What are we to think of Mitt Romney's pick for the next Vice President? He's not a graduate of Columbia University. He's not a graduate of Harvard. He wasn't selected as the President of the Harvard Law Review. He didn't get a special free quota scholarship ride to any prestigious university and, instead, had to work his way through Miami University of Ohio. For God's sake the man drove the Oscar Mayer Wiener Truck one summer and waited tables another!
One morning when Paul Ryan was sixteen years old he went in to wake his father up and found him dead of a heart attack. He didn't write two books about that experience (like Obama did). Instead, he assumed the role of adult at an early age, never having the luxury to pursue youthful drug use and the art of socialist revolution.
Instead, Paul Ryan and his mother took his grandmother, suffering from Alzheimers, into the household and served as the primary care provider for his grandma. His grandma wasn't the Vice President of the Bank of Hawaii (like Obama's) so she could offer nothing in return, except the element of "need".
Once Paul Ryan got his BA in Economics from Miami University of Ohio he was hired as a staff economist in Wisconsin Senator Kastin's office. The job must have not paid well because young Ryan moonlighted as a waiter and fitness trainer. No one offered him a "token honor" position at the University of Chicago and a $200,000 dollar a year salary.
When a still young Paul Ryan returned to Wisconsin to run for Congress he didn't demonize his opponent and dig up dirt to shovel against him. He waited until the standing Congressman vacated the office before seeking the office. In Janesville, Wisconsin they don't have a big political machine to promote you, to criminalize your opponent; instead Paul Ryan had to go door to door and sit at kitchen tables and listen to his future constituents.
After getting elected to Congress Paul Ryan didn't triumphantly march into Washington, buy himself a Georgetown townhouse and proceed over to K Street to rub elbows with lobbyists. He bunked in his Congressional office and used the house gym for showers and a fresh change of clothes.
Paul Ryan then married and took his bride back to Janesville. He lives on the same street he lived on as a kid and shares the neighborhood with eight other members of the Ryan clan. He hunts with the local Janesville hunt club and attends PTA meetings and other civic functions.
For those who can't make those public functions, Paul Ryan bought an old bread truck, converted it into a "mobile constituent office" and drives around to meet with those who need his help and attention.
No, I don't know if we can vote for a guy like this. He doesn't have a regal pedigree; he's Irish for God's sake! No one awarded him a Nobel Peace Prize two months after getting elected. No one threw flowers or got "chills down their leg" as a he took his seat in Congress.
What is most despicable about Paul Ryan is that he has had the nerve to write the House Budget for three years in a row. He's is brazen and heartless in advocating in that budget for a $5 trillion dollar reduction in federal spending over the next ten years! The House passed his budget three years in a row and three years in a row the Democratically controlled Senate has let it die in the upper house, without ever proposing a budget of their own. What is wrong with this guy? If Congress were to cut $5 trillion dollars from the budget where would the President get the money to give $500 million dollars to a bankrupt Solyndra? Or $200 million dollars for bankrupt Energy 1? Or $11 billion dollars to illegal aliens filing INIT, non-resident tax returns to claim $11 billion big ones in child tax credits, even for their children living in Mexico?
I don't know. Paul Ryan seems heartless to me. He keeps wanting to cut government waste, he keeps wanting to put a halt to those big GSA conventions in Vegas and, worse, he keeps trying to make people look at that $16.7 trillion dollar deficit! The guy's no fun at all!
Who wants a numbers cruncher? Who wants someone spoiling the party by showing folks the bill? Nothing will spoil a party quicker than sending the host the bill before the party's over.
What’s right is right what’s wrong is left
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Comments
a bromance and an antique pun - sinister - get it lulz
I dont know why rightwing snark is just never convincing. You just don't do it all that well. I'm not sure you get into the spirit of the thing. Ya see, snark is supposed to be funny, not just a reveal of your true deep emotions.
Practice makes perfect tho, so, it's good you are getting some practice,
Anyways, glad to hear you got a mancrush on Ryan. Everyone should have a hobby.
Thing is, you kinda leave yourself open to counterpoint. Thanks for that.
You got anything substantive you want to lead with? Before I counterpoint, that is?
Now, I thought this was a fun example of snark...
What Ayn Rand Taught Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan laughed. He stood naked on top of the vice president’s desk in the Senate chamber, scanning the crowd of sniveling politicians below him.
