Rep. Paul Ryan Schools Chris Matthews on Basic Economics

Lucky Wisconsin has a great rep -- Rep. Paul Ryan (R).  He went toe-to-toe with Chris Matthews and soundly argues for specific tax cuts ... that Matthews just blew through or didn't comprehend.

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You can go to Noel Sheppard's transcript and commentary over at Newsbusters: "Paul Ryan Schools Chris Matthews on Tax Hikes, Budgets, and Economics 101."  Here's my favorite part: Matthews asked Ryan if he had no problems with defending tax cuts for people who make over a quarter a million a year.  Ryan replied no, and offered small businesses as his reason why.

MATTHEWS: No, no, individuals. It`s an individual tax cut.

RYAN: No, no. You have to understand, Chris, 75 percent of those people who pay that tax rate are small businesses who file as individuals, not corporations. That`s the problem with this economic argument, Chris, is when you think you`re just taxing rich people like Bill Gates, what you`re end up doing is you`re hitting successful small businesses. When we tax our employers more than our foreign competitors tax theirs, they get our jobs and we lose in global competition.

So, we ought to be keeping our eye in economic growth and job creation, what`s necessary to do, and that means low tax rates on businesses and small businesses in certainty. We have a whole new tax on certainty that`s hurting economic growth. We need to give taxpayers certainty that they`re not going to have a huge wave of tax increases in 2011 and then another in 2013.

MATTHEWS: OK.

RYAN: I would argue that`s depressing economic growth and costing us jobs.

I found a Newsweek article from March that cites what the Congressional Budget Office has said about Ryan's Roadmap:

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces Congress's official projections about the long-term fiscal effects of legislation, Ryan's Roadmap for America’s Future would zero out the deficit, balance the budget by 2063, and reduce Medicare's expected share of the economy in 2080 from a projected 14.3 percent of GDP to a mere 4 percent. The Roadmap also calls for a substantial simplification of the tax code and a replacement of the corporate income tax with an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. CBO's projections are inherently uncertain—even the most competent economic forecasters can only guess at how the world will change over 50-plus years. But the result is, at the very least, a compelling conservative vision of the country's fiscal future.

Rep. Ryan will be an interestesting politician to keep an eye on. I've seen him before dogging Congress on its schemes, including this past winter's Bipartisan White House Summit on deficit reduction, when Ryan challenged Obama on his claims that the proposed plan would reduce the deficit.  Here's a snippet of Ryan schooling Obama:



Obama's face: priceless! Obama sits with his hand casually placed at his chin, but notice how much he's blinking.  He looks especially pissed at about 5:25.

"Ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers.  Hiding spending does not reduce spending."