Budget chicanery.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Comment - Paul Ryan - Viewpoint essay

House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, has a way of disarming people at his town hall meetings.

"Hi, everybody!" he calls out cheerfully as he strides into the high school gym in Franklin, Wisconsin, holding the microphone talk-show-host style. "Wow! We never used to get so many people at these events." Ryan urges his constituents to share their views openly and politely in front of the cameras.

"We all have strong opinions," he says. "Let's show people we can have a civil debate."

It works. Ryan's friendly, open demeanor relaxes the crowd. So does his pitch that his budget is really not as radical as they've heard--and that it won't touch them personally.

"How many of you are fifty-five or over?" he asks. Nearly every hand goes up. "This won't affect you," he says.

As he flips through PowerPoint slides, talking fast the whole time, he unleashes a cascade of charts and graphs he says shows our economy being crushed under the weight of government spending.

"Welfare reform worked well in the 1990s, but it only reformed one program," he says. "We need to reform the other entitlements."

This is a stunning assertion. The "entitlements" he's talking about--welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--represent the pillars of the New Deal and the Great Society. Ryan and the Republicans want to knock them all down. For years, politicians have been afraid to touch Medicare and Social Security because, unlike welfare, they are crucial protections not just for poor, disenfranchised women and children, but for middle-class retirees who vote in large numbers.

Add to this Ryan's advocacy for permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, plus $4 trillion in spending cuts mainly to programs that serve people with low and moderate incomes, and you have the boldest effort ever to fulfill the rightwing ambition of destroying government.

But Ryan presents it with a smile. "People say this is so draconian--that we're hurting children. The rhetoric is pretty overwhelming," he says.

When people attack his plan--such as one woman wearing a Wisconsin solidarity T-shirt who tells Ryan his budget is "balanced on the backs of the poor" and we have "the lowest taxes on the rich ever"--he leans forward and praises their politeness.

"Some people say, 'Just raise taxes,' " Ryan says. "Trust me, it's mathematically impossible" to fix the deficit that way.

He displays a bar graph showing how closing tax loopholes (but keeping...