Charles Krauthammer's column today is a real treat for connoisseurs of the hack non sequtiur. Essentially, Krauthammer's defense of the program consists of defending other, very different proposals that are irrelevant to Ryan's. My favorite example:
The final charge — cutting taxes for the rich — is the most scurrilous. That would be the same as calling the Ronald Reagan–Bill Bradley 1986 tax reform “cutting taxes for the rich.” In fact, it was designed for revenue neutrality. It cut rates — and for everyone — by eliminating loopholes, including corrupt exemptions and economically counterproductive tax expenditures, to yield what is generally considered by Left and Right an extraordinarily successful piece of economic legislation.
I see. So the fact that a previous tax reform was revenue-neutral and didn't unduly distribute revenue upward means we should ignore the fact that Ryan's plan is almost certainly not revenue-neutral and unambiguously lowers the tax burden of the highest income brackets. Very convincing.
But my very favorite part of the column asks "whether President Obama counters with a deficit-reduction plan of equal seriousness." What exactly would a plan as "serious" as Ryan's look like? Obama could start out by assuming that restoring the Clinton-era tax cuts will cause unemployment to permanently drop to 0.2 percent and produce multi-trillion-dollar surpluses. Then he could produce even greater surpluses and lower unemployment by restoring Eisenhower-era tax rates and cutting defense spending 80 percent. Then he could propose using the extra money to fund a national, 50-state high-speed rail network, Scandanavian welfare state benefits, and a complete nationalization of the country's financial and energy sectors.
I'm not sure that this is quite as out of the mainstream and politically unrealistic as Ryan's plan to end Medicare and restore McKinley-era social spending to finance massive upper-class tax cuts, all justified with utterly fraudulent empirical assumptions. But it's a start!
