Paul Ryan, the Budget-Bucker

Paul Ryan! That’s Mitt Romney’s choice for vice president, according to American media, a young budget wolf adored by the tea party movement — and incidentally, a Catholic, which makes the Romney-Ryan team the first “ticket” without a protestant.

Paul Ryan has little stick-out ears and a falsely naive Danny Boon air. But behind his clear eyes, he is not afraid to wield a chainsaw. Paul Ryan is known for wanting to cut everything: pensions, welfare, agricultural subsidies and health insurance for the elderly. With this choice, Mitt Romney wages war on Obama’s weakness — the fight against deficits.

Last year, when Paul Ryan presented the Republican Party’s budget plan for 2012, the political-media class stopped breathing. “No one anticipated such a radical plan,” said one commentator. “Isn’t this a suicide bomb?” asked a reporter. Ryan willingly agreed. “This isn’t a budget,” he responded, “it’s a cause.”* Paul Ryan has developed a reputation for having a tough skull; even Barack Obama seems to consider him as a quasi-alter ego in fiscal technocracy.

At 42 years old, Paul Ryan is the chair of the committee on budgetary affairs in the House of Representatives, which is no small feat when you consider that the chairmen acquire a powerful force. With his youthful looks he succeeds in appearing anti-establishment, even though he began his service in the House in 1998. He appeals to youth who are “libertarian by nature,” hoping that they will help him with his challenge to pension funding.

Along with his budget, Paul Ryan released a shocking video, à la Al Gore, on the fiscal catastrophe that awaits America. He shows himself in miniature next to maddening graphics. He is crushed by debt ($14,000 billion, or around 10,000 billion euros) but he is in shirtsleeves and valiantly attacks the deficit. “I love PowerPoint presentations,”* he told the New York Times.

In his home state of Wisconsin, he shows pictures of riots in Greece. The agonizing question follows: “Are we waiting for this?” Paul Ryan studied economics at Miami University of Ohio, where he learned from disciples of the Austrian Friedrich von Hayek. He wanted to become an economist, but he was afraid that his reports would end up on the shelves of university libraries (this was before blogs). After his first job in the landscaping business founded by his great-grandfather, he turned to politics. He was elected by a constituency that voted for Obama in 2008.

While both parties are fighting over a few billion dollars in budget cuts, Ryan juggles trillions (1 trillion = 1,000 billion). Far from propositions of cutting subsidies to NPR (public radio) and family planning, he favors heavy suppression of Medicare for those older than 65 (replaced by an annual allocation allowing them to purchase an insurance policy on the private market), capping aid for the poorest, reductions in funding for transportation, energy, veterans’ pensions, a 10 percent reduction in the number of employees.…

In total, the Ryan budget provides $6 trillion in budgetary cuts over 10 years. It even reduces taxes… notably for those in the highest income brackets: the maximum rate goes from 35 percent to 25 percent. Like most Republicans, he believes that lowering taxes creates jobs. “I believe in the free market approach to bring prosperity to those who don’t have it,” he said.

The Republican establishment was a bit afraid of his excesses last year, and the party chose not to adopt his “Roadmap for the Future,” a partial privatization program for social security. But neoconservatives have saluted his “courageous” policy.

It’s “the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times.

Paul Ryan’s “courage” has also been saluted by the left, albeit in a more ironic fashion. “It’s true that it takes a lot of courage to propose to rip off 90 percent of the population to give tax credits to the rich,”* blogged Matt Yglesias.

The “deficit hawks” seem to have found their man. And they’re already dreaming of a Ryan-Obama duel.

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.