Mitt Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate is a double down bet on a set of ideas and policies. The idea is that if rich people get lower taxes and working people get fewer benefits, America will somehow be a better place for everyone.
Ryan and Romney agree that Medicare should be turned into a voucher program, in which senior citizens would get a flat amount of money which they would have to go buy health care from private insurance companies. This voucher program would require senior citizens to pay about $6400.00 more in out of pocket expenses. Ryan’s plan also would require people to wait two more years, until age 67, in order to get access to even this significantly reduced benefit. Medicaid would receive $700 billion dollars in cuts, which would throw an estimated 14 to 19 million people off of Medicaid, according to figures presented by David Kay Johnston on “The Ed Show”. Ryan’s budget cuts $134 billion from Food Stamps, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
At the same time, the Ryan plan proposes $4.2 trillion dollars in tax cuts, the great majority of which would go to the super wealthy. In Mr. Johnston’s estimate, it would actually involve a $4,479 tax increase for persons making between $50 thousand and $100 thousand. Ryan’s plan would cut taxes for millionaires by approximately $331 thousand.
It is incredible that Ryan who has claimed for years that the sky is falling because of the budget deficit, does not hesitate to increase the budget deficit through massive tax cuts for the rich, combined with drastic cuts to services needed by working families. How can the budget deficit crisis that Ryan and other Republicans have cried about for decades be real if they can always afford more billions for billionaires? It makes me believe that even they do not believe their own story. Either we are in an existential crisis because of the budget deficit and we need all Americans to pitch in to fix the problem, or we have loads of extra resources and can afford a massive tax holiday for the already rich. One of these things can be true, or they can both be false, but they cannot both be true.
Ryan’s claim that we are in a budget crisis that somehow permits more than $4 trillion dollars in tax cuts to benefit the very wealthy, while he goes after grandma’s Medicare benefits and literally snatches the food out of the mouths of the working poor, reveals the logical contradictions of the standard conservative fiscal argument. It also reveals an argument which is essentially a con game to justify a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the super rich. The plan is a moral travesty. The plan does not just belong to Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. Nearly every Republican congressmen in both the House and Senate has voted for the Ryan plan twice. The Ryan plan is the Romney plan. Although Romney wishes to wiggle away from Ryan’s relative specificity back to his usual evasive obscurity.
Too late. Romney and Ryan are one now. There is no way for Romney to distinguish his ideas from Ryan because for one thing, Romney has never showed any evidence of having any ideas of his own. Ryan fills the Romney vacuum and he fills it in a way the confirms all of our worst fears about Romney. The Man Who Likes Firing people has found a partner who Likes Taking Away Grandma’s Medicare and Giving the Saving to the Rich. The are a parody of the one percent. They are the Inequality Twins.