Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech Analysed

Paul Ryan’s convention speech went over pretty well on the right in the United States. Jim Geraghty of the National Review had this to say about it:

This speech, and his warmth and sense of connection when delivering it, almost unnerved me. I started worrying that I was seeing what I wanted to see, that I was hyping a pretty good speech delivered pretty well in my own mind. Except my Twitter feed was exploding. The delegates were going nuts. And it just seemed to be getting better and better as it went on. Conversational, direct, funny, detailed . . . this was Reaganesque, guys. I was a kid when Reagan was president, so I got lulled into a false sense of what American presidents were — I thought they were all that good. This felt like that.

You can read his full post here. Perhaps this was indeed the case for Mr. Geraghty. I myself was struck by the sheer number of untrue, openly fallacious claims in it, and today I would like to highlight them.

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Stimulus vs. Austerity: USA

I keep seeing a certain political sentiment expressed. It goes a little something like this, from James Pethokoukis of the New York Post:

So what’s the problem with the Obama recovery? Why is it the weakest since the Great Depression?

Maybe it’s the Obama policies, like a stunning disregard for the trillion-dollar deficits that are likely already a dead weight on growth. Or maybe it’s the Obama guarantee of more tax hikes and regulation that makes US business too worried to hire and invest.

But it’s not too late to start shrinking unproductive government, cut debt and reduce penalties on work and investment — just like in those recoveries that we used to know.

Then there are the political cartoons, things like this:

Here’s the structure of the idea:

The economic recovery has been insufficiently strong
Therefore, we should do the opposite of what Obama has done
Ergo, vote Romney/Ryan 2012

The first point is correct, the other two points are simplistic and anti-intellectual, and I intend to illustrate both how and why.

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Misconceptions: “Medicare is Going Bust”

Lately it has become fashionable among political pundits to declare that the US Presidential election has devolved into a negative slug fest in which both Obama and Romney are equally culpable, lying and distorting and refusing to accept fundamental realities. This is a sort of professional centrism–taking it as an article of faith that both sides are equally to blame. The trouble is that this centrism doesn’t reflect reality and consequently, in order to maintain it, these “centrists” have resorted accepting blatantly false claims from the American political right. Chief among these is the claim that “Medicare is going bust” and that Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system is some kind of bold, serious solution. Today I set out to examine and refute that claim.

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Oversimplifications: “Obama is a Socialist”

How many times have we heard this one? “Obama is a socialist”, they say, “he’s just like [insert Communist boogie man here]”. There’s an obvious thing being missed by the right when they call Obama a socialist, and that’s that there are endless variations on socialism. So that brings us to our question for today–if Obama is a socialist, what kind of socialist would he be, and who should the right be comparing him to?

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Paul Ryan’s Magical Fantasy Budget

So Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan to be his running mate in the US Presidential election. It is a very telling choice. As regular readers will know, Mitt Romney proposed a tax policy that was more or less mathematically impossible without inflicting severe tax penalties on the bottom 95% of tax payers. It just so happens that Paul Ryan is guilty of precisely the same magical thinking. Let’s explore.

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