Late last year, as The Daily was setting up for its launch, I wrote a few sample columns that never saw the light of day beyond the various product testers and decisionsmakers within News Corp.  This was my first one, about Paul Ryan, who just today came out with a plan to "fix" Medicare by killing the program and moving future retirees back into the private insurance market that was historically so bad for retirees that we needed Medicare to fix it.

As the next congress is sworn in, Representative Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) will take over as chair of the House Budget Committee, which now must be officially known as “the powerful House Budget Committee” since that’s how it appears on first reference most of the time.  Ryan is D.C.-young (he’s 40) and he thinks you’re a slovenly wimp who has been reduced to begging your government for alms whenever you can recover the will to break free of your general shiftlessness.

While other politicians of all stripes talk about the industry, ingenuity and selfless commitment of the American worker, Paul Ryan says:

“Americans have been lured into viewing government – more than themselves, their
families, their communities, their faith – as their main source of support; they have been
drawn toward depending on the public sector for growing shares of their material and
personal well-being.  The trend drains individual initiative and personal responsibility. It creates an aversion to risk, sapping the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for growth, innovation, and prosperity. In turn, it subtly and gradually suffocates the creative potential for prosperity.”

He can’t stand you.  You’re like his Mom’s brother who shows up late for the holiday dinner, doesn’t bring a bottle of wine and spends most of the evening cadging beers out of the fridge and trying to talk grandpa into giving him more money.  It’s all in Ryan’s “A Roadmap For America’s Future” which you can read here if you can be bothered to activate the link.

Ryan’s proof that Americans have lost the will to work and prosper is a statistic he cites from the Tax Foundation, a group that calls itself a non-partisan educational association so that it can solicit donations to further its entirely partisan mission to cut taxes for wealthy people.  Ryan says that 60% of Americans receive more in government services than they pay in taxes.  The Tax Foundation helpfully points out that it’s the bottom 60% who are the freeloaders.  We’re all on welfare now.  Except for the top 40%, who pay more in taxes than they get.  These are society’s patrons.

By the Tax Foundation’s calculations, you get the best deal if you’re in the bottom 10% of wage earners.  For every dollar they make they get $10.44 in services.  These services include the usual suspects like welfare benefits, food stamps, the earned income tax credit, Medicaid and other direct transfers of wealth and resources. Good Times.  Remember that show?  Of course, these people make less than $11,000 a year.  While their taxpayer funded haul sounds generous, the Tax Foundation also assumes that they get their proportionate share of government services that are available to everyone:  National Parks; The Smithsonian; Interstate highway maintenance; The air traffic control system.  As if everyone makes the same proportionate use of these public assets and federal money spent on airport security means as much to some one living in a car as it does to an executive with a corporate jet.  These calculations are basically a fiction.  The numbers work but they don’t accurately reflect life.  The rich and the poor share NASA alike, but only Richard Branson has a shot at getting into space.

The Tax Foundation imagines some sort of rich man’s burden at work in society, one that conservatives have seized on as not only economically unsustainable but one that’s unhealthy for a democracy.  People have become dependent, as Ryan argues.  Those who take more than they give have little stake in the future of the entire enterprise.  They will defend their entitlements but little else.  They become childish and antisocial.  This could be a very bad thing.

Now let’s look at the other side of the ledger.  According to the Tax Foundation’s numbers, the top 40% of wage earners take in 73.6% of the income (See here, page 5).  But income certainly isn’t evenly distributed among the top earners.  The top 10% take in 40% of the earnings America produces and taxes in a given year.  The top 1% gets 17% of annual wages.  That top 1% is paying $63,000 more per year than the Tax Foundation says they get in services.  But they make an average $2.1 million a year.  Perhaps they could try living that kind of lifestyle in Colombia, where they would need to hire their own private armies for protection, rather than living here in the U.S. where they are likely admired and are at worst envied in an entirely friendly way.  I think most would call the 63 grand they’re out worth the benefits of living in a fully functioning and open society.