Most politicians are contemptible. They are shallow, grasping, insecure clowns who want to expand the size and scope of government so they have more power to dictate how the rest of us live our lives.
To make matters worse, many of them know they are doing the wrong thing, but they don’t have the moral courage to resist the corrupt, go-along-to-get-along culture of Washington.
But that doesn’t mean they’re bad people. When people ask me what motivates politicians, I sometime explain the theory of “public choice.” In other cases, I tell the simple story of the guy who is endlessly conflicted between an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other shoulder.
And I tell them that a good politician is one who – more often than not – sides with the angel.
And that’s why, when asked to comment on the outgoing Speaker of the House, I applauded Paul Ryan. You can watch the entire interview here, but I’ve excerpted a segment that hits the two main points.
Simply stated, Ryan was instrumental in moving the ball forward on tax reform. I very much doubt we would have achieved a lower corporate tax rate or scaled back the state and local tax deduction without all the work he did during his time at the Budget Committee and Ways & Means Committee.
And while entitlement reform never happened, first because of Obama and now because of Trump, it’s nonetheless a remarkable achievement that Ryan was able to:
Put together budgets with genuine Medicaid and Medicare reform.- Get those budgets approved by the House and Senate.
By the way, I’m not being a naive cheerleader.
Ryan had plenty of bad votes, including the horribly corrupt TARP bailout. And he routinely supported many other elements of George W. Bush’s big-government agenda.
And his tax record wasn’t perfect, either. His Roadmap budget plan had some great reforms, but also included a value-added tax. More recently, he supported the border-adjustment tax (sort of a pre-VAT).
But even Saint Ronald wasn’t perfect.
P.S. My biggest sin of omission in the interview is that I didn’t mention the de facto five-year spending freeze between 2009-2014, an achievement that largely overlapped with Ryan’s tenure as Chairman of the Budget Committee.
