A couple of days ago Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, and ever since I have been arguing with myself over what this means for America. Don't get me wrong, Ryan is the best person Romney could have picked as a running mate. Not that I will be changing my choice between today and November 2nd. Due to the fact that Romney hasn't presented a convincing enough argument that he won't do what he did at Bain Capital while in the Oval Office. He was a wonderful governor but he's run away from that record while endorsing his record at Bain which baffles me.The serious problem of debt that currently exists and the way in which debt was leveraged while at Bain are too similar, and in good conscience I can't vote for Romney due to these facts.
In any other part of the industrialized western world I would be called a conservative, and in the United States the political movements I most identified with would be the Rockefeller Republicans. When I first got engaged in politics, I would take the political compass test and my results would line up perfectly with José Zapatero. Since then I take it periodically and I still score closely to Zapatero's views but more and more I'm becoming a left libertarian. At the end of the day I believe in the efficiency of markets and smaller government, but I believe the efficiency of markets is due to rigorous planning and if we are to have efficient government we will need much greater planning.
Not to bloviate my frontal baggage of political views, I just thought it was important to get some of that out of the way before I came here to say what I felt needed to be said. Back to Paul Ryan. I fear that the greatest asset Paul Ryan has to bring to this election and to America may be his greatest shortcoming as vice president. He put forward ideas that were incredibly unpopular in his own caucus as a junior member and their shear force of those ideas resonating with the Tea party wave were able to build a brand for himself. The problem is for me that while those ideas resonate in sound bites, the do for me honestly, I genuinely enjoyed hearing him tear into the Affordable Care Act with a lot of the same criticisms I had of it when I read what I could of what was proposed at the time.
The problem is in the details of what he proposes outside of the talking points. I read his proposed medicare reform and it baffles me. Democrats have the problems of being meticulous(or meretricious depending on which side of the fence you fall) in what they propose in writing, a huge criticism the Republicans aptly had of the Affordable Care Act when you look at it's length. The average American is never going to have the time to sit down and read what was proposed, even at the length at which it took them to pass the bill. The problem Ryan's proposal had was not only was it excruciatingly vague in how it proposed it's ideas but it was clear in the wording even with its vagueness to just shift costs around. That coupled with the amount of revenue he proposed to cut and no articulate proposal to make the revenue gap... Well let's just say it baffled me at the time and still does.
At it's core the Chilean idea(the main influence for Ryan's proposed reform of medicare), giving citizens some control over their healthcare, effectively involving them into the process sounds like a good idea. But every time he presents it in writing the details of his proposal are make me flinch. While healthcare is important, the biggest reform in our government in modern times, whether you think it was effective or not was in 1986 of the tax code. If we are to approach the biggest problem I think is facing us going forward we are going to have to change the tax code somehow, again. Not only find a way to make revenue match spending but like in the case of Chilean healthcare involve ALL working Americans into the current system. Ever since we reformed the tax code, it's been edited fifth-teen thousand times. In that time its digressed slowly to the broken state it is today. Just to put this into context, during the Obama administration the number of laws actually passed was in the single digits including the Affordable Care Act while being below normal isn't that below normal as you might expect. Even with all those edits to the tax code its clear that it's broken, and the problems it fixed thirty years ago has only opened room for new more devastating problems that need to be addressed and haven't been addressed despite all these numerous edits.
It is much more likely that instead of fixing the tax code we will just find new ways to encourage bad behavior and discard the old bad behavior. That being said, I think Ryan offers a good voice for the conservative argument and counter factual to Obama in the debates. It is likely that Paul Ryan will upstage Romney, but that's only because Ryan has done such a good job at building his own brand on his ideas. At the essence of democracy that's what you want to encourage, whether your enjoy their ideas or not. It's better than the alternative. I'm just glad Republicans have stopped focusing on social issues, it's a shame they had to pick the guy who runs away from his accomplishments and advertises his shortcomings. That's not a brand I can get behind.
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