Not Such a Bright Light
Most of the superficial characterizations of Ryan as Republican Mitt Romney's vice presidential choice did serious damage to conventional English language usage.
Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, we were told, is someone who is not afraid to take risks and propose bold reforms of government programs.
Within today's right-wing, extremist Republican Party, what in the world is bold or risky about proposing to slash government spending that benefits the middle class and those in need in order to give even more eye-popping tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America?
That's hardly a controversial stand among Republicans. The wider the income gap between the super-rich and everybody else, the happier they are. The Koch brothers might even invite them over for dinner.
Or how about Ryan as the source of fresh, new ideas within the Republican Party?
Ryan's most startling ideas, to begin dismantling Social Security and Medicare, are more than 75 and 45 years old, respectively. Republicans have tried to end those popular, successful programs ever since they began under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in 1935 and 1965.
Younger voters should fight repeal just as passionately as older voters, since everyone eventually becomes an older voter.
It's not because Ryan represented any new ideas that The Wall Street Journal and others on the right who don't very much like Romney eagerly lobbied for Ryan.
It's because Ryan is a young, good-looking politician who's much better than Romney at looking right into a TV camera and pretending the most vicious and socially repugnant ideas of the extreme right aren't really chicken droppings, but rather a nutritious chicken salad.
Economists Aren't Fooled
Voters may be surprised to learn Ryan has no background in economics from any of those prestigious Ivy League universities that usually provide candidates at this level.
Ryan has only a bachelor's degree from a small college in Ohio. But he's learned to use lots of charts no one understands while explaining the federal budget. People's eyes glaze over, but they get the mistaken impression he knows what he's talking about.
Legitimate economists aren't fooled. Paul Krugman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, calls Ryan a flimflam man. Krugman rejects Ryan's self-adopted image as a policy wonk. “He's a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michele Bachmann's, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.”
Romney's selection has made Ryan's mean-spirited and economically reckless House Republican budget the centerpiece of the 2012 campaign.
Here's a modest assessment of the Ryan budget by Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
“It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation's history).”
Most of the media failed to tell the country just how radical and destructive Ryan's budget was. It should have been a national scandal when House Republicans passed it.
The media's lame excuse was that Ryan's budget was never going to pass the U.S. Senate anyway. But now Romney and Ryan are ready to try to sell the same snake oil in a presidential election.
The media has a duty to tell us when politicians are lying to us. We're not talking about the tortured hair-splitting of PolitiFact, which concentrates on blades of rhetorical grass while ignoring Giant Redwood Lies.
Ryan's budget and almost everything he says publicly are rooted in one very big lie. Ryan maintains that his draconian cuts to programs protecting America's middle class and providing a lifeline for the poor are necessary to prevent an impending economic apocalypse about to be caused by our national debt.
How do we know that's a lie? Because Ryan's enormous gutting of government services does absolutely nothing to reduce that national debt.
In fact, Ryan would actually add $3.1 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. Instead of using enormous cuts in necessary benefits to working people and vulnerable single mothers and children to lower the national debt, Ryan's budget would brazenly pass out those trillions of dollars in more large tax cuts for the richest people in America.
From sketchy financial disclosures politicians submit, we know Ryan, who married into money, has assets of $2.1 million to $7.8 million. That's chicken feed, of course, compared to Romney's estimated quarter of a billion dollars.
Still, a presidential ticket of multimillionaires in a nation painfully recovering from the second-worst economic crisis in history really ought to run on something benefiting all Americans, not just bigger tax cuts for themselves and their fellow millionaires and billionaires.
Fact - The Wall Street Journal is written at a 6th grade level. Why? Not because the movers and shakers were educated in Ivy League schools, but because the real movers and shakers got there by shrewd and cunning deal-making, not by peer-reviewed book-learning. It's all about "using" the economic power of the moment, leveraging peoples fears of "what if" the bottom fell out tomorrow or what if the other lane of traffic moved ahead and you were not in it.
Fact - Life is like a ratchet wrench or an old-fashioned spare-tire jack. As you turn your wrench handle forward and back, crank the tire iron up and down, you never let go and get a new grip like when climbing a rope. Unlike nature being a closed cycle, the old adage that "what goes up must come down" does not apply to life's material wealth. That jack or ratchet handle moves ahead and back in equal amounts, like economic cycles, yet you still gain ground and make forward progress, the tool was made to do that! -- Cannot offer a solution that redistributes ANY of your hard-earned gains back down again, don't ever suggest it! Capitalism was made for that purpose, to move the cunning ahead, while leveraging off the losers to make it all worthwhile. For that top rank to be stable requires a LARGE base of losers to stand on.
Fact - by definition, Social Security and Medicare is and always was a "redistribution of wealth" program, just like Insurance with premiums and claims. The "haves" must must pay in so that the system can pay out to the "have-nots". That is an abomination to the above facts. -- The only reason ANYONE has insurance on their car, has insurance on their house, is because it is a mandated condition of having a loan note on it. You will not get the loan if you do not maintain insurance coverage, private lenders are fully in their right to not deal with you if you do not follow the private lenders rules, you can always go to another lender who does not have those rules (Oh, there are no other lenders? Gee, they all went out of business because no insurance means you don't take care of it!).
Fact - this is a nation of "Equal Opportunity", never was a nation of "Equal Outcome". As a private entrepreneur (or public department head), I cannot succeed if I do not make it my right to deny opportunity to those I believe are not able to achieve a satisfactory outcome. After all, nobody is in business to lose money. Private Business (and even Public Bureaucracy) does it every day in their cost-benefit analysis of which "projects" to fund and which to turn down.
Does everybody see the reason that winners feel like winners? It is only due to there being lots more losers!
Do you also see why 1800's communities had their barn-raisings, getting together by the sweat of their brow to build the town hall, or help build their neighbors house? That was how to build wealth without taking out a loan from a bank. They also had no taxes on the working class or Middle class. But, if you were nasty and unsociable (or crippled or too weak to contribute), nobody would help you build your house, if not polite and friendly, and of a giving nature, you were not welcome!
What banks and "legal tender" really did was make it so that the "haves" would not have to get in there and be sociable and friendly with the "have-nots", in fact, they would never even have to deal with them!
Sure, go ahead and vote for the ones who made big money, just because they know how to make money. Ask them again how many of their US workers were brought up to the required lifestyle minimum of 250K a year? Oops, the ones who made 50K in the midwest, steel belt a decade or two ago are out of work, and those factories are now in the deep south or foreign lands? We did not stop making stuff becuase there was no more need, did we?
I want to vote for the candidate who raised up the largest number of people, created the largest "man-dollar" numbers, not the one who pulled all that wealth into one large bank account.
"Man-dollars", the product of # of American workers multiplied by their US paychecks.
I want to vote for the one who has the potential of sharing the largest amount of wealth among the US Citizenry, not the largest amount of wealth in Cayman banks or paid it to high-valued business owners who gave up thir US Citizenship to be called citizens of Singapore.
Watch what you say about Singapore. That is one hellava great country. Clean, no crime, speaky English. You mess up there and commit crimes, litter, etc they will take you down. They will take you down to Chinatown and beat your ass good. Caymans are scaring people now. A 10% increase in non-citizen income tax has been proposed from 0% to 10%. But because of the fair tax policies in the past, they have attracted about 350 banks to the island which has just a tiny population. We in the USA need to go to a zero tax policy for businesses, put people on welare to work in exchange for Food Stamps, and make the USA the next China. And then close our borders. Not to keep Mexicans out, but to keep them in and put them to work. If done right, we can become the next India for cheap labor. Ryan and Romney understand how to do this.