Scrooge McRyan
If Ryan's proposals to destroy Medicare, Social Security and health care for the poor were put forward not by a fresh-faced young congressman with puppy-dog eyes, but instead by a scowling old man with a mole on his nose, everyone would recognize his vision for America.
We all remember the scene from Dickens' A Christmas Carol when two good-hearted solicitors implore the old skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge to help those in need of food and warmth during the Christmas season.
Scrooge inquires whether prisons and workhouses still exist. Told they do, Scrooge is cheered. He says those are the public institutions he supports and people who can't provide for themselves should go there.
The solicitors reply that many can't and some would rather die.
“If they would rather die,” Scrooge snarls, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
What's most frightening is, unlike many politicians who will say anything to get elected, Ryan actually appears to believe in the destruction he advocates for successful government programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
When Tea Party Republicans helped make Ryan chairman of the House Budget Committee, he convinced his party to go on record in favor of destroying Medicare and replacing it with an ever-decreasing voucher program that would ultimately force the elderly to pay up to 60% of the cost of their own health care.
Approaching this year's elections, many Republicans would prefer to play down the dismantling of popular government programs that protect the elderly from being plunged wholesale into abject poverty.
Not Ryan. After previously advocating privatization of Social Security, Ryan now has introduced his election-year version of wrecking Medicare and other government assistance for anyone but the very wealthy.
Ryan would cut $5.3 trillion over the next 10 years from Medicare, Medicaid and a wide variety of other assistance, including food stamps and even support for farmers.
Ryan's budget also kills President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, kicking seniors and everyone else in the teeth even more by allowing insurance companies to cancel their insurance when they get sick and deny them coverage for pre-existing conditions.
He also would abolish Obama's closing of the “doughnut hole” in Medicare drug coverage, forcing seniors to pay thousands of dollars more for their prescription drugs.
Ryan Plan Increases Deficit
Well, those may be drastic measures, but aren't drastic measures needed to reduce our soaring national debt?
Nope. That national debt Ryan talks about so much continues to soar under his draconian cuts. Ryan's budget actually would add $3.1 trillion to the national debt over 10 years.
Ryan's enormous cuts punishing the elderly, the poor and the sick wouldn't be used to reduce the national debt. Instead, those savings would help provide $4.3 trillion in additional tax cuts, going overwhelmingly to the richest people in America.
Ryan's primary motive for taking government assistance away from the elderly and poor who are in need and giving the money to the wealthy is not to save the government money. He says he's doing it to improve the morals of the elderly and the poor.
Ryan recently explained to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute that when government provides too much of a safety net to those in desperate circumstances, it “lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives. It's demeaning.”
Giving that money in tax cuts to people who are already rich, on the other hand, doesn't damage the morals of the wealthy. Rich people are accustomed to receiving enormous handouts from the government, so their morals remain as high as they've ever been.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, calls Ryan an economic flimflam man.
Ryan may not know much about economics, but he has been nothing short of masterful at bamboozling Republicans and much of the media.
Almost daily, you can hear commentary on cable TV describing Ryan as one of the leading intellectuals in the Republican Party. In the land of the visually impaired, the one-eyed man is king.
And woe be to any Republican candidate who dares to criticize Ryan. The first time Newt Gingrich's mouth got his presidential campaign in trouble was when he dared to speak the truth about Ryan's budget last year, calling it radical, right-wing social engineering.
Since then, every other Republican candidate has fallen into line. Mitt Romney calls Ryan “one of the brilliant visionaries in our party.”
The usual definition of a visionary is one who can see far into the future. It doesn't apply to Ryan, who looks backward, longing to restore the enormous economic inequality and Dickensian cruelty toward the poor and the elderly of the 19th century.
The moment I read Muslim, I realized this commenter is an idiot. We've gone over this - Obama isn't Muslim, was born in Hawaii, and isn't a socialist. He's actually not incredibly left-leaning in his actual actions - just fairly left-of-center. The Tea Party, however, transformed from a libertarian movement into the neoconservative pile of crap it is today, and Paul Ryan is an esteemed example of the inaction that the modern Tea Party takes. Steal from the poor and give to the rich.
