So, I started writing on Facebook and realized that what I was really doing was engaging in a point-by-point refutation of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Republican Budget Committee Chairman and VP candidate.
I'm basing my comments below the Orange Fleur de Lis on this link.
I welcome comments.
Ryan opened his speech with the following statement:
I accept the duty to help lead our nation out of a jobs crisis and back to prosperity – and I know we can do this.
My immediate response: And what exactly were you doing for the past 14 years in Congress? In 1998, we had a budget surplus and job creation was rocking and rolling. Your time in Congress has been a catastrophe.
I accept the calling of my generation to give our children the America that was given to us, with opportunity for the young and security for the old – and I know that we are ready.
Um... I'd like to give our children an America that is
better than the one given to my generation. And frankly, I think the old deserve opportunity and the young deserve security just as well.
Our nominee is sure ready. His whole life has prepared him for this moment – to meet serious challenges in a serious way, without excuses and idle words.
He certainly has been spending plenty of time on the sidelines collecting $15 million a year for doing nothing, hasn't he? Mitt Romney thinks he understands the plight of the unemployed because he's been sitting around doing nothing for the past several years. I'd love to see him put an end to the "job creators strike" that Speaker John Boehner
described several months ago.
I’m the newcomer to the campaign, so let me share a first impression. I have never seen opponents so silent about their record, and so desperate to keep their power. They’ve run out of ideas. Their moment came and went. Fear and division are all they’ve got left.
Um, no. You want to see what our President has said about his record? Check this out:
If you want more information about the President's record, you might check out the White House website.
The Obama Administration isn't tooting its own horn. It's calling for Republicans to step up and join the effort to rebuild America.
With all their attack ads, the president is just throwing away money – and he’s pretty experienced at that.
Yeah, President Obama knows about throwing away money... like endless unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a blank check to the drug companies for Medicare Part D, and tax cuts for millionaires and corporations that ship jobs overseas. Those are wasteful programs and ideas that Republicans like Paul Ryan voted for. And the President has been calling for that waste to end.
Speaking of that, the President created agencies to eliminate fraud and abuse, and to trim wasteful or redundant government programs. Learn more here.
For my part, your nomination is an unexpected turn. It certainly came as news to my family, and I’d like you to meet them: My wife Janna, our daughter Liza, and our boys Charlie and Sam. The kids are happy to see their grandma, who lives in Florida. There she is – my Mom, Betty. My Dad, a small-town lawyer, was also named Paul. Until we lost him when I was 16, he was a gentle presence in my life. I like to think he’d be proud of me and my sister and brothers, because I’m sure proud of him and of where I come from, Janesville, Wisconsin. I live on the same block where I grew up. We belong to the same parish where I was baptized. Janesville is that kind of place.
That's nice. But Ryan's father wasn't just a small-town lawyer. He was a prominent leader in the community and their
family business was built on government contracts like the ones Ryan and Romney keep railing against with their specious "You didn't build that" attacks. More on Ryan's family
here.
(Ryan didn't mention that his father built a log cabin with his bare hands, or that he once chopped down his father's cherry tree. But you get the idea here.)
The people of Wisconsin have been good to me. I’ve tried to live up to their trust. And now I ask those hardworking men and women, and millions like them across America, to join our cause and get this country working again.
We might ask about Ryan's approval rating in Wisconsin. His
favorability ratings aren't bad. But he leads the Republican caucus for one of the least popular Congresses in US History. And I generally find his budget plan odious. I'm in general agreement with the folks who made
this site, praying for Paul Ryan's change of heart.
But, they keep re-electing him and they've made him a millionaire, so... good for him, I guess. (Is it good for Wisconsin?)
President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis, as he has reminded us a time or two. Those were very tough days, and any fair measure of his record has to take that into account. My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.
Well, Obama was right. I think a number of people have already noted that the plant closed before Obama became President, because government didn't support GM until after Obama became President. Ryan and the Republicans were willing to bail out Wall Street and banks, but they weren't willing to help save the auto industry.
Budgets reflect values, and Ryan's budget is inhumane.
Right now, 23 million men and women are struggling to find work. Twenty-three million people, unemployed or underemployed. Nearly one in six Americans is living in poverty. Millions of young Americans have graduated from college during the Obama presidency, ready to use their gifts and get moving in life. Half of them can’t find the work they studied for, or any work at all.
Again, where have you been since 1998? Seems to me that unemployment was low back in 1998 when Paul Ryan was first elected to Congress. It seems that the more powerful he gets, the worse things get for the economy.
So here’s the question: Without a change in leadership, why would the next four years be any different from the last four years?
Agreed. We need to get rid of the do-nothing Republican Congress and elect more Democrats. Obama led the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (while Ryan and his Republican cronies were trying to kill it and disable it), drove the process of Wall Street reform, enacted landmark health insurance reform, killed Bin Laden, ended the Iraq War, and re-established American foreign policy. Not too bad for the first four years.
And for an encore, Obama's calling for a Constitutional Amendment to protect citizens in a post-Citizens United world.
The first troubling sign came with the stimulus. It was President Obama’s first and best shot at fixing the economy, at a time when he got everything he wanted under one-party rule. It cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government.
