Paul The Fraud

I don't know why some in the media keep falling for Paul Ryan's schtick, but it only gives Paul Krugman more opportunities to tear him a new one. 

And we already know, from experience with the Medicare Advantage program, that a voucher system would have higher, not lower, costs than our current system. The only way the Ryan plan could save money would be by making those vouchers too small to pay for adequate coverage. Wealthy older Americans would be able to supplement their vouchers, and get the care they need; everyone else would be out in the cold.


In practice, that probably wouldn’t happen: older Americans would be outraged — and they vote. But this means that the supposed budget savings from the Ryan plan are a sham.


So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.


But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future

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So please, keep the praise coming lol!

If That's The Best You Got...

Krugman puts his foot squarely in Paul Ryan's ass over his understanding, or rather his lack thereof, of economics LOL.

I don’t even know where to start with this. What does Ryan think the fed funds rate is? (It’s the rate at which banks lend each other money overnight, usually to help meet reserve requirements.) He obviously doesn’t know the the Fed funds rate basically equals the return on federal paper, so that raising that rate would make banks more, not less, likely to stay with that federal paper. I’m sure someone will try to come up with a reason why Ryan is being smart here, but the truth is that he’s stone-cold ignorant.


Now, he wouldn’t be the only ignorant member of Congress. But wait — my colleague David Brooks tells me, this very morning, that

Paul Ryan, the most intellectually ambitious Republican in Congress, lavishly cites Brooks’s book. Over the past few years, Ryan has been promoting a roadmap to comprehensively reform the nation’s tax and welfare system.

So this is the smartest Republican Congress has to offer?

Repeal And Replace.....With What? An Opportunity

I posted before about how the GOP's repeal push is likely to blow up in their face by the time November rolls around. In the last week or so it seems a number of Republicans have started reading the same tea leaves I was looking at and backed off the repeal claim some. But now there seems to be this new approach of saying they will "Repeal and Replace" the health care reform bill. So here's my thing, I never felt like Democrats ever took full advantage of Paul Ryan's disastrous and truly scary "shadow budget" nor his bullshit heath care reform plan which was actually scored by the CBO. Well my friends, as the saying goes pay back is a bitch and Democrats should now take that plan and damn near SUPER GLUE IT to the Republican Party. And you know what, I bet if we looked hard enough we could find some death panels in his plan, some real and actual cuts to Medicare, hell maybe even some areas where that plan puts government between a patient and their doctors.

For the folks in the short bus what I'm saying is now that Republicans are saying they will replace the health care reform bill that already passed we should now fear monger against Ryan's plan to the point where people will fear IT a lot more than they fear what has already passed. And in the process we insure that health care reform really is the Republican's "waterloo".

Their only possible strategic response would be to totally disavow Ryan's plan which they tried to do during the health care reform summit at Blair House, but then that leaves them in the uncomfortable position of either having to come up with another plan OR having no answer when their Democratic opponent asks them what they plan on "replacing" health care reform with.

Again, this is the lowest hanging fruit ever. I can only hope Democrats don't find a way to fuck it up.

About That "Shadow Budget"

LMAOOOOOOOO

So it turns out that even if Paul Ryan could get ever conservative's wet dream of slashing MediCare and privatizing Social Security and cutting spending to social programs for the poor, we STILL wouldn't have a budget in.......2080

Somehow EPIC FAIL just isn't a strong enough term

Republicans Really Do Want To Cut Social Security And Medicare

But hey, don't take my word for it, just check out Congressman Hensarling, you know the guy President Obama bitch slapped last week over his bullshit comments about the deficit, on Hardball this evening.



Or you can read Ezra Klein's post on Congressman Paul Ryan's GOP budget proposal to cut the deficit.

As you all know by now, the long-term budget deficit is largely driven by health-care costs. To move us to surpluses, Ryan's budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher's growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs. And beyond health care, Social Security moves to a system of private accounts that CBO says will actually cost more than the present arrangement, further underscoring how ancillary the program is to our budget problem.

snip

The proposal would shift risk from the federal government to seniors themselves. The money seniors would get to buy their own policies would grow more slowly than their health-care costs, and more slowly than their expected Medicare benefits, which means that they'd need to either cut back on how comprehensive their insurance is or how much health-care they purchase. Exacerbating the situation -- and this is important -- Medicare currently pays providers less and works more efficiently than private insurers, so seniors trying to purchase a plan equivalent to Medicare would pay more for it on the private market.

It's hard, given the constraints of our current debate, to call something "rationing" without being accused of slurring it. But this is rationing, and that's not a slur. This is the government capping its payments and moderating their growth in such a way that many seniors will not get the care they need. This is, in its simplest form, a way to limit the use of a finite resource: Money.

But here is the thing, none of this matters one whit if Democrats don't seize the day. Tomorrow every Democrat in the House should be lined up for their chance to address the body at the podium on CSPAN and point out what the Republicans are up to. And immediately following each Democrat in the House should put up a youtube online of their speech and send it out to every single email list they have. If Ryan's proposals and Hensarling's appearance are pushed into the national dialogue, the media will HAVE to cover it. And every single GOP House member that appears on CNN or MSNBC or one of the morning shows will HAVE to answer the question of if they agree with these "visionaries" in their own party.

But if not. If this is allowed to slide under the radar, well then shame on every person in any leadership position in the Democratic Party. You will have shown without a doubt that you do not deserve to lead this country.

Real talk.

Barney Frank 1 Paul Ryan/GOP -100

One thing I like about how Barney Frank PWNS his Republican colleagues is that many times he simply asks them tough questions that the media refuses to hit them with. In this video GOP Congressman Paul Ryan is on a roll talking about how gung ho the Republicans are about health care reform. All it takes is one question from Congressman Frank and it all goes up in smoke.

Smoke And Mirrors

I have been talking about Congressman Paul Ryan today and his promotion of the House GOP "alternative budget". Well what I didn't mention was that he also had an op ed in the WingNut Journal this morning also advocating for his plan. In the op ed he included this chart. Look it over and then see if you can find anything curious about it.









I knew something looked wrong about this picture but I didn't take it seriously anyway. Then I went over to TPM and Josh Marshall points out that the chart goes out 70 years. Now keep in mind that the President's budget only went out 10 years and if you look carefully the numbers during that time of their estimates of the percentage of GDP that their budget would take up isn't far off at all from President Obama's budget projections. Now if you are skeptical like me you have to believe that they fudged even those numbers on their own projections. You don't see an actual big divergence until 20 years from now, at best 12 years AFTER President Obama will be out of office, which nobody has actually game planned out.

This is just another reason why you can NEVER take Republicans seriously these days.

Video Evidence

Here is the clip that I referenced earlier.



Thats why I will always have a love/hate relationship with Tweety

Congressman Paul "Herbert Hoover" Ryan

Congressman Ryan was just on "Morning Joe" promoting the House GOP alternative budget that he is releasing today. He said, I bullshit you not, that they are calling for a spending freeze on everything but defense and veterans spending. When the full details come out today I just want you to remember this clip from conservative columnist David Brooks.




At least Tweety was on the show at the same time and called it what it is, much to the ignorant Mika's dismay, Hooverism. I can't wait to see how this plan gets pilloried all day after its release.