If you see so many people who "won't" work, it quite likely is because working conditions are now so poor, workloads are impossibly high, and people are just too damn tired, they know it is not worth the effort anymore. Not to mention, the hard-working members of the non-majority class are dumped upon time and time again by their majority class co-workers. No wonder the entire lower 3/4 of the population would quit work if they won a lotto Jackpot.
On the Affordable Care Act, the reason it will fail in the eyes of Paul Ryan's followers is that the wealthy class want it indoctrinated in all of us that everything worth doing is to be monetized, must turn a profit. That means those well-positioned must make money off the less well-positioned that they do business with (both customers and workers receive less from the business than what they provide to the business, that's how a business makes profit). That means there must be lots more losers than there are winners. How can that be sustained? How can that leave these workers and customers (who are losing ground) happy? The only way to sustain is to make this majority of losers unable to vote, they will no longer have a voice, they must be "disenfranchised". But that is also the formula for rebellion.
The ACA must be set up to put all of America in the same combined risk pool, and then our government will be forced to enact laws to improve conditions so as to reduce the risk, if only to limit the payout, like subsidizing healthy foods instead of unhealthy foods, making the good foods available to the Food Stamp group, eliminating pink slime, etc. But, privatized healthcare will always segregate the risk pools... "no way will one red cent of my money go to... THEM!" These risk pools will be so sub-divided that there will be whole groups that cannot even fund a risk pool, and therefore will not be served. That's the problem with privatization, it does not serve all.
Conservative Republicans do not want equality for all, fairness for all, never have, never will. The ancient way is to have 10% haves, 90% peasants. All fine and dandy when you are in the 10%. Democracy was created to end that, to make sure at least 50% will thrive, or 2/3 or even 3/4 for certain things that should not be easy to flip flop, like constitutional amendments.
Now, let's talk "protected class", the definition of what can be discriminated against, what cannot. Things that you are born with or born into, but near impossible to change. Like your skin color, your gender, your religion, even poverty. Discrimination based on those is what is to be protected against. Things that people can change, like work ethic, the desire to learn, choice of food or fashion, what they spend money on, that is fair game for segregation. That's what the free market does with its Supply and Demand, it deals with things we can choose.
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In answer to anon -- Republicans will help their own kind... to an extent. Like their relatives, or the neighbors who will become on unpleasant eye-sore, or a property value killer if they don't keep up proper appearances. Those out of sight in the next county do not matter. If the dark-skinned female in the neighbors house is in a servant role, well okay, but if raised to the equal of a white person in the neighbors house, then the castle doctrine will allow Mr. Republican to shoot her if she comes over to borrow a cup of sugar (that heavy Pyrex measuring cup can be a deadly weapon!)
We all define fairness differnently. To me its like sports - winners and losers. If you lose, then I own you. You now work for me. We have too many liberals who won't work because they have hit the welfare/Food Stamp bonanza and lay around collecting lavish amounts of money just to watch TV, drink beer, and fornicate like animals. They think they are just as good as the rest of us. If they can't have a sit down job in a cube with lavish public worker benefits, then they refuse to work. We need people to do back breaking brutal work in the fields and the mines in order to benefit those who have chosen to be successful. If we simply pull the rug out now, no more unemployment benefits, no more welfare, no more Medicaid, no more food stamps, etc. The hammock class will most likely opt into the workforce over time. They will learn their proper place serving the privileged. God wants us to give our best and we can't give our best if we are laying around a crack house eating chicken tv dinners.
In sports, the loser is left intact to play again in another game, the winner does not own the loser, the winner does not acquire the losers assets, does not absorb the losers good players and fires the weak players, that's what private businesses do. The losing team cuts their own weak, no need for the winning team to dismantle the loser's team for them.
That's why we have rules of fairness, and the rules are periodically adjusted to keep things in balance. Not so in private business.
The public sectors mistake was in not having the balls to keep the high performers and cut the low performers. A public entity that can manage its own will serve more customers than a private entity that overpays its crony execs and only serves that which is profitable. Let the public sector manage itself correctly and there will not be any accusations of "make-work" jobs.
I know, I was mentored by a "hatchet man" whose job was to oust the low performers in government at the height of affirmative action and public unions.