The Ryan pick.

August 12, 2012



Listen to the broadcast of Decision 2012 with Paul Gleiser, Monday, August 20, 2012.

My assumption was traditional. Marco Rubio is Hispanic. He’s conservative. He’s from Florida, arguably the most important swing state. That trifecta seemed to me all but unbeatable in the run-up to Romney’s announcement of a running mate.

And yet, Romney passed on making an overtly political choice in favor of a governing choice. If Romney can win the White House, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan will in all likelihood be the most domestic policy-involved vice president in recent history.

Paul Ryan has risen quickly since his first election to Congress in 1999. In 2008 he became ranking member on the powerful House Budget Committee, stepping over several more senior Republicans. In 2010, following the Republican takeover of the House, he became chairman.

The last two budgets to pass the House of Representatives each came to be called “The Ryan Budget.” In those budget proposals, Ryan called for reducing marginal tax rates across the board, eliminating many of the most commonly-used deductions, eliminating the capital gains tax and the estate tax and eliminating the corporate income tax. The revenue lost from these taxes would be replaced by a consumption tax in the Ryan model.

Neither of the Ryan budgets that passed the House were ever taken up by the Senate. The Senate has not passed a federal budget since 2009.

Also in those budget proposals, Ryan put forth plans to phase out the current Medicare model under which the government directly pays doctors and hospitals for services provided to seniors. Instead, Medicare would provide vouchers that beneficiaries could use to purchase health insurance in the open market.

In so doing, Ryan became the first member of Congress from either party to substantively propose modifying Medicare. For this apostasy, in an Internet commercial produced by the Agenda Project, a New York-based non-profit political organization, Ryan was depicted shoving an elderly woman in a wheelchair over a cliff, presumably to her death.