Democrats, their special-interest groups and their complicit news media will do their best to make Paul Ryan look his worst.
Paul Begala, a Democratic operative who holds sway on CNN, has already called Ryan "the Dr. Kevorkian of Medicare."
Cute and clever, though Begala had weeks to think it up, the same number of weeks that he knew Ryan was working to save the country financially with the first serious budget Washington has seen in decades -- one that cuts the overspending, pushes health-care decisions to the states and reduces tax rates to grow private-sector jobs.
So one guy etches out a contemplative budget proposal, and another comes up with a snarky comment to demonize him. Go ahead. You choose between them. Our money's with Ryan -- because it's safer there.
This shouldn't be a popularity contest anyway, although the "mainstream" news media will try to make it one. This needs to be about the numbers. The numbers are on Ryan's side.
We're $14 trillion in debt now -- and the Congressional Budget Office projects the current track will leave us with another $13 trillion-plus in debt in 10 years.
Paul Ryan, a gifted, earnest young congressman from Wisconsin, has proposed a budget that lops off about $6 trillion of that $13 trillion -- less than half.
And for this he's being called a suicide doctor?
Hey, the great thing about demagoguery is that you never run the risk of exaggerating!
You know, if Paul Ryan and others like him were interested in merely surviving re-election and enjoying the Washingtonian high life like their Democratic colleagues, they wouldn't be suggesting painful budget cuts. They're not doing it in order to be elected class president -- they know it's not going to be popular, especially after the one-sided left-wing news media are done with them.
What they're doing is what they think is right for the country -- and what voters wanted done last November when they sent a tsunami of conservative Republicans to Washington.
So, yes, the Democrats -- who, you should remember, didn't even write a budget at all when they controlled both houses of Congress last year -- are eager to pounce on the Ryan budget and those mean Republicans for having the nerve to tell us we can't have everything we want anymore.
Even the left-leaning political website Politico.com's headline recently was, "In White House's view, Paul Ryan's plan a weapon for 2012."
"Just over a year ago," the website observed, "President Barack Obama singled out Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as a serious-minded Republican who could be a partner in the kind of 'adult conversation' the president said he welcomes on entitlement reform.
"But when Ryan stepped forward Tuesday with his long-awaited budget plan, an ambitious attempt to slice almost $6 trillion in federal spending and fundamentally alter Medicare and Medicaid, the White House rejected it. ...
"Senior Democratic strategists told Politico that the Ryan plan is almost certain to be a centerpiece of their advertising and fundraising efforts."
How predictable, but cynical -- particularly considering our country's financial future is at stake.
So which is it? A significant attempt to solve the nation's fiscal problems -- or just ammunition for Democrats?
You have a year and a half to decide who's right in all this.
What you decide will determine the shape of this country for some time to come.
We must stop this out of control spending. It must be brought under control or our currency will collapse.
I support Ryan's attempts to put forward a sane spending proposal.
Debt is slavery.
Brad
I think people would have been more angry if congress just passed the original submitted budget of $1.134 trillion for the 2011FY. Congress didn't not vote on the budget because they didn't feel like it, they didn't vote because all the congressional committees and subcommittees couldn't agree on the spending. So obviously, if they couldn't agree on the amount, and Democrats had a majority in congress, that must mean that there really are some Democrats who are concerned about how much we are spending and see the need to cut back. Really.
But the ACES doesn't want you to see that. They'd rather write half truths and demonize Democrats and make the reader think that Democrats were just too lazy to propose a bill. These half truths are pretty obvious from the ACES ridiculous statement in this OPED that " [Democrats]didn't even write a budget at all"
The fact is, Democrats did propose and write a budget, in fact, if you check out congressional records, you'll see there were actually 3 different budget versions that were put out by democrats. The difference is, they were just not passed. And when the republican majority in the house was added to the mix, it only exacerbated the voting process even more.
The big fish exaggerations are getting old, ACES. Why do you keep on printing this stuff?
Laura....the Democrats proposed a budget that they couldn't even pass when they had both houses and the Presidency? The reason they didn't pass the budget is because they didn't want the American people to see exactly how much money they were spending. You can keep defending the big spenders day after day if you want, but the American people are waking up.
I'm sure you on the ACES are most eager to believe the Heritage Foundation's lofty projections over the CBO's, but let's just say I'm skeptical.
Begala's isn't the most constructive voice out there (and I don't watch CNN at all anymore) but Americans need an honest and thoughtful debate before they vote themselves out of the middle class and into a kind of neofeudalism. Given the present, record levels of income disparity and wealth concentration in this country, I really don't think that's hyperbole.
A new Ronald Reagan has emerged.
Yeah, buddy, that income disparity only calls for one thing. Dish out everybody's money no matter if they earned it. The rewards of capitalism mean nothing when you start taking the results of the work effort. Didn't the Soviet Union, China, East Germany and North Korea prove taking the wealth and passing it out as the government sees fit doesn't work?
