Tag: Paul Ryan

Can We Stop The Budget Game?

This game of battling budget proposals is getting weary……..Recently, whiz kid Ryan offered up his new budget proposal…..here is the rub……the newest budget is almost word for word the last whiz kid proposal…….only the new one says it will balance the budget in 10 years as opposed to the 40 years in the last one…….but do not take my word for it……..

(Newser) – Paul Ryan is unveiling his latest budget proposal, and this time, he says, it’ll balance in 10 years—half the time he claimed for his previous budget, NPR notes, because he’s including new revenue from the fiscal cliff deal. As promised, the new plan calls for repealing ObamaCare, to be replaced with “patient-centered reforms,” Ryan writes in the Wall Street Journal. Ryan would also boost oil drilling and reform Medicare, the tax code, and welfare, Politico reports.

“On the current path, we’ll spend $46 trillion over the next 10 years. Under our proposal, we’ll spend $41 trillion,” Ryan writes. “Because the US economy will grow faster than spending, the budget will balance by 2023, and debt held by the public will drop to just over half the size of the economy.” Among his proposals:

  • On taxes: Instead of the current “Rubik’s cube,” “our goal is to have just two brackets: 10% and 25%,” Ryan writes.
  • On welfare: “After the welfare reforms of 1996, child poverty fell by double digits,” he notes. The budget would let states “tailor programs like Medicaid and food stamps to their people’s needs.”
  • As for Medicare: “Starting in 2024,” seniors will see “a range of insurance plans from which they can choose—including traditional Medicare.” It will be “a premium support program,” notes NPR.
  • Meanwhile, Patty Murray, Democrat head of the Senate Budget Committee, is proposing her own plan, which would raise tax revenues by almost $1 trillion as it cuts spending to the same extent, Politico reports. She’ll meet with party members, including President Obama, today.

Why waste time?  This budget is dead on arrival at the Senate……..and the Senate budget will be dead on arrival in the House……..and Obama’s budget will just tickle somebody’s fancy…..but wait!  This sounds a lot like the budget that Ryan ran on in 2012…..oh yeah, he lost!  so why go through this BS?  Why waste the country’s time?

Here’s Why

When Romney announced his running mate would be Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, people rejoiced and I was one of them….not because I am a conserv but rather that Ryan was a person that had a plan, which I did not agree with, and that would give the Romney presidency some direction and some specifics that could be debated….but so far I have seen nothing to impress me about Ryan, if I deduct that gym schedule that he has, and the Romney presidency has nothing, even after several promises of more specifics and several restarts, we as voters still have NOTHING that would make him a good president….Hell not even a bad president….at least bad pres have plans….Romney got nothing but “trust me” or  “I will explain everything after the election”……

GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan insists that Mitt Romney’s plan will lower taxes for all Americans, but you’ll just have to take him on his word. When asked by “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace about the plan’s specifics, Ryan said he did not have enough time to explain it.

“It would take me too long to go through all of the math,” Ryan said. He added, “But let me say it this way. You can lower tax rates 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class for things like charitable deductions, home purchases, for health care. What we’re saying is people are going to get lower tax rates and therefore they will not send as much money to Washington.”

If Paul Ryan is the best they can do at explaining their issues then they are in bigger trouble than I had anticipated.

One of the best examples of this campaign with NOTHING is an response that Ryan  had to a question by FOX News personality, Chris Wallace…..let me say that again in case you missed it…….Chris Wallace of FOX News…..

I think we have seen what will be one of the points covered at tomorrow’s debate….

This is the perfect example of the Romney/Ryan campaign….they have no way to give specifics…even when asked by FOX News….they have nothing.

10 Things About Ryan

The hoopla of the Ryan VP candidacy is winding down and so am I….he is an interesting person….but it is a short lived interest, at least for me…….this will be my last post on Ryan for at least the foreseeable future and I want to leave the reader and hopefully voter with a few things to keep in mind about Rep. Paul Ryan……..

The list was compiled by MoveOn.org a liberal group that few Right wingers put any validity in their words…..but I say get creative and use your Google button and find out for yourselves…….

1. His economic plan would cost America 1 million jobs in the first year. Ryan’s proposed budget would cripple the economy. He’d slash spending deeply, which would not only slow job growth, but shock the economy and cost 1 million of us our jobs in 2013 alone and kill more than 4 million jobs by the end of 2014.[1]

2. He’d kill Medicare. He’d replace Medicare with vouchers for retirees to purchase insurance, eliminating the guarantee of health care for seniors and putting them at the mercy of the private insurance industry. That could amount to a cost increase of more than $5,900 by 2050, leaving many seniors broke or without the health care they need. He’d also raise the age of eligibility to 67.[2]

3. He’d pickpocket the middle class to line the pockets of the rich. His tax plan is Robin Hood in reverse. He wants to cut taxes by $4.6 trillion over the next decade, but only for corporations and the rich, like giving families earning more than $1 million a year a $300,000 tax cut. And to pay for them, he’d raise taxes on middle- and lower-income households and butcher social service programs that help middle- and working-class Americans.[3]

4. He’s an anti-choice extremist. Ryan co-sponsored an extremist anti-choice bill, nicknamed the ‘Let Women Die Act,’ that would have allowed hospitals to deny women emergency abortion care even if their lives were at risk. And he co-sponsored another bill that would criminalize some forms of birth control, all abortions, and in vitro fertilization.[4]

5. He’d dismantle Social Security. Ironically, Ryan used the Social Security Survivors benefit to help pay for college, but he wants to take that possibility away from future generations. He agrees with Rick Perry’s view that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” and he supported George W. Bush’s disastrous proposal to privatize Social Security.[5]

