Due to the perceived lack of a serious challenge, and the high profile of some other state and national races, Paul Ryan(R-Wall ST) bid for re-election seems to be flying under the radar. While the odds(ie press coverage( and money) are definitely in his favorThe Janesville Gazette, and if CSI media shows any more love for him his wife will be jealous. Despite all the odds in his favor, the people of the 1st Congressional District of WI, might want to think twice, for all of our sakes!
Mr. Kaye at Rocknetroots has a great take on this, that I wanted to expand on a little.
As Mr Kaye points out:
The choice this November is clear. If you vote for Paul Ryan, you will be casting a vote to destroy Social Security, Medicare and the American dream of a secure and achievable retirement. That is straight up. On top of all the unemployment, slashed wages, cut benefits, outsourcing of jobs, foreclosures, rising personal debt, declining net worth and property values, stock market volatility and stolen private pension accounts, you’ll be able to chuck it all because – by voting for Paul Ryan you will be voting to destroy the only and last salvation to keep your head above water.
I think there is even more to Ryan’s incompetence than this so let me point out some more.
Ryan is an unabashed supporter of
the elitist Ayn Rand. He was recently named the The most powerful Randroid in politics with this description:
You may have heard about Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan and his “roadmap” — the closest thing to an economic answer to the Democrats an elected Republican has yet produced. Few Republicans seem to want to be caught supporting it, perhaps because Ryan’s roadmap basically privatizes Social Security and Medicare. It’s not just an assault on the Obama plan; it’s meant to destroy the New Deal.
That seems a little hot for your average voter. But Ryan’s got a safe seat. He’s also got a hero to inspire him to feats of pro-capitalist derring-do.
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person,” he said at a Rand 100th anniversary party, “it would be Ayn Rand.” He also said that “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill” boils down to “individualism versus collectivism.”
We may assume that Ryan’s not on the collectivist side, which explains why he wants to gut Social Security — he says it’s a “collectivist system.”
You’d think that, with such strong Randian credentials, Ryan would have also resisted the bailouts of 2008. But in fact he voted for the original TARP — and he was moved to do so by another great literary figure.
Ryan told the Daily Beast that in 2008 he believed without TARP, “Obama would not only have won, but would have been able to sweep through a huge statist agenda very quickly because there would have been no support for the free-market system.”
The author who convinced him of this? Jonah Goldberg, and his right-wing libruls-r-Hitler stroke book Liberal Fascism.
That’s gotta be the most embarrassing Customers-Who-Bought-This-Item-Also-Bought of all time.
The Jonah Goldberg/liberal fascism book – which Jon Stewart thought so little of, he could not take Goldberg serious in an interview. This is the awe-inspiring book of the star of the republican party(seriously I am not making that up)?
Ryan was also recently singled out by Campaign for America\'s Future, for being a unique representative from WI. He stood alone in Wisconsin for
for taking almost $2,000,000 from Wall St. or as they put it:
A full 90 members of Congress who voted to bailout Wall Street in 2008 failed to support financial reform reining in the banks that drove our economy off a cliff. But when you examine campaign contribution data, it’s really no surprise that these particular lawmakers voted to mortgage our economic future to Big Finance:
And this from the main speaker at the recent Racine \"tea party\". Just what our Founders fought for – corporate whores.
Then we see Paul being cheered on by one of the leading neoconservative voices today, the often wrong Bill Kristol.
Here Kristol spills the beans
pointing out that Ryan will Violently Slash entitlements!
Ryan’s full body of work shows why its so important that he join the 16% unemployment rate in his hometown of Janesville. If we elect him with more power this time, the results could be dire!!!
Show me the section of the Roadmap that forces the individual into privatization.
Allow me to clarify – social security privatization. I am well aware that he wants to privatize Medicare.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/paul-ryans-smoke-and-mirrors
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/12/lungren-ryan-roadmap/
Lungren Praises Ryan’s Budget Plan Privatizing Social Security As ‘The Best,’ But Hesitates To Endorse It
http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/001749.htm
Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-WI) the ranking Republican on the budget committee, recently detailed the Republican plan for Social Security that preserves the existing program for those 55 or older. For younger people the plan “offers the option of investing over one-third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to the Thrift Savings Plan available to federal employees.”
If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should. After all, George W. Bush’s disastrous drive to privatize Social Security helped undermine his presidency. Now, in the wake of a Wall Street meltdown that evaporated the retirement savings for countless thousands of Americans, the Republican wunderkind Ryan is calling for an encore.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/saving-ryans-privatization/
In any case, Ryan’s attempt to deny that what his own movement used to call privatization is, in fact, privatization should settle the question of his sincerity.
The first thing I noticed is that you linked me to everything BUT the Roadmap.
So then you admit it – his plan IS NOT forcing people into privatization for SS! You do know what “offers the option” means right? I’m going to copy directly from the Roadmap summary:
“The choice of personal retirement accounts is entirely voluntary. Even those under 55 can remain in the current system if they choose. Further, those who choose to enter the personal account system also have an opportunity to leave the system, and those who initially opt out of the system of personal accounts can enter into it later on.”
So stop these half truths about the Roadmap on SS. You may not like his plan – fine. Whatever. But please stop saying he is flat out privatizing it when all he is doing is offering a choice.
Now on to Medicare. Did you know Medicare denies more claims than almost all private insurance companies?
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/368/2010-nhirc-results.pdf
Why would I want Medicare again?
One of the most thorough analyses of the good and bad sides of Paul Ryan’s plan is the 17 page analysis from the CBO–Center on Budget Policy
Consider the first two paragraphs of their summary:
The Roadmap for America’s Future, which Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) — the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee — released in late January, calls for radical policy changes that would result in a massive transfer of resources from the broad majority of Americans to the nation’s wealthiest individuals.[1]
The Roadmap would give the most affluent households a new round of very large, costly tax cuts by reducing income tax rates on high-income households; eliminating income taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest; and abolishing the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the alternative minimum tax. At the same time, the Ryan plan would raise taxes for most middle-income families, privatize a substantial portion of Social Security, eliminate the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance, end traditional Medicare and most of Medicaid, and terminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The plan would replace these health programs with a system of vouchers whose value would erode over time and thus would purchase health insurance that would cover fewer health care services as the years went by.
You can give me all the explanations why the current system is unsustainable, why government fails in certain places where private enterprises succeeds, and why Paul Ryan is more honest than all Democrats and most Republicans and I will agree, but taking into account the analysis of the CBO, I think the fact that the Roadmap is a Moral failure precisely like the CBO says because it shifts so much money from those least able to afford it–the middle and lower classes–to those who are already doing so well in this Recession and don’t need an even bigger slice of the pie.
I’m sure wall street would do great taking their cut of private accounts–just as they already do with managing IRAs, 401Ks, student loans (Oh, wait, that cash cow was taken back!) and other accounts. Then there’s the following ‘goverment guarantee’ noted by the CBO.
In addition, the Ryan plan would require the federal government to guarantee the performance of the private accounts; if the stock market fell and value of the accounts declined sufficiently, the Treasury would have to make up the losses.
So…if the private markets failed, as in 2008, after the managers have raked in all their fees and Wall Street is doing great, then the goverment has to step in and bail out individual Americans, in a kind of super-proliferation of bailouts, just as we did for the big banks in 2008?
This is called privatize the profits and socialize the risks, and it’s the surest way to make Wall Street, rich folks, Republicans fat and happy, and put the government and non-rich folks into a ‘death spiral’. That’s what Paul Ryan wants, of course.