Dick Ryan, the long-retired director of the legislature’s research department, died on October 19 this year in Topeka at age 95. In his 46 years at the department, he earned a reputation for hard-nosed fact-finding and pinpoint analysis, the experts’ expert.
The department provided specialists to legislative committees for research and analysis on request. The topics have been wide-ranging, from local taxes and school finance to federal aid, highway projects, welfare programs and public health initiatives. Under Ryan’s leadership, his staff – all with required master’s degrees – were known for telling lawmakers what they needed to know, not what they wanted to hear.
Ryan led by example. By the time he retired in 1996, after 46 years at the department, he had become prophet and sage, especially about the state budget and the budget process. By the late 1980s, he could be spotted from time to time in the Capitol halls, tall and thin, walking with a determined slant, leading with his jaw. He was at once a mystery and a legend – a budget scholar with an encyclopedic mind, a frightening intellect. He was a man of few words and loathed people who wasted them.
He dismissed reporters who came to him unprepared and was curt with legislators who were not equipped for discussions. His comprehensive testimony before legislative committees left little room for questions. He was not shy about dismantling myths and suspicions about the budget process. He dealt only in proof of fact.
I went to him in the late 1980s and asked his help in understanding the state budget – how the money came in and where it went. Each January for seven years until he retired, we met on Martin Luther King Day in his 5th-floor Capitol office to look over a governor’s new budget proposal piece by piece, 900 pages in two volumes.
It was not all grind. In those days, smoking had not been banned, Ryan cherished a good cigar, and late in the morning he’d pull out a box and offer one of his finest. One year he surprised me with petit fours from La Galette, a French bakery that his son, Kelly, had opened.
Ryan, the budget master and authoritarian, his platoon of experts well-equipped, retired quietly. Years ago he wrote his own brief obituary. “Richard was no fan of funerals so he is not having one…Adios,” he wrote.
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Pushing reform
A progressive pitch these days includes heavy taxes on high-end incomes and big investment dividends. Moderate Democrats are more cautious about overloading their speeches on taxing the rich, and rich companies.
This is reminiscent of George McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat who ran for president in 1972. McGovern wanted to tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. He wanted to reduce depreciation allowances and investment credits and increase death duties on stocks and bonds.
This gave moderate Democrats and even liberal Republicans a case of nerves. Capital gains reflect the growth factor in stocks, and hope of growth prompts investment perhaps even more than hope for income. The big investors then, as now, were pension funds, life insurance companies, mutual funds, charitable trusts and educational institutions.
Small investors were not the speculators or operators, but laborers, farmers, small business managers saving for a rainy day, widows, orphans and retired persons.
It was said in McGovern’s time that a majority of men and women who work would be affected adversely by McGovern’s proposals. They would be hurt in their pension funds, their insurance premiums, their savings.
At that time, an important way that corporations raised more money to start production and hire more people was through the sale of stock to those who hoped for capital gains.
In that era of rapidly changing techniques and heavy income taxes, corporations generated cash to replace obsolete equipment by taking depreciation on the declining worth of that equipment.
McGovern seemed confused about both political realities and business realities. He seemed to be thinking in simple-minded terms about the economy of another age, when the well-being of the wage earner was not tied to the growth of business and industry.
Many of these arguments are in play today. Some, such as the well-being of wage earners, and the purpose of selling stocks, have been turned on their heads. Hedge fund barons, multinational bullies and off-shore shufflers no longer can cry about heavy taxes. The trick today, as a half-century ago, is to achieve reform by knowing where to squeeze and how far to push it.
