Paul Ryan loves the poor so much he wants to put them out of their misery

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Paul Ryan claims he cares about the poor. He claims he wants to deal with poverty in a serious and meaningful way. But of course he's a combination of Ayn Rand devotee and Christianist ideologue, an anti-government extremist who departs from Rand in adding a cover of religious moralizing, and so what he really wants to give the poor, as he pursues his far-right "free"-market agenda benefitting the rich before all others, is more Jesus and less everything they actually need.

And so it's hardly surprising that in fact he's really not all that interested in tackling poverty beyond rhetoric designed to put a compassionate spin on what is essentially an agenda of brutality, and that's reflected in his "budget":

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin on Tuesday will lay out a tough, election-year budget that he says will come into balance by 2024, in large part through steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and the full repeal of President Obama’s health care law, just as millions begin to see its benefits.

But even with those cuts, Mr. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, is counting on a boost of economic growth to balance the budget, a boost he says will be gained by reducing the deficit. Many economists believe such dramatic spending cuts — especially those affecting the poor — would have the opposite effect, slowing the economy and lowering tax receipts.

Not that Ryan, who speaks for the bulk of his party on fiscal matters, has ever let something like the obviousness of reality get in the way of his ideological pursuits. As Jon Chait explains: 

The disintegration of Ryan's promise [to tackle poverty] reveals something very deep. It's not that he needs a little more time and a few all-nighters, or some more help getting fellow Republicans in line. His policy vision is fundamentally impossible.

Ryan and his party are committed to the following beliefs:

1. America faces an impending debt crisis, somewhere, which requires a balanced budget within the next decade;
2. Social Security and Medicare benefits for current and near-retirees amount to a sacred pact that cannot be violated;
3. Barack Obama has hollowed out the military, requiring defense spending to rise (as Ryan proposes), or at minimum not to drop;
4. Taxes can never, ever, ever rise at all, even as part of a trade for other desirable policy changes.

The only possible way to reconcile this combination of policy commitments is to impose staggering cuts to programs for the poor, which Ryan's most recent budget proposal does. Every previous version of the Ryan budget is, basically, a plan to cut benefits for the poor. At least two thirds of the cuts in last year's Ryan plan come from programs for poor people.

Paul Ryan is a Catholic, but essentially, beyond the basic trappings of their faith, he's the opposite of Pope Francis. His God is the "free" market (which is really just the Hobbesian state of nature, a state in which life is nasty, brutish, and short except for those who are strong enough (that is, rich enough) to survive by constructing their own Leviathan of the 1%), his savior is Ayn Rand (along with other fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman), and the disciples he places alongside her include Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp (who was just a bit more serious about helping the poor than he is). 

And here, as always, he intends to crush the poor, and pretty much the entirety of the 99%, as well as to stop the American economy in its tracks (however much his ideology might tell him otherwise), in order to enrich the already rich, empower the already powerful, and create the right-wing dystopia of his crazed imaginings.

Paul Ryan's racist dog whistle

By Frank Moraes 

(Ed. note: For more on Ryan blaming poverty on lazy inner-city men, clearly a code meant to assign blame to black men in particular, see ThinkProgress, which notes that "[w]ork requirements have yet to significantly reduce poverty, particularly during a downturn economy." -- MJWS)

Digby posted a Quote of the Day that made me burst out laughing. It isn't actually the quote that was funny. It is how she juxtaposed it with Lee Atwater's infamous "nigger, nigger, nigger" quote. For those that don't know it, Atwater gave an interview back in 1981 where he discussed the evolution of racial politics. He said, "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff..."

Well, as we all know, Paul Ryan now "cares" deeply about the poor. He put out his 204-page poverty report and openly campaigned against those evil liberals who want to fill children's stomachs with food and thus deprive them of a top rate soul. But this morning on Bill Bennett's Morning in America, Ryan said:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

This reminds me of the new The Young Turks segment, "Is It Racist?" In a word: yes!

But don't take my word for it. Let's just finish Atwater's quote:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is: blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

It is much more abstract! It just isn't any less racist.

I actually think that Paul Ryan is actively a racist. He seems like an Ayn Rand true believer. Yet he doesn't make the Ayn Rand argument: selfishness is good and all that crap. Instead, he makes the argument that is coded to sound okay to moderates but which simultaneously pushes all those tribal and racist buttons. So I don't think he necessarily holds the "screw the poor" opinions because of any personal racial animus. But he sure is willing to knowingly use coded racist rhetoric to reach his preferred Ayn Rand dystopian future. And that is racist.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Paul Ryan weeps for school lunches

By Frank Moraes

Paul Ryan was at CPAC today, and he's been getting a lot of attention for a story he told about a young man who didn't want to get a free hot meal from the school but would rather have his parents pack him a brown bag lunch. "He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him." To Paul Ryan, we are depriving this boy of the dignity of his parents work. Or something.