Well, this is just patently false. Obama needed to woo Arlen Specter and other Republican Senators (as well as folks like Ben Nelson in Nebraska) and downsized the Recovery Act. He also put a number of Republican ideas in place, including a massive middle-class tax cut. Ryan is misleading and the "one party rule" idea is simply not what Obama had in mind in 2009. I remember vividly how Obama said that he was willing to accept any good idea from either side of the aisle, because the time for the past partisan wrangling was over.
It went to companies like Solyndra, with their gold-plated connections, subsidized jobs, and make-believe markets. The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.
Well, if you think Solyndra is bad... how about the TARP program that Ryan supported? How about the massive oil industry subsidies? How about the no-bid contracts for endless wars? Ryan reminds me of the old line from Jesus: "You hypocrites! You strain a gnat and swallow a camel."
What did the taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus? More debt. That money wasn’t just spent and wasted – it was borrowed, spent, and wasted.
Um,
no.
No.
No.
I could go on and on with the refutations.
And again... I can't remember Ryan complaining when we put two wars on a credit card to China, or when we gave massive tax cuts (with borrowed money) to millionaires who ship jobs overseas.
Maybe the greatest waste of all was time. Here we were, faced with a massive job crisis – so deep that if everyone out of work stood in single file, that unemployment line would stretch the length of the entire American continent. You would think that any president, whatever his party, would make job creation, and nothing else, his first order of economic business.
But this president didn’t do that. Instead, we got a long, divisive, all-or-nothing attempt to put the federal government in charge of health care.
Um... didn't you just say that Obama passed the largest-ever government stimulus package in history?
He made job creation the first order of economic business. And he saw health reform as a key way to spur economic growth while building sustainability for the future.
Obamacare comes to more than two thousand pages of rules, mandates, taxes, fees, and fines that have no place in a free country.
Yeah. Rules. Like prohibiting the use of contraception? Those kinds of rules?
Ryan contradicts himself.
You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.
Um... wow. I can't even begin on this piece. Ryan's own plan guts Medicare and gives the money to private insurance companies. What Obama did was to eliminate double-dipping by providers and skimming by insurance companies. He enacted reforms that protect taxpayers and Medicare recipients.
So our opponents can consider themselves on notice. In this election, on this issue, the usual posturing on the Left isn’t going to work. Mitt Romney and I know the difference between protecting a program, and raiding it. Ladies and gentlemen, our nation needs this debate. We want this debate. We will win this debate.
OK, fine. But winning a debate doesn't mean you're doing anything to protect seniors. It just means you're willing to spend gazillions of dollars to protect the interests of those "corporations are people" friends of yours.
It began with a financial crisis; it ends with a job crisis.
It began with a housing crisis they alone didn’t cause; it ends with a housing crisis they didn’t correct.
It began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America.
Yeah,
I remember how that went.
You gloated when the US debt was downgraded. Because you were more interested in winning debates and elections than in moving America forward.
So here we are, $16 trillion in debt and still he does nothing.
Um, no. That's you. You're the one doing nothing.
After four years of government trying to divide up the wealth, we will get America creating wealth again. With tax fairness and regulatory reform, we’ll put government back on the side of the men and women who create jobs, and the men and women who need jobs.
Can I get some libertarian fairy dust with that, too? How about something that trickles down on me? I love that.
Behind every small business, there’s a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores – these didn’t come out of nowhere. A lot of heart goes into each one. And if small businesspeople say they made it on their own, all they are saying is that nobody else worked seven days a week in their place. Nobody showed up in their place to open the door at five in the morning. Nobody did their thinking, and worrying, and sweating for them. After all that work, and in a bad economy, it sure doesn’t help to hear from their president that government gets the credit. What they deserve to hear is the truth: Yes, you did build that.
Yes, we did. Together. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
We are the government. Government of, by, and for the people.
I started a small business this year and I needed a lot of help. My government hasn't provided it, but I don't blame the President for that. I blame the Republicans in Congress.
I learned a good deal about economics, and about America, from the author of the Reagan tax reforms – the great Jack Kemp. What gave Jack that incredible enthusiasm was his belief in the possibilities of free people, in the power of free enterprise and strong communities to overcome poverty and despair. We need that same optimism right now.
Optimism isn't the problem. President Obama has that in spades. The problem is a lack of demand for goods and services created by a decimation of the middle class, led by declining home values and weakness in consumer spending. America needs a pay raise, and Ryan wants to send the profits and the jobs to the Caymans.
And in our dealings with other nations, a Romney-Ryan administration will speak with confidence and clarity.
Well, that would be something new. The Romney-Ryan foreign policy to date has been a catastrophe. So has Romney's dealings overseas. Is there anyone he hasn't managed to confuse or piss off?
College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life. Everyone who feels stuck in the Obama economy is right to focus on the here and now. And I hope you understand this too, if you’re feeling left out or passed by: You have not failed, your leaders have failed you.
Yes, you have.
We can get this country working again. We can get this economy growing again. We can make the safety net safe again. We can do this.
You could have done this, working with the President, for the last 4 years. Instead, you've been trying to make him a failure - and bring down the nation in order to score political points.
I'm done.