituencies on the right in favor of doing so.

Still, Green’s remedy for the double bind seems more like a restatement of a riddle. “it’s about expanding our coalition so our policy objectives can match our philosophical goals. As long as the GOP is the party of the Medicare/Social Security voting population, we won’t seriously reform entitlements. So the answer isn’t to kowtow to the aged. It’s to attract enough younger voters so we can win elections on our own.”

How will that happen? “Here’s where the GOP ought to be aiming itself: a movement that embraces innovation, economic vibrancy, and upward mobility.” In other words: Growth uber alles, the same mantra on the lips of everyone from Karl Rove to Barack Obama.

But is there any indication that younger voters are galvanized by the politics of dynamism? The most striking feature of today’s rising generations isn’t their appetite for prosperity traditionally understood. It’s their rejection of traditional American views of “making it,” and their embrace — albeit on a broad spectrum running from enthusiasm to resignation — of alternate modes of pursuing American dreams. The simple upward/downward mobility scale no longer captures the way younger Americans think — or, we can wager, the way they will vote. Hitting ambitious growth goals may be the only way to tame deficits in an age when the aged ensure massive entitlement spending. But from a younger perspective, that looks like just another way to lock into a vision of the good life that’s losing currency, not gaining it.

This gets to the heart of why Paul Ryan’s budget is so baffling — not because it’s so unafraid, in a more youthful way, to live with less, but because it’s so dowdy and paleo-liberal in its concept of what government is all about. It’s amazing to me so few people have reacted to some of the lines in Ryan’s Wall Street Journal op-ed pitching the plan:

the most important question isn’t how we balance the budget. It’s why. A budget is a means to an end, and the end isn’t a neat and tidy spreadsheet. It’s the well-being of all Americans.

In what world is the purpose of a federal budget to ensure the well-being of all Americans? Franklin Roosevelt’s? Even if Ryan’s critics on the left are dead certain that his budget does precisely the opposite, it’s striking — and deeply revealing — that Ryan himself views government accounting in this way. This is a terrible foundation for trying to connect with the youth vote. Not only do younger voters who lean leftward sense a huge gulf between Paul’s budget and his vision of a budget’s purpose. Younger voters who lean libertarian recoil from both the budget and the vision. And younger voters who lean conservative are left holding the bag — stuck with the burden of trying to account for how it is that balancing the budget in 10 years, or whatever, is part of a morally urgent mission to achieve the well-being of all.

At a time when Michael Bloomberg’s machinations underscore how insanely adaptable the mania for “public health” has become to any and all interventions into private life, Ryan’s budget vision reads all to well into the script: we must act now to change, because everyone’s well-being is at stake.

Remarkably, the task has fallen to Barack Obama to inject some measured realism into the debate. As the president told George Stephanopoulos, there is no debt crisis. Though misleading — coming from a man who insists we should reduce deficits in a “balanced” way, but never bothers to tell us why — the talking point is true: the problem with our debt is not that it amounts to a crisis. Indeed, the real problem is that we’ve managed to ensure that standing levels of colossal debt do not provoke an economic crisis. If you view economics as the master science, this will confuse you. But economics can’t tell us why big debt is bad; for that, we need politics. When the government can write itself endless blank checks, the government is certain to spend large sums on things the people don’t really want. And, as we plainly see, some of those unwanted things are deeply inimical to our most basic freedoms, including freedom from surveillance, monitoring, databasing, and tracking. In a society ruled by the love of money and the love of equality, big federal budgets inherently mean big government power — a power exercised in a way that far exceeds the limits desired in a free society.

None of this really comes into view beneath Ryan’s green eyeshade. His view of excessive power isn’t focused on liberty but on prosperity. Though “the nation’s debt is a sign of overreach,” he continues in his op-ed,

Government is trying to do too much, and when government does too much, it doesn’t do anything well. So a balanced budget is a reasonable goal, because it returns government to its proper limits and focus. By curbing government’s overreach, our budget will give families the space they need to thrive.

Maybe or maybe not — what matters is that the whole argument depends on a dominant feeling among voters that their families currently lack “the space they need to thrive.” On the one hand, it used to be a hallmark of conservative thought that this sort of space is quickly crowded out by a government that spends in an effort to ensure the well-being of all. On the other, young voters increasingly reject the neat social framework of nuclear family prosperity that once undergirded the national economy — but probably no longer will. Ultimately, Ryan’s budget tries to ground new-fangled conservatism in something much closer to old-fashioned liberalism. The older you are, the more that might appeal. But the younger you are, the more both facets of the plan are likely to seem out of step with the times.

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