There are a couple of things that really strike me about this story. First, when I was a kid, I was one of those kids with brown bags. And I really didn't like it. I would much rather have gotten a hot lunch. It wasn't about the love that my mother was supposedly giving me; it was about the taste of food. Mom was a fine cook, but there is only so much you can do with a sandwich. It got boring.

I also know kids. What this young man is probably getting at is the fact that hisfriends have brown bag lunches. He's feels like the oddball, because he isn't like them. He would feel the same if he were the one with the brown bag when all his friends got hot lunches. Of course, it could well be that this young man doesn't have any parents close by. He might be a foster kid. Certainly the line "someone who cared for him" makes it sound like the kid is missing a whole lot more than lunch. Regardless: his complaint is not about the fact that he gets a state-paid lunch but that he isn't getting one from mom. Even as it stands, the story does not say what Ryan claims it does.

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Republican class warfare on Obamacare

By Frank Moraes 

Brian Beutler wrote an interesting article over at Salon recently, "Why They Hate Working America: GOP Equates Benefits With Personal Failure." It is about the Republican reaction to the CBO report that said that, because of Obamacare, some people would cut back the hours they work and others would stop working altogether. The information in the report is mostly good news. In particular, it gets rid of the problem of job-lock where people are stuck in jobs just because they need the health insurance it provides.

Back in 2009, Paul Ryan himself asked, "[A]re we going to continue job-lock or are we going to allow individuals more choice and portability to fit the 21st century workforce?" But as usual with them, Republicans approach any problem with a long list of solutions that are not acceptable. So they may all be in favor of affordable healthcare, but they aren't willing to do anything about it that would actually work. So it isn't surprising that Republicans would twist themselves in knots to attack Obamacare with information indicting it is fixing a problem they've claim to care about.

Beutler notes that the main argument that is appearing from Republicans about the CBO report is pretty much the same as Romney's 47% narrative. "They're not condemning 47 percent of people in the country, but they are being much more specific about the class of people they're condemning." The best example I have of this is a two-income family where the one person only wants to work part time but has to work full time in order to have health insurance. So Obamacare allows the family to go from two incomes to one and a half incomes, allowing more time for managing the home and children. That ought to be something that conservatives would applaud -- especially social conservatives!

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Even Paul Ryan realizes the latest Republican line of attack on Obamacare is bullshit

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, maybe "even" isn't the right word. Paul Ryan is a fairly smart guy, whatever you think of his atrocious views, and so one should expect him to understand the difference between the truth and partisan spin -- and his own party's dishonesty. He's no Louie Gohmert, after all, to name but one of his embarrassing colleagues. In a caucus full of morons, that is to say, Ryan does stand out as a man with some capacity for independent thought. Which isn't saying much, but still.

Anyway:

At least one Republican is setting the record straight on what the Congressional Budget Office actually said this week about Obamacare and its effect on jobs.

House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) explained in a Wednesday hearing with CBO director Doug Elmendorf that the health care reform law wouldn't cost the U.S. economy more than 2 million jobs, as many of his colleagues alleged, but that Americans would choose to work less.

"I want to make sure we accurately understand what it is you are saying," Ryan said, before leading Elmendorf through a series of questions to explain the report and its findings.

Ryan and Elmendorf combined to explain that Obamacare would lead to a decrease in the number of hours worked by up to 2 percent in 2024. Most of that drop, the CBO said, would be the result of Americans choosing not to work, for various reasons, but not because employers would want to hire fewer workers on account of the law. Translate those lost hours into full-time employment and it equals up to 2.5 million jobs by 2024. But that's not the same as jobs being cut.

"Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off," Ryan said.

"That is right," Elmendorf said.

That's a pretty direct contradiction for the attack adopted by many GOPers following the report's release. Senate Republicans blasted out an email, saying that Obamacare would "print more pink slips." Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and others alleged that the law would "cost" the country more than 2 million jobs. A number of conservative outlets framed the report as "pushing" Americans out of the workforce, rather than it being of their own volition.

It's a pretty easy thing to understand. There are people who only work because they need the health coverage. With Obamacare, that is, with access to affordable health insurance, they won't need to do that. Ryan opposes Obamacare, but at least he seems to grasp that. The problem is that many in his party either don't or don't want to, and so what we're getting from Republicans and their allies in the media (and even some in the "liberal media" who are too stupid to figure it out or who just regurgitate GOP lies) is yet more distortion, yet more dishonesty, yet more lies, which is pretty much all they've got in their ongoing assault on Obamacare.

It's a job-killer, they scream. Repeal, repeal, repeal!

