the zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan gets to present his own federal budget , as though he were the shadow president and not a guy elected by roughly 180,000 people in and around Janesville, Wisconsin, is that he managed early on to convince people that he was not your run-of-the-mill zombie-eyed, granny-starving, trickle-down Randian snake-oil salesman of the kind that have been running Republican economic policy since half-past Ronald Reagan's lucidity. No, indeed. Ryan was a Serious Man Of Public Policy, interested only in disinterested pursuit of answers to the country's pressing economic needs. You might disagree with him, we were told, but you can't dispute the fact that the man knows his stuff. Even liberal wonks found themselves charmed by Ryan's charts and graphs, all of which, remarkably, came to the same conclusions that a generation of conservative fiscal cranks had been proposing for 30 years. Shift the country's wealth upward and soak the poor and the middle class. Create a functional oligarchy in the national economy and lay in sufficient budgetary traps and snares that the oligarchy you have created is unassailable in the future.

Nonetheless, the ways of the Village are what they are, so Paul Ryan got to bring forth his own budget on Tuesday, and its fiscal bullying is matched only by its towering political cowardice. Ryan is forever meeping about making the "tough choices" necessary to get our economic house back in order, but faced with actual tough political choices, he and his pet budget duck every single one of them. He's still a zombie-eyed granny-starver, but he pushes all the actual zombie-eyed granny-starving down the road a decade, so as not to anger the various grannies in the First Congressional District of Wisconsin. (Ezra Klein seems to find this alarming, although I don't know why, since at least there will be less granny-starving in the short term.) And Ryan and the other Republicans are breaking all kinds of rock trying to defang the automatic defense cuts in the Budget Conrol Act of last summer. Republicans rushing to protect the defense budget — there's change we can believe in.

The fact that this budget is shot through with political chickenshit is relevant because this is primarily a political document, a campaign blueprint for the Republicans this fall. (It's also an attempt to establish bargaining position in the upcoming budgetary brawl with the White House. Whether that succeeds, of course, is completely dependent on whether the White House takes any part of this bag of horrors seriously enough as an actual budget to negotiate on it.) As a plan for governing, it's yet another blueprint for economic dystopia from a man who either doesn't know, or doesn't care, what life is actually like for the people who don't buy him $4000 bottles of wine in restaurants far from the Time Out Pub in Janesville. It's a supply-sider's wet dream, in technicolor, with Jenna Jameson serving you popcorn at intermission. Food stamps and Medicaid — which loses $770 billion anyway, according to Ryan's plan — get handed back to the states in the form of block grants which, if our experience with stimulus money and the tobacco settlement are any indication, the states will then use to fund those things that get their governors re-elected, and you may have noticed that healthy poor people are rarely one of those things. There's what amounts to be a flat-tax: two basic income-tax rates, the top being 25 percent. Also the corporate tax rate gets cut to 20 percent. Because he has to pretend that he's visiting this radical restructuring of the American economy on us because of his great concern over The Deficit — and we'll get to that particular canard in a moment — Ryan proposes to close "loopholes", which means that the upper one percent loses some boutoniere money while you lose your mortgage interest deduction, but you and Steve Forbes will be paying the same flat rate, so it's all good!

And there was the usual conservative boilerplate about lazy poor people whose initiative has been blunted by government cheese or something:

"We propose welfare reform, round 2," he added, charging that aid programs were encouraging people to sponge off the government. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people ... into complacency and dependence."

Says a guy who got through high school and college on Social Security survivor's benefits. Can I mention right here that Paul Ryan, while not yet as colossal a dick as Rick Santorum, is working very hard at it?

But, once again, the piece de resistance of zombie-eyed granny-starving is what Ryan does to Medicare. The last time he tried this, the country got so agitated that it started electing Democrats again in upstate New York. Now, though, having brought on board useful idiot Ron Wyden, he got a second wind, so he's at it again. Again with the "premium support." Again with the dreamy dreamworld of "markets" and "competition":

"We propose to save and strengthen Medicare by taking the power away from bureaucrats," said Ryan as he rolled out his proposal Tuesday on Capitol Hill. "We believe competition and choice should be the way forward."

So, again with the notion that, in competition and choice, there are no such things as "bureaucrats" in, say, insurance companies, who have the power to decide that, No, your dialysis won't be covered there, Gramps. So, again with the notion that "freedom" consists of the 72-year-old wife of a 75-year-old Alzheimer's patient going out into the insurance market to determine which of the dozens of companies who will be scrambling for her business offers her the best deal. And, since he also proposes to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act, we'll all get a chance to practice being helpless and old and at the mercy of the greediest industry in America over the course of our entire lives. Bonus!

The man lives on Neptune, or he simply doesn't give a fuck. I know which way I'm betting.

Paul Ryan doesn't propose a budget like this because he's concerned about The Deficit. It is senseless to talk about this budget in that context, although even some liberal wonks like to give him the benefit of a prodigious doubt on that score. (This blog declines to do so on the basis of its fundamental economic philosophy: Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.) If he were concerned about The Deficit, he wouldn't have voted to finance two off-the-books wars and the Medicare expansion that the previous administation pushed through. Paul Ryan proposes a budget like this because he believes that the programs he is working to demolish — food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and on and on — are not legitimate functions of the federal government. He does not believe that the Constitution's requirement that it promote the general welfare means that the government may make the lives of the poor and the sick a litte easier, or that it should embark on programs that help create and maintain a viable middle-class. That's the job of The Market, even though The Market has shown itself, time and time again, to be uninterested in doing anything of the sort. Economic inequality is the inevitable byproduct of the truest kind of freedom. (That 72-year old woman with the 75-year old demented husband? Free as bird!) A society permanently stratified between the very rich and everyone else is precisely what the Founders had in mind. This budget may function as a campaign document and a statement of political purpose, but its source is an ideology that borders on the theological.

The White House should laugh at this. The Democrats should take it and hammer every breathing Republican over the head with it. It should be hung in the town square like a piñata and beaten until all the nonsense and bullshit comes tumbling out on the ground. It should be taken seriously only in the sense of a demonstration of how committed the conservative movement — and the political party that it now completely controls — is to maintaining corporate power and its deeply perverse effect on the political commonwealth. I have no reasonable expectation, however, that any of that will actually happen. Somewhere in this deeply dystopic ruin of a budget is something that "compromise" will dictate that we all have to live — or not live — with.

(Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog)

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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