Well, you might want to start here.
Paul Ryan's budget blueprint would push the aged into poverty
His proposal to abolish Medicare and gut Medicaid would send tens of millions of people living on fixed incomes over the financial brink.
The hall of mirrors in which our bitterly partisan politics now play themselves out is a curious place. But even by its distorted standards, the reaction to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan's budget blueprint has been odd, particularly the general reluctance to call it what it plainly is: an attempt to abolish Medicare and gut Medicaid, while further lowering the taxes paid by corporations and wealthy individuals.
And you might want to follow that up with some discussion regarding the insanity of trying to continue to pay corporations and wealthy Americans on the backs of our elderly by taking away their Medicare benefits that they worked so long and so hard for, paying their way every STEP of the way.
Then, perhaps a bit of this to make sure that they get the difference between how the Republicans want to pay off their Corporate Donors and Wealthy American Donors and how the Democrats, led by President Obama aren't going to allow that to happen to them.
This being from the middle America Des Moines Register will offset the above article from the high brow libs of the LA Times.
Eliminate deficits, not entitlements
The federal government is exactly like such a family. And its options going forward are exactly the same.
This country didn't create massive deficits and record debt overnight. They are the result of years of decisions made by politicians focused on re-election rather than the financial soundness of the federal government. In recent history, these decisions included waging two wars, adding a drug benefit to Medicare and cutting taxes with no plan to pay for any of it.
Spending more money while taking in less is a recipe for disaster.
President Barack Obama stressed in his speech at George Washington University Wednesday that this is what his Washington predecessors did. Now the fiscal mess must be dealt with. The president is a little late to the deficit game, but he hit the mark with this speech, calling for lowering deficits by $4 trillion over a dozen years through a mix of revenue increases and spending cuts.
Obama said "we will all need to make sacrifices," and changes must be made to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the military, which make up two-thirds of the federal budget. But he said "we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in," and he blasted a House Republican deficit-reduction plan. The president rightly said he refuses to dismantle entitlement programs by privatizing Medicare and shifting more costs to future seniors, as the House plan authored by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan would do.
Of course, at this time it is best to ask if the receiver of said email would be happy to see their grandchildren not only find a balanced budget at the end of their rainbow, but to also know that it was arrived at fairly, and not on the backs of their parents and grandparents that worked so VERY HARD to make sure they were the recipients of an America that cared for all Americans in good times and bad.
To finalize this "road to reality" showcase, the following might be best to be placed in their faces.
Obama address was surprise attack, GOP lawmakers say
The situation was all the more perplexing because Obama has to work with these guys: Camp is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, responsible for trade, taxes and urgent legislation to raise the legal limit on government borrowing. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) chairs the House Republican Conference. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is House Budget Committee chairman and the author of the spending blueprint Obama lacerated as “deeply pessimistic” during his 44-minute address.
The three Republican congressmen saw it as a rare ray of sunshine in Washington’s stormy budget battle: an invitation from the White House to hear President Obama lay out his ideas for taming the national debt.
They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.
“What came to my mind was: Why did he invite us?” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just a wasted opportunity.”
snip
“What the president did yesterday was describe the vision put forward by the House Republican plan and describe his own vision, the vision that he thinks is preferable,” Carney said Thursday. “Just because there’s a lot of heat in these discussions, in these debates, a lot of firmly held convictions, doesn’t mean that we cannot come together and find common ground.”
The first cause is to completely mock Rep. Paul Ryan FOR being deeply pessimistic when it comes to thinking that Americas Seniors are stupid. Stand up and say it. Our Seniors are the most educated and carefully interested political minds our world has ever seen, and the Republican Party is trying to pull the wool over their eyes in a partisan takeover to pay back their Corporate and Wealthy American donors on the backs of not only Seniors today, but their children and grandchildren in the future. A future that the Republicans insist holds no guarantees that the government will back them in their old age, because once they gut Medicare, how far behind can Social Security be? We all paid into Social Security and Medicare. Shouldn't we be able to expect that that will be there for us today and our future generations to come? Shouldn't we expect that our Republican Representatives should stand with us as Americans and not exploit our Seniors today and our future generations to just pay off their campaign donors now?
Lot's of work ahead. Now go find even better representations of the truth than I have, and get busy. Share them here. And everywhere. We are the future. Our Seniors can be the starting point of making sure of that. The Republicans just made sure of that if we leverage the truth correctly and get the word out.