Ezra Klein: Paul Ryan’s budget plan betrays his own views on income inequality
On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget proposal. The plan’s pleased author didn’t mince words. “We are bearing witness to history this week,” Ryan said. But my thoughts kept returning to something Ryan said five months ago.
The occasion was an October speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Again, Ryan really leaned into the historic moment. His remarks were titled “Saving the American Idea: Rejecting Fear, Envy and the Politics of Division,” and they were Ryan’s bid to make a different sort of history: To be the first national Republican to lay out a coherent theory on income inequality and what needs to be done about it.
“Class is not a fixed designation in this country,” Ryan said. “We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups. The Treasury Department’s latest study on income mobility in America found that during the 10-year period starting in 1996, roughly half of the taxpayers who started in the bottom 20 percent had moved up to a higher income group by 2005.”
Upward mobility, Ryan said, is the real key to the “American idea.” But that idea was under threat — and not, as so many seemed to think, because of Republicans or low tax rates on billionaires. The real danger, Ryan argued, was coming from the Democrats and the programs they support. It was classic Ryan: A wonkish effort to recast an issue on which Republicans had traditionally been weak as a policy problem that only conservatism could solve. And it didn’t end there.
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