6. He’d eliminate Pell grants for more than 1 million low-income students. His budget plan cuts the Pell Grant program by $200 billion, which could mean a loss of educational funding for 1 million low-income students.[6]

7. He’d give $40 billion in subsidies to Big Oil. His budget includes oil tax breaks worth $40 billion, while cutting “billions of dollars from investments to develop alternative fuels and clean energy technologies that would serve as substitutes for oil.”[7]

8. He’s another Koch-head politician. Not surprisingly, the billionaire oil-baron Koch brothers are some of Ryan’s biggest political contributors. And their company, Koch industries, is Ryan’s biggest energy-related donor. The company’s PAC and affiliated individuals have given him $65,500 in donations.[8]

9. He opposes gay rights. Ryan has an abysmal voting record on gay rights. He’s voted to ban adoption by gay couples, against same-sex marriage, and against repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He also voted against the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2009.[9]

10. He thinks an “I got mine, who cares if you’re okay” philosophy is admirable. For many years, Paul Ryan devoted himself to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness as a virtue. It has shaped his entire ethic about whom he serves in public office. He even went as far as making his interns read her work.[10]

I do suggest that if you want to know the truth about anything then search for apolitical sites that have NO political affliation….I know that this is an uncommon way to get facts nowadays….but ….try it!  You may like it!

The Selling Of A VP

Mitt has now made his choice of a running mate and that person as we all know by now, Paul Ryan……a common name but only 23% of the people polled have any idea who he is…..so the GOP will have to market him and have him ready for his place at the convention…..now I know you will ask….”how ill they do that”…..good question and Justin Raimondo has written such and analysis…….

Paul Ryan at Utah fundraiser 2012

The Romney campaign is making a major effort to reach out to the Tea Party, grassroots conservative activists, and Ron Paul’s libertarian supporters. They’ve not only invited Rand Paul to speak at the Tampa convention, they’ve also scheduled a “Tribute to Ron Paul” video to be shown to the delegates. However, these are mere crumbs: the video is not likely to highlight Paul’s more interesting positions, such as his vociferous opposition to the American empire and its endless wars.

No, the real cake, complete with quasi-“libertarian” frosting, is Paul Ryan, whose addition to the ticket opens up the prospect of having Ayn Rand, the late novelist and philosopher of “Objectivism,” become a campaign issue. I can’t wait for someone to accuse the Republicans of endorsing “terrorism” on the grounds that The Fountainhead, Rand’s best-selling 1943 novel, climaxes with the hero blowing up a home for mentally challenged orphans. Oh wait …

That some “libertarians” are ready, willing, and able to swallow this guff, I have no doubt. They claim Ryan “gets the free market.” Well, whoop-de-doo! So does the Chinese Communist party, these days.

However, he doesn’t really “get it” at all, not even to the extent that the heirs of Deng Xiaoping do, because he thinks we can still have an overseas empire and a “limited” government, with low taxes and “free” enterprise. The Chicoms — to use right-wing Republican phraseology — are “isolationists,” i.e. their foreign policy amounts to minding their own business and making as much money as possible. Ryan, on the other hand, is all about maintaining “American leadership” in the world, and the way he tells it, “leadership” is a polite euphemism for domination.

In a speech before the Alexander Hamilton Society — where else? — Ryan gave full-throated expression to what American foreign policy would look like under his watch, and while the vice-presidency is an office with little power, from the tone of the speech the office of the Vice President in a Republican administration would once again become a nest of neocons lobbying for more and bigger wars.

Ryan may be a neocon drone, but he’s no Dan Quayle: he realizes, as he put it in his talk to the Hamiltonians, that “our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

Translation: we can’t have an empire, given our present financial straits. So what’s the solution? To any normal American, who never wanted an empire to begin with, the answer is simple: give up the imperial pretensions to “global leadership,” and tend to our own ill-used and leached-out garden. Ryan, however, is a creature of Washington, and this is unthinkable inside the Beltway: it would be a most grievous blow to the self-esteem of these worthies if they had to exchange the imperial purple for a plain republican cloth coat. Why, no Serious Person would even suggest such a thing! So instead of stating the facts, he makes up some of his own:

“Our fiscal crisis is above all a spending crisis that is being driven by the growth of our major entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In 1970, these programs consumed about 20 percent of the budget. Today that number has grown to over 40 percent.

“Over the same period, defense spending has shrunk as a share of the federal budget from about 39 percent to just under 16 percent — even as we conduct an ambitious global war on terrorism. The fact is, defense consumes a smaller share of the national economy today than it did throughout the Cold War.”

This is a flat out fabrication. As David Callahan of Reuters put it:

“Ryan is wrong — and misleading — when he argues that defense spending is shrinking. He says that defense as a percentage of GDP has declined from its ‘Cold War average of 7.5 percent to 4.6 percent today.’ What he doesn’t say is that this share is up from the 1990s. Defense spending ranged between 3 percent and 3.4 percent of GDP from 1996 to 2001, according to budget data from the Office of Management and Budget. Likewise, while Ryan says that such spending as a percentage of all federal outlays is down from 25 percent three decades ago to 20 percent today, he doesn’t mention that defense spending constituted just 16 percent of federal outlays in 1999.”

The infamous Ryan budget wants to raise military spending and declares any cuts off limits because, don’t you know, it’s a “strategic” matter, and not a question of dollars-and-cents. But what is this grand “strategic” vision he wants to throw money at?

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Okay reader…there you go…………either rejoice or reel at the thought….but anyway you cut it Ryan will be the VP nominee and the American people need to make up their minds…..will you or will you not….vote for the team of Romney/Ryan……