Conference call with Paul Ryan: Fighting for a "new American Renaissance"

Paul Ryan held a conference call with new-media representatives about his speech, expressing his concern that Barack Obama has moved from hope and change to “fear and resentment.”  Ryan accused Obama of telling people that they are stuck without hope is reprehensible, but more importantly, the math is just flat-out wrong.  Ryan says that Obama wants to use that fear to push for wealth redistribution and crony capitalism, rather than remove the barriers for personal success.

Ryan also challenged Americans to recommit themselves to entrepreneurial economics, we can restart economic growth, demolish barriers, and bolster American exceptionalism.

Questions:

• Income inequality numbers — Ryan says the way to address this is to get the economy moving again, which will present the greatest opportunities for success.  The so-called “top 1%” represent successful businesses that employ others and bring opportunities.  This rhetoric, Paul says, somehow demonizes success, but it does work: “Class warfare makes for pretty good politics, but not for good economics.”  Conservatives need to challenge this rhetoric, or we will lose the engine of prosperity we have long enjoyed.
• Is the Occupy movement an expression of the President’s rhetoric, and will it blow up in their faces? — Won’t say that, and Ryan says he shares their frustrations over too-big-to-fail banks.  He says they should join his opposition to Dodd-Frank.  However, Ryan notes that at Tea Parties, you don’t see paddy wagons and teargas.
• Did Obama’s rhetoric contribute to the violence in Oakland? — Ryan says you can’t connect the two, but Obama is certainly dividing Americans, and it has to stop.
• What do you think of the flat tax proposals coming from Perry? — He likes what he sees, and says it’s similar to his own proposals.  “No two ways about it — this is a pro-growth proposal.”  He also says that we’re entering a positive phase of the campaign, getting away from personal attacks and instead putting bold solutions on the table.
• What happens if Republican candidates don’t start challenging the class-warfare rhetoric in the debates? — We are at a very precarious situation in our country, thanks to the escalating debt and wild spending.  If we don’t fix it, we will end up with a social-welfare state and lose the prosperity that we have always enjoyed in our country.
• What about the class-warfare and crony capitalism built into our regulatory system? — That’s starting to get some recognition.  We’re now seeing a “regulatory onslaught,” and the NLRB is a perfect example with Boeing.  “Regulations are nothing more than hidden taxes,” and they’re being used to penalize those out of favor and help those who are in favor.
• Does a flat tax make the system  more complex? — Ryan says that the practical argument for this claim is that people have already arranged their lives around the current code, and that it takes some time to transition in order to avoid economic dislocation.  On the political side, though, there are entrenched interests that will fight simplification — Ryan called it “the gauntlet,” the “tax-expenditure lobby” — and they won when Republicans had control of Washington in the Bush years.  Having two systems in place for a short term allows for transition and bypasses that power.

Ryan finished by saying that we could be on the cusp of a new American economic renaissance — if we have the courage to fight for it.