Riverman1, "A new Ronald Reagan has emerged."
That reminds me of the comparison Dan Quayle was making between himself and Jack Kennedy. All I want to know is where was all this fiscal responsibility during the George W. Bush and Halliburton years? Cuts need to be responsible, not radical as those being proposed that would hurt the economic growth that has come after the disaster that was left by Bush, both economically and in our foreign affairs.
Where was all the responsibility under Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae who pocketed tens of millions while precipitating the crash?
Actually, Jack Kennedy did little except get assassinated is the truth. He was a pathetic president who almost blew the world up in his amphetamine induced state during the Cuban Missle Crisis. His personal physician gave him amphetamines daily. Bobby Kennedy caused Marilyn Monroe to kill herself because of his and Jack's lurid use of her. Bobby was with her hours before she killed herself and she tore up the house in anger while he was there.
I think you're confusing the Bay of Pigs with the Cuban Missle Crisis.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/04/the-drug-abuse.html
A new Ronald Reagan? In no way shape or form could Ronald Reagan run and win as a republican today. There have been times when Obama had used Reagan's words and ideas- and the right only cries and complains. Reagan wanted a nuclear free world; Obama does the START treaty and is labeled anti-American. Reagan makes a speech about how unions are important for freedom, Reagan himself being a union member and president of organized labor; Obama supports unions and is called anti-American some more. Reagen bombed Libya; Obama does it and the complaints from the now conservative doves roll in.
Add to it all, His trickle-down economics benefited mostly the wealthy- nearly tripling the deficit and the national debt, while increasing government. Reagan started an unnecessary war in Grenada. He empowered Osama bin Laden by backing and then abandoning Afghanistan's mujahadeen. He also sold arms to Iran in order to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua and wasted billions of dollars on a useless defense system known as Star Wars, the list goes on.
However Obama is the dangerous anti-American, commie....
And now people think this Ryan guy is the next Reagan? I sure hope not.
Does anyone think they know what a President does with drugs/women/injections in his body......we sometimes learn these things after the fact....who knew that Kennedy was seeing a gangsters girlfriend .....who knew that Clinton was busy in the Oval office....give me a break.....evenTiger as well known as he is....he had more going on off the course than on the course.....did you ever hear of OJs attacks on his wife til after the trial....even with 24 hour news cycle.
fred, ‘That reminds me of the comparison Dan Quayle was making between himself and Jack Kennedy.’
How about the present piece of trash in the WH trying to compare himself to Lincoln?
"Actually, Jack Kennedy did little except get assassinated is the truth. He was a pathetic president who almost blew the world up in his amphetamine induced state during the Cuban Missle Crisis. His personal physician gave him amphetamines daily. Bobby Kennedy caused Marilyn Monroe to kill herself because of his and Jack's lurid use of her. Bobby was with her hours before she killed herself and she tore up the house in anger while he was there."
CHOOSE YOUR OWN RESPONSE: An Exciting Game For The Whole Family!
1. Read "One Minute to Midnight" before you make any statements about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
2. I have never read something so incredibly disrespectful on the Chronicle's website.
from toomuchonline.org-
You won’t find many photos with smiles on the face of Andrew Mellon, the U.S. treasury secretary back in the 1920s. The exceedingly dour — and fabulously wealthy — Mellon may be smiling someplace now. His spirit lives.
Mellon, a Pittsburgh financier, began his dozen years atop Treasury in 1921. He rated, at the time, as one of the world’s richest men. One of the most determined, too.
Mellon came to Washington as a man on a mission. That mission: to slash federal income tax rates on his fellow rich — and himself, of course, too. He succeeded.
In 1921, America’s richest faced a 73 percent tax rate on income over $1 million. By 1925, Mellon had maneuvered that top rate all the way down to 25 percent.
Last week Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin, the go-to guy on taxes for the GOP House majority, channeled his own personal Andrew Mellon. He introduced, with great fanfare, the official Republican budget for America’s next fiscal year — and decade. His budget’s maximum tax rate on top-bracket income: 25 percent.
Andrew Mellon’s 1920s handiwork would eventually pour $72 billion, in today’s dollars, into wealthy pockets and set the table for the wildest speculative bubble Wall Street had ever seen. That bubble would burst into the Great Depression — and impoverish, in the process, tens of millions of Americans.
Mellon opposed, right up until his 1932 exit from Treasury, any efforts to get the federal government to come to the aid of those millions. Hard times, he told President Hoover, didn’t have to be “altogether a bad thing.”
“People will work harder,” Mellon pronounced. “Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."
The “Path To Prosperity” budget plan Rep. Ryan unveiled last week updates Mellon’s Uncle Scrooge approach to public policy for the 21st century.
