This is pretty glorious. Paul Ryan says that Rage Against the Machine is one of his favorite bands. Tom Morello, the guitarist for the band, responds by saying, “Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against.”
This is the closest I have ever come to feeling sorry for Paul Ryan. If Sufjan Stevens or Thom Yorke or Joanna Newsom were to announce to the world that they thought I sucked, my feelings would be pretty hurt! But then I remember that Paul Ryan wants to engineer one of the largest transfers of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-wealthy, and I stop feeling sorry at all.
Even if we accept the premise that Ryan’s wine purchase is normatively bad, we must ask why we find it normatively bad. Should our politicians not be drinking $350 bottles of wine while people are suffering? That seemed to be the original picture-taker’s point of outrage.
“We were just stunned,” said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter later the same evening. “I was an economist so I started doing the envelope calculations and quickly figured out that those two bottles of wine was more than two-income working family making minimum wage earned in a week.”
She was outraged that Ryan was consuming hundreds of dollars in wine while Congress was in the midst of intense debates over whether to cut seniors’ safety net, and she didn’t know whether Ryan or his companions was going to pay for the wine and whether the two men were lobbyists. She snapped a few shots with her cell phone to record the wine purchase.
OK, but let’s say Ryan had instead spent $700 on a big television set or a new iPad/Phone/whatever, what would we care? Maybe there are some things that we assume should be worth $700, and bottles of wine don’t fall into that category. But why shouldn’t they? A $350 bottle of wine may have all the hallmarks of decadence, but it’s hard to pin down what was so decadent about it, when compared to a techno-toy you’ll never use or a piece of furniture.
But maybe there’s some sign of malfeasance here. Representatives should not be accepting gifts from anyone, even a friend, with a high value. Again, though, this seems like relatively small potatoes compared to the excesses of lobbying junkets and the like. Besides, if Ryan split the meal 50-50 including the wine, any sign of malfeasance is slim to nil.
So what is it that’s so bad? The man had a bottle of wine. It was pretty expensive. So what? Plenty of us do expensive things all the time. Even people without much money will buy a lotto ticket every day, or buy a flight home for the holidays. The first thing that societies do when they get a middle class is to start loading up on luxuries, rather than dealing with malnutrition or sanitation. People would rather have a satellite dish than an indoor toilet. Does that make them decadent too?
My point is not to defend the rich for winning the class war. Unfortunately, rather than pointing out the fact that an astonishing number of Congresspeople and Senators are millionaires, or that the Bush tax cuts would benefit almost all Congressmen, etc., a focus on Ryan’s bottle of wine just looks petty. Ryan is reprehensible for his awful budget plan, not his decadent personal tastes. I don’t mind who buys an expensive bottle of wine, as long as he’s taxed through the ass for it.
Readers of this blog have probably seen me say at some point that I think the biggest threat to the promise of America is our out-of-control and ever-widening gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else.
That being the case, you might not be surprised to learn what I think of a long-term budget plan that continues to slash top tax rates when they’re already at historic lows, and then slash trillions from programs like Medicare and Medicaid: it’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the most privileged. With our current fiscal structure in this country, I find that unconscionable and immoral. So I’ll turn it over to James Fallows to unload:
1) A plan to deal with budget problems that says virtually nothing about military spending is neither brave nor serious. That would be enough to disqualify it from the “serious” bracket, but there’s more.
2) A plan that proposes to eliminate tax loopholes and deductions, but doesn’t say what any of those are, is neither brave nor serious. It is, instead canny — or cynical, take your pick. The reality is that many of these deductions, notably for home-mortgage interest payments, are popular and therefore risky to talk about eliminating.
3) A plan that exempts from future Medicare cuts anyone born before 1957 — about a quarter of the population, which includes me — is neither brave nor serious. See “canny or cynical: take your pick” above.
4) A plan to reconcile revenue and spending, which rules out axiomatically any conceivable increase in tax rates, is neither brave nor serious. Rather, it is exactly as brave and serious as some opposite-extreme proposal that ruled out axiomatically any conceivable cut in entitlement spending or discretionary accounts.
5) A plan to reduce the federal deficit by granting big tax reductions to the highest-income Americans, at a time when their tax rates are very low by historic standards and and their share of the national income is extremely high, and when middle-class job creation is our main economic challenge, is neither brave nor serious. See “cynical,” above.
The Unpersons 