Earlier this year, when I asked Rep. Phil English (R-Penn.) his favorite choice for a runningmate with John McCain. “Paul Ryan,” he replied, naming his Republican colleague from Wisconsin and fellow House Ways and Means Committee Member and, in the process, giving me a jolt.
Paul Ryan? At 38 and after a decade in Congress from Wisconisn’s 1st District (Janesville-Konosha), Ryan is not exactly a “household word.” A graduate of Miami Univeristy (Ohio), Ryan worked as speechwriter for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at their “Empower America” organization, and was then legislative director for Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KA). Anticipating that incumbent Rep. Mark Neumann would run for the Senate in 1998, Ryan moved back to his hometown, mobilized a campaign in which he wouild easily win nomination and electon (57% of the vote) to Congress. As a Member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, he has been a force behind tax cuts and trimming discretionary spending. Ryan (lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 93%) has also been a strong booster of gunowners’ right, pro-life legislation, and tougher measures on illegal immigration.
Impressive, all right, but the first impression is not ready for presidential politics. English disagrees. As he put it, “Paul is Catholic, from the Rustbelt, and has the economic credentials Sen. McCain needs.” Other Republican backbenchers agree, and talk of Ryan-for-Veep mushrooms in the House GOP Conference.
So what does Ryan himself think of this? “I’m flattered,” he told colleagues Allan Ryskind and Jim Seminara and me recently, “But that and fifty cents gets me a cup of coffee. I don’t take these things too seriously.”
What Ryan does take seriously is the agenda he deals with on the Budget and Ways and Means Committee - in his words, “an agenda that is rooted in principle that solves our problems of debt, of taxes, of winning globalization. And when I look at the fact that my three kids, who are 3, 4, and 6 years old, when they’re my age, under the current projections, the government will be twice what it is today. And that’s unsustainable. We will become France. France is a nice country, a nice place to visit, but it’s not a great country. And we will become France in the not-to-distant future unless we change course. That’s why I’m here, to try and change that trajectory.”
Social Security is a case in point, says Ryan, and “the easy one to fix. You know, money in, money out. It’s pretty simple.”
Having held sixty-four town meetings on the issue at home and introduced at least three bills for Social Security reform, the lawmaker believes “the best way to fix Social Security is large personal retirement accounts, which grow at an average of 5 or 6 % a year. And over a person’s lifetime, the benefit obligation obviously shifts from the government to the account. That’s good for many reasons. It’s good for economic reasons. It’s good because the power of compound interest is harnessed on behalf of the individual. It’s also good for political and philosophical reasons, because people become more independent. People become more self-reliant. People become owners of our free enterprise system. Actually, there isn’t an idea out there, that more decentralizes the concentration of wealth in America than large personal retirement accounts for Social Security.”
On the lower tax front, Ryan is a strong booster of McCain’s proposal to drop the gasoline tax for the summer and, on behalf of the Republican Study Committee, has introduced the Tax Fair Choice Act. As he told us, “it which has an alternative tax system you can choose to have if you want to. Right now, you have to fill out two codes. AMT and the 1040 code. Under our bill, you can pick and then go. You can use the current system, or the new system, which has a top rate of 25%. And that’s what our proposal was. And I’m really happy to see him start talking real tax reform. I think he just began the dialogue on tax reform today, and that’s a good step in the right direction as well.”
In taking this position, he stands for neither the flat tax popularized by Steve Forbes nor the the “fair tax,” whose banner was carried in the ’08 Republican primaries by Mike Huckabee.
“Going from one system to a new system inevitably involves clumsy transition decisions.,” Ryan maintains, “The best way to do that is to allow the individual to choose how and when to transition from the old, clumsy code we have to a new entrepreneurial code, a low tax code, and that’s why we have a ten-year transition system in our program.
“At the end of the day, I think our taxes should tax income once at its source, and never again. We should not have these double and triple layers of taxation on capital like we have in the code today. And those ought to be eliminated. So I think George W. Bush did a lot of good work on this. I think where they went is probably the best, most intelligent way to go. My friends [who support] the Fair Tax are onto a good idea. Unfortunately, just watching the way this place works, I fear that we’ll just look like Europe, and we’ll have an income tax with a sales tax on top of it.”
Like most House conservatives, Ryan has had his differences with the man who will lead his party’s ticket into the ’08 elections. He proudly voted for oil drilling in the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and opposed the McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration package. Ryan has offered the Clear Act to beef up identification mechanism for illegal immigrants and says that “after we’ve secured the border, after we have a secure employment verification system so that illegals can’t get jobs, then let’s talk about a guest worker program.”
While “extremely sympathetic” with McCain’s opposition to the Administration’s prescription drug bill in 2003, Ryan felt he had to vote for it because “I was in a different type of position because I was the person who negotiated Health Savings Accounts into the law.
Overall, Ryan feels the ’03 measure has been a success. “Medicare Advantage is breaking up this Medicare monopoly, this government monopoly, and it’s showing us the way we need to go forward on how we reform entitlements,” he told us, “The whole bill, the drug bill, has come in 40% under projections - 40% under cost projections - because of the fact that we have private sector choice and competition in this program. And so we’ve been able to demonstrate, here’s the way you reform entitlements.”
Like Pope Benedict XVI, the Wisconsin lawmaker believes it’s important to confront relativism and that we recognize the threat form Islamic totalitarianism.
“But what I focus on, because you have to have to pick your fights wisely, and where my aptitude is is in the area of economics,” he said, emphasizing his concern that ”we are about to surrender our freedoms to the status quo, as Milton Friedman said, to the status quo if we just let government continue on its path. And the problem is we’re at this juncture in this nation where all the left has to do is stop us from reforming government, and they get a social welfare state in this country.:”
Needless to say, a session with Paul Ryan is wide-ranging, informative, and even visionary. Will such vision put him on a national ticket? The consensus seems to be “not yet” but, sometime in the future, a good bet.