Andrew Mellon prevented the federal government from creating programs to aid those most in need. Ryan’s budget, if ever enacted, would gut the federal aid programs that have appeared over the 80 years since Mellon left office.
Two-thirds of the $4 trillion in budget cuts the “Path for Prosperity” proposes for the next decade would come out of “programs that serve people of limited means,” reports the Center on Budsget and Policy Priorities.
That would be no accident. The “Pathway to Prosperity” budget, as the text explaining the Ryan plan proudly proclaims, will “ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”
Andrew Mellon never made his insensitivity to the poor any clearer than that. But hand this to Andy Mellon. He had an excuse for his philosophy. History, in Mellon’s time, had not yet fully exposed the folly of cutting taxes on the rich as a route to economic prosperity.
Ryan and his rich people-friendly colleagues in Congress today have no such excuse. The comfort-the-comfortable, afflict-the-afflicted policies Mellon pushed, we now know, did not usher in prosperity. They ushered in the greatest depression in American history.
Our two most powerful national untax-the-rich surges since then — the first in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, the second 20 years later under George W. Bush — also failed miserably to create prosperity for average Americans. For Rep. Ryan and his GOP congressional leadership friends, no matter.
Ryan’s new budget simply ignores the history Andrew Mellon never lived long enough to experience. Ryan’s budget predicts unprecedented prosperity, with numbers so statistically groundless that even the conservative Economist magazine was describing Ryan’s claims last week as “laughably overoptimistic.”
But we can’t afford to laugh. No proposal that carries a stamp of approval from congressional majority leaders can ever be dismissed as a laughing matter.
Alex: "The reason they didn't pass the budget is because they didn't want the American people to see exactly how much money they were spending. "
.........................
Thats a bunch of baloney. The numbers aren't hidden, they posted in plain sight where anyone can have access to them. You can keep defending half truths and add to our problems with childish rhetoric, or you can be a part of the solution. It's really that simple.
Mary Dits, Fred, and Jon Lester great posts and thoughts. Keep at it, guys!
And you, Laura, can keep defending the president and his fellow dem's lies, overspending, and disregard for the constitution if you wish.
Alex.... what "dem's lies" and "disregard for the constitution" are you talking about? What's the talking points this week?
So now the CBO, an objective and nonpartisan organization, which provides timely analysis to aid in economic and budgetary decisions on the wide array of programs, is the enemy now?
Really Alex. I'm also interested in hearing what "dem lies" are.
Do you really have something else you'd like us to explain to you, or do you just want to repeat sound bites from the AC, Fox news and Rush Limbaugh? Because the latter just gets old and boring real fast. Kind of reminds me of my nephew who thinks it's a blast to watch his mom retrieve the toys, spoons, and spaghetti-os he throws from his high chair.
The mandate to purchase insurance has been deemed unconstitutional by federal court, ie a disregard for the constitution. Lies? Is GITMO closed? Have all bills been posted prior to being signed.
Obama himself said that the president does not have the power to take military action without congressional approval, but he disregarded the condition on that one.
I have read in detail about the Cuban Missle Crisis. Kennedy got us into a situation where Russian troops in Cuba with nuclear capability were about to take measures by themselves.
While it is true that in later stages of the crisis Kennedy managed to move the decision making away from hardcore military leaders such as Curtis LeMay who wanted to bomb sites in Cuba and possibly attack the USSR, he was the one who had allowed the crisis to escalate into a do or die situation. It's also true he was high on amphetamines during that time. Kennedy was a pathetic president who had been president only about 1,000 days when he was assassinated.
The only thing I'll take up for him about IS the Bay of Pigs. That plan was already in place when he took power. Eisenhower was president when the plan and details were formulated. Kennedy reluctantly went along.
Deemed unconstitutional by federal court, or one U.S. district judge in Florida said so?
And if Obama did disregard the constitution, then he would be able to force the states to take the prisoners of GITMO. He still wants it closed, but because of checks and balances- you don't always get what you want.
Riverman: What history books are reading where you think the way JFK handled the Cuban Missile Crisis was wrong, and thus making him the worse president ever? I guess you don't agree with setting the country up for success with civil liberties, NASA, peace corps, creation of Special Forces. He even turned the economy around...
Beck, it's all myth. He wasn't president that long. LBJ fought the civil rights battle and got the legislation passed. There is much on the subject of Kennedy handling the Missle Crisis wrong, but do you agree it was close to armageddon? Who was president when it happened? He almost let it escalate into a situation where both sides couldn't walk away. One Minute to Midnight is slanted. I read parts of it and reviews. Good call on the Special Forces. He did keep them and allowed them to keep their beret when the Army wanted to take them away.
The district court in FL is a federal court, so yes...... Deemed unconstitutional by a federal court..... Nice try at spin though.
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012. All Rights Reserved.