He flexed his muscles, the result of hours spent in the House gymnasium. Look at these pathetic specimens, he thought. Not one of them could do a one-armed pushup if his life depended on it. Not one was worthy of so much as co-sponsoring one of Ryan’s bills. Every single one of them had been elected by appealing to the average citizen in his (or her -- Ryan snorted at the thought) district. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that of all the men and women in this room, only he, Paul Ryan, had been selected for his current office by the president himself.
The president. Ryan’s mind wandered as he thought about the only man who stood between him and absolute power. Mitt Romney was a weakling, he thought -- and not for the first time. He’s a man whose views can change. The thought filled Ryan with disgust. His own views were as solid as granite. They were the views of the only clear-thinking woman he had ever met: Ayn Rand.
Now, other than the medicare killing budget, what has Ryan done?
The place to start might be substance, so I was wondering what you think Ryan has actually done?
Besides voting against fair pay for women, say?
Every analysis I have read says the Ryan Budget is a kind of a fraud, in that (a) it actually increases the deficit, and (b) it cant get passed.
What's your analysis? Do you figure a vouchers medicare is passable? How does that work, politically?
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting recent article looking at the budget, from Martin Wolf, associate editor at the Financial Times, which is the leading publication of the London financiers - so, an outsiders look at the plan.
Paul Ryan’s plan for America is not credible
In all, the idea that Republicans care about the deficit does not pass the laugh test. Mr Ryan, however, is supposed to be different: he is a conservative, but an honest one.
Really? As Heidi Przybyla notes in a report for Bloomberg, Mr Ryan was pivotal in killing the Bowles-Simpson agreement, which, for all its faults, was (and is) the only politically realistic long-term fiscal solution. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office’s meticulous analysis of the initial Ryan plan demonstrated that it is smoke and mirrors.
As usual in any contemporary Republican plan, Mr Ryan’s offers upfront unfunded tax cuts, with the top marginal tax rate slashed from 35 per cent to 25 per cent. These cuts are to be offset by deliberately unspecified reductions in “tax expenditures”. Of these, the CBO comments, “the path for revenues as a percentage of GDP was specified by Chairman Ryan’s staff. The path rises steadily from about 15 per cent of GDP in 2010 to 19 per cent in 2028 and remains at that level thereafter. There were no specifications of particular revenue provisions that would generate that path.”
In discussing these unspecified savings, Mr Stockman notes: “Of the $1tn in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates of capital gains and dividends.” That is simply not going to happen.
The plan also leaves social security and Medicare untouched before 2022. What the plan would do, instead, in Mr Stockman’s words, is “shred the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100bn per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300bn for Medicaid”. The intention here is to turn federal support into block grants of fixed dollar amounts, indexed to consumer prices. This would shift an increasing burden on to already stretched state budgets.
Would this plan improve the deficit picture over the next decade? No, not really. The CBO projects that, under current law, which includes expiration of the unfunded and unaffordable Bush tax cuts, the deficit would be 2¾ per cent of GDP in 2022 and the debt held by the public would be 67 per cent of GDP. Under the Ryan plan, if implemented (which is close to inconceivable), the deficit would be – wait for it – 1¾ per cent of GDP, while debt held by the public would be higher, at 70 per cent of GDP. Even if one did believe in Mr Ryan’s plans, federal debt would rise by $6tn over the next decade alone, as Matt Miller has noted in the Washington Post. But the plan would make federal revenue 2½ per cent of GDP lower and spending 3½ per cent of GDP lower than the CBO’s baseline, by 2022. The real difference, then, lies not in deficits and debt over the next decade, but in tax and spending.
It is true that, under the plan, by 2050 (if one believes that plans for such a distant date have meaning), the deficit would have turned into a surplus and non-interest federal spending would be down to 14¼ per cent of GDP, from 22½ per cent in 2010. Yet this assumes that all spending, other than on health, social security and interest, would be 3½ per cent of GDP. As the CBO notes, “spending in this category has exceeded 8 per cent of GDP in every year since World War II”. Indeed, 3½ per cent of GDP would be less than the current share of defence alone.
The core of the plan for the long term, however, is elimination of Medicare for anybody below 65 in 2022. Its replacement would be a voucher for purchasing insurance that would put 68 per cent of the cost on to beneficiaries, by 2030. If that happened, it could bring federal health spending down to 4¾ per cent of GDP by 2050, against 5½ per cent in 2010, despite the rise in the share of elderly voters. If you believe that is likely, I have a bridge to sell you.
Over the next decade, the Ryan plan is inadequate and incomplete. Over the long run, it is incredible. It may be good politics. It is bad policy.