Paul's Hometown

Paul Ryan (R- Wall St.) likes to tell everyone he is an Irish Catholic from Janesville, WI!

So let's take a quick look at Paul Ryan's ancestry!


1.  Paul Ryan's Ancestral hometown is rooting for  - President Obama of course:

 Despite his name, Roman Catholic faith and immigrant-made-good family history, the Irish half of the Republican ticket is failing to win the allegiance of the old country from Barack Obama, a skilled hand at playing the Irish card.

Obama struck public relations gold last year by sharing a Guinness with a distant cousin in the village of Moneygall after an amateur genealogist traced his ancestors there. Pictures of cheering Irish crowds were beamed across the United States.

But 100 kilometers (60 miles) down the road, Ryan's ancestral hometown is feeling the cold shoulder and like Ireland as a whole, most of the locals are rooting for his Democratic presidential rivals.

"He doesn't have the charisma, he hasn't connected with the people," said Pat Nolan as he strolled passed the 13th century stone church in the village of Graiguenamanagh where Ryan's great-great grandparents were married.

"It doesn't matter what his name is, it's Obama that has made the effort," said Nolan, 62, a retired physiotherapist.

In a recession-hit town where almost a third of the shops on main street are vacant, Obama's promise to secure more visas for Irish immigrants and help attract U.S. investment has struck a chord.

Ryan's pitch to slash public spending does not go down so well in a country reeling from years of austerity imposed after crippling bank debt forced the government to take a bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in 2010.

Despite the Ryan connection, few locals are hoping for a Republican victory across the ocean.

"It would give a boost to a nice small town like this, but I would forgo it. I wouldn't want to inflict him on the American people," said Margaret, a 64-year-old cashier, upset by Ryan's plans to cut welfare and Medicare health cover for the elderly. She withheld her family name to avoid angering her employer.

2.  Not much more popular in Janesville, WI either! 

Whether it's their "slash & burn" budget proposals, unwillingness to provide more than 2 years disclosure of their personal income taxes, or their public distain and dishonesty for and about the middle class, the pretense that Romney/Ryan will be a President/Vice-president for all Americans not only ceases, but seizes.
I hope middle class folks and their supporters understand the distinction between these two different paths. In recent polls in my native Wisconsin -- Paul Ryan's native Wisconsin -- only 10 percent of voters said that Romney's policies would favor the middle class. The poll had President Obama leading Mr. Romney by some 17 points.

Arguably the greatest champion of America's middle class during the 20th century was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was FDR who, in the depths of the Great Depression, created the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, aid to dependent children, Social Security, and banking and stock market regulation to name but a few of the New Deal programs that still exist today.

In sharp contrast to Romney & Ryan's perception of "moochers" was FDR's vision to foster and protect the middle class. President Roosevelt said in his 137th press conference on August 24, 1937, "For people who want to keep themselves free from starvation, keep a roof over their heads, lead decent lives, have proper educational standards, those are the concerns of government... and another thing... is the protection of the life and the liberty of the individual against elements in the community that seek to enrich and advance themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens."

I believe in FDR's vision. I suspect the many folks in Janesville believe in it, too. They deserve better than what Romney/Ryan offer. Certainly, their fellow Americans deserve better.

Three Economists!

1. Paul Krugman was on the Colbert Report recently explaining that if you want to see Romney Economics in action - check out Ireland

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2. Dean Baker wrote a column recently stating that he does not understand why the liberals keep stating that all republicans want is to leave the market's alone, when in reality what the right wants is very big government(tilted in their favor).

Pick an issue, any issue, and you will almost invariably find the right actively pushing for a big role for government. However, for conservatives the goal is not ensuring a decent standard of living for the bulk of the population. Rather the goal is ensuring that money is redistributed upward. And, of course, the conservatives are smart enough not to own up to their use of the government.

Just to take a few easy ones, why would any market-oriented opponent of big government support the existence of too-big-to-fail banks (TBTF)? These TBTF banks operate with an implicit subsidy from the government. Lenders expect the government to step in to back up these banks debt if they fail, as happened on a massive basis in 2008. As a result, TBTF banks can borrow money at lower interest rates than would be possible in a free market. The amount of money at stake is substantial, possibly more than $60 billion a year. This is more money than is at issue with the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. This $60 billion is money that is redistributed from the rest of us to the biggest banks in the country, their top executives and their shareholders, all courtesy of big government.

To take another easy example, drug patents raise the price of prescription drugs by close to $270 billion a year above their free market price. This is roughly five Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Patents are government-granted monopolies. Since prescription drugs often are necessary for a person's health or even life, people will pay almost anything for a drug if they can afford it or can get their insurance to pick up the tab. Patents imply very big government since the government will imprison anyone who produces a drug without the patent holder's consent.

In recent years the big government has been actively working to extend Pfizer and Merck's patent monopolies to the rest of the world through NAFTA, CAFTA and other recent trade deals. Patents are currently used as a mechanism to finance prescription drug research. But there are other more efficient mechanisms, such as the prize system suggested by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz. Alternatively, we could simply increase and redirect the $30 billion in public money that goes to support biomedical research each year through the National Institutes of Health.

3. Jared Bernstein asks "What part of Austerity doesn't work do you not understand"?

First, some facts. By austerity I mean attacking recession by cutting spending and raising taxes – the opposite of Keynesianism, which dictates that if the private sector isn't spending enough money to get the economy moving, the government needs to temporarily step in and supply the juice (aka "stimulus").

Europe and the UK are committed to austerity, and – But that doesn’t explain the U.S., the U.K., and most others who continue to blithely go down this bumpy road. For that, I think we need to reflect on what the great economist Joe Stiglitz refers to in his new book on inequality (I recently interviewed Joe for these pages – should be up soon) as deficit fetishism, the prime symptom of which is the inability to distinguish between good and bad deficit spending

• For Republicans, deficit reduction is a cudgel to bash government. They are ideologically opposed to social insurance, stimulus, infrastructure investment, and everything else, but they gussy this up as an economic argument about markets and debt burdens on future generations. Worse, for them it’s mostly rhetoric. Since Reagan, it’s the Republicans who’ve run structural deficits (Obama’s deficits are largely cyclical—very much a function of the recession).

• Drawing the wrong lessons from the Clinton surpluses: The last time the federal budget was in surplus was at the end of the Clinton years. Economic growth was strong, unemployment very low (below 4% for a few months in 2000!), and financial markets were booming (due, in no small part, to the dot.com bubble, but that’s a different story). These were the years of the alleged bond vigilantes, bond traders who would punish governments by dumping their bonds if they thought their fiscal policy was irresponsible. I’m not sure there ever was such a menace—what led to the late 90s surpluses were a reasonable set of tax rates and strong (albeit bubbly) growth. But whatever…the main point is that fiscal policy during the Clinton years made sense: deficits fell as the recovery gained strength. By no measure does that imply that austerity makes sense in recession.