"You’d think that our fiscal meltdown would have shown the flaw in Rand’s philosophy. She thought we could derive morals from the markets. But we derived immorality from the markets."
But the real reason for her op-ed was not to demean a book, which has been around for more than 50 years, but rather to take a potshot at Paul Ryan, who obviously has the White House worried as we near November 2012. Observing that Paul Ryan is an admirer of "Atlas Shrugged", Dowd lashes out at the Wisconsin congressman:
"Obama is antithetical to Rand’s ideal man, Howard Roark, the architect of skyscrapers who violently refuses to exist for others. Paul Ryan, trying to push the cost of Medicare and Medicaid onto the old, the sick and the disabled while rewarding insurance companies with bigger profits, would be more up her alley."
That's it? We are to agree with Dowd that Paul Ryan is a monster, intent upon improving the bottom line of the insurance companies at the expense of the sick and elderly? It must be true. After all, Mr. Ryan read and liked "Atlas Shrugged".
But wait. Before passing judgment on Mr. Ryan on the basis of this one-liner from Dowd, shouldn't we take even a minute to consider the concerns of this congressman regarding ObamaCare? Paul Ryan writes (http://paulryan.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=9978):
"The [health care] law relies on 10 years of tax increases to pay for six years of new spending. It double-counts more than $520 billion as both spending cuts and payments to beneficiaries and ignores $208 billion needed to avert cuts to Medicare physicians. Even the $115 billion in implementation costs are hidden behind budgetary gimmicks and Washington-style accounting rules.
In addition to its impact on the deficit, the health care law is damaging to job creation and economic growth. Its dizzying maze of mandates and thousands of new regulations threaten to cripple businesses both large and small. The bill also hurts workers by encouraging employers to drop coverage and dump employees into a government-controlled exchange rather than pay the increased rates associated with new mandates in the bill.
The bill also contains more than $500 billion in new tax hikes on individuals and businesses. With the national unemployment rate at 8.8 percent, keeping a job-destroying, spend-and-tax law on the books would be irresponsible and would further diminish the prospects of a robust economic recovery.
I raised these concerns with the President at the 2009 Blair House Summit and again when Congress took up the bill. Since then, the Administration’s own Chief Actuary, along with a host of other independent studies, have raised many of the same concerns. A gimmick-free estimate from the House Budget Committee pegs the price tag of the health care law near $2.6 trillion when fully implemented, with $700 billion in new deficit spending."
Yes, I know, Maureen, Paul Ryan is a Republican, he is only interested in crushing poor people, and everything he says is just a capitalist smokescreen.
This blog entry is not intended as a critique of the pluses and minuses of ObamaCare or the value of Paul Ryan's alternative proposals. And although I agree that the late-2000s financial crisis exposed greed and immorality that had infected the U.S. economy, do we now throw the baby out with the bath water, nationalize banks and insurance companies, and turn to socialism?
Dowd is incapable of comprehending that one need not agree with all that Paul Ryan says in order to appreciate the value of a free interchange of ideas and the resultant contribution to problem-solving and the refinement of solutions.
It is no accident that President Obama is finally attempting to address the federal budget deficit, which is indeed – Mr. Ryan is correct - unsustainable.
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