Paul Ryan in Esquire

Interviewed by Tucker Carlson.

So he (Barack Obama) is clearly very bothered by income inequality. Are you?

I'm not bothered by people who become successful. I'm bothered by a society that makes it harder for people to find success who have never found it before. Like my mentor, Jack Kemp, I don't worry about people who are wealthy. I worry about making it easier for people to become wealthy who have never seen it before. That's what I'm worried about. So I don't see life as a zero-sum game. The economy is not a zero-sum system, in which someone's gain necessarily comes at someone's loss. Let's ride ourselves on success. Let's be excited about entrepreneurs. Let's celebrate achievement and hard work and innovation and wealth creation. Let's not demonize it. Let's not divide it. So rather than speaking to people in class terms, rather than creating emotions of fear, envy anxiety, and anger, let's appeal to their aspirations. Let's get opportunity into the pockets of poverty that haven't seen it before. Let's get a society of upward mobility and appeal to that.

That's a lot of words to use just to say, "No."

 

Well, I can only imagine the thread you would have started if he had said, "No."

 

Dick, I don't get the impression that you much disagree with that answer. Do you?

 

I think that there are paths to upward mobility available in this country.

But I think that when very few people are taking advantage of them from the lower classes, then you have a systemic flaw.

YF, as I'm sure you know from following my posts, I don't think that you solve income inequality, necessarily, just by a clean-and-neat redistribution of income from rich to poor. You do it by reinvesting that money in early-childhood education, for example.

You teach a man to fish.

 

What the GOP is losing sight of...is that more and more Americans every day are deciding that working hard and getting a good education is no longer enough to reach an achievement worth celebrating, to use Ryan's words. American's are discovering that they are working harder, and the only ones achieving anything from it are their bosses and their banks.

That's a hard realization for the GOP to overcome.

 

One huge problem is the barrier of educational cost, since education is the great equalizer. Even if a lower-class student is capable of receiving a top medical, legal, or business education, for example, the six-figure price tag to attend is a greater barrier than it is for a higher class student.

It is only getting worse. For example, high-paying law firms now do probably 99 percent of their recruiting at 15-20 schools (out of 200 or so). The economy has slowed hiring, for one thing, so there are less slots to fill. For another, budget cutbacks have forced them to more efficiently spend their money. They do so by putting all of their eggs in the Harvard basket - and none in the State U basket, as the Harvard flight and hotel stay will yield more hires. With some exceptions, you have to be a have to go to a place like Harvard. Thus, you have to be a have, to begin with, to get hired.

And thus the cycle goes on.

 

In the meantime, let's cut aid to education so we can extend and expand tax breaks for billionaires.

 

That's a strawman built by Ryan that people who are bothered by income inequality are "bothered by people being successful." I don't think anyone, say, was bothered that Steve Jobs or anyone who came up with great ideas and worked hard to put them into place is successful. What's bothersome is, say, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange demanding $850 million in tax breaks or else it'll leave Illinois, or other corporate and personal welfare for the wealthiest, which then shifts the tax burden onto the backs of those who don't have as much money.

I also would believe Paul Ryan more if he didn't advocate policies that indeed shifted the burden in that way.

 

Bob, you hit the nail on the head regarding my problem with Ryan. He's insincere. He says he wants a system where people are upwardly mobile. But the system he advocates doesn't do that. Not on a grand scale.

 

I find it humorous that Ryan's answer specifically ignores that the metrics -- three decades of increasing disparity characterized by stagnation in the middle and capital gains-fueled growth at the very top -- clearly demonstrate the economic barrier about which he claims to be concerned. I also find it amusing that his "mentor" Jack Kemp was one of the principal players in igniting that disparity as a fierce foe of capital gains taxes during the '80s.

http://tinyurl.com/7kw9joh

 

That's a lot of words to use just to say, "fuck him."

 

This thread should be titled "Someone at Esquire Has A Serious Man-Crush On Paul Ryan"