That the truth is against them, as Ryan himself knows, hardly matters.

What should Pope Francis do about Paul Ryan?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Not the pope.

Honestly, just who the fuck does Paul Ryan think he is?

Oh right, an Ayn Rand devotee, trickle-down ideologue, and Republican leader of all things fiscal, as he towers over the ignoramuses of his party and holds court like some wizard in the land of Oz. But, really, he's a sham, his expertise a mirage, his concern for the poor utter bullshit, his Catholicism a self-aggrandizing joke. As Salon's Joan Walsh writes:

When 1.3 million Americans lose their unemployment benefits on Saturday, they can thank Rep. Paul Ryan. He took the lead in negotiating a bipartisan budget deal with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, and on behalf of his party, held the line against continuing extended unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless.

Sure, a lot of Republicans share blame with Ryan. But he deserves extra-special (negative) credit for the deal, because he has lately had the audacity to depict himself as the new face of "compassionate conservatism," insisting Republicans must pay attention to the problems of the poor. Friends say the man who once worshipped Ayn Rand now takes Pope Francis as his moral role model. Except he can't help treating his new role model with arrogance and contempt.

It's true that while knuckle-draggers like Rush Limbaugh attack the pope as a Marxist, Ryan has praised him, which I guess takes a tiny bit of courage since normally Republicans don't like to buck the leader of their party. "What I love about the pope is he is triggering the exact kind of dialogue we ought to be having," Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "People need to get involved in their communities to make a difference, to fix problems soul to soul."

But he couldn't suppress either his right-wing politics or his supreme capacity for condescension for very long. "The guy is from Argentina, they haven't had real capitalism in Argentina," Ryan said (referring to the pope as "the guy" is a nice folksy touch.) "They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don't have a true free enterprise system."

Pope Francis isn't just triggering dialogue and isn't just promoting good-hearted communitarianism, he's taking a stand against the very sort of capitalist brutality that Ryan espouses. And I suspect he has seen more than enough shit both in Argentina over the decades and throughout his long pastoral and ecclesiastical career to give him a certain credibility when discussing capitalism and its horrors. (Besides, how exactly does America have a "true free enterprise system" -- what with its corporate welfare and plutocratic politics? It's also cronyism, of a sort, and if Ryan really thinks America has real capitalism, he's as much of an ignoramus as his blind followers in the House.)

Sure, Ryan isn't quite as odious as Dear Leader Rush, but the two aren't all that far apart, and where they differ it's more in style than substance. The media blowhard is just more forthcoming with his extremism, whereas the politician tries to pass himself off as a caring individual, wrapping his, and his party's, extremism in a neat little package that he hopes a gullible electorate will lap up with glee.

Pope Francis has many more important things to concern himself with than Paul Ryan's political games, but is excommunication out of the question? Seems to me it might send the appropriate message.

Red light, green light, 1, 2, 3...

By Carl 

So it seems that the historic bipartisan budget deal in the House last week – historic, in that it's been years since we didn't just pass a Continuing Resolution to fund the government – is falling on enough deaf ears in the Senate to be a problem:

The prospect that the budget would clear the cloture hurdle brightened Monday, when three GOP senators -- Orrin Hatch of Utah, Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia -- announced that they would vote yes. A fourth, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, expressed his support on Sunday. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona also said they would vote in favor of cloture last week.

But unlike in the House, where Speaker John Boehner aggressively battled conservative groups trying to kill the bill, GOP leaders in the Senate are signaling opposition, or at least resistance, to the package.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has not said which way he will vote Tuesday, but he is widely expected to oppose the measure. Similarly, Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas announced his opposition Monday morning on his campaign's website -- a step his Senate office was unwilling to take. It was later deleted after reporters from The Associated Press asked for confirmation of a Cornyn quote that appeared on the Internet site Breitbart.com.

"Senator Cornyn opposes this budget deal because it breaks previously set spending caps and goes in the 'wrong direction' with regards to entitlement spending," according to the post. His Senate spokeswoman, Kate Martin, would only say that Cornyn would take "a close look" at the measure and is "concerned" that it reverses some of the spending cuts won in a hard-fought 2011 budget pact.

Interesting. It appears that hard-line conservatives in the Senate have drawn a line in the sand. The political implications of this are larger than the legislative implications (the bill overcomes any filibuster and becomes law, with minor amendments).

For one thing, the Republican nominee-apparent, Paul Ryan (by dint of running as the Veep candidate with Mitt Romney), was one of the driving forces behind this deal. The thinking on his part had to include a calculation of the national political implications of being out in front of a bipartisan budget bill ahead of an election that will likely feature Chris Christie, who's main attraction is his ability to bring Democrats on board with his agenda.

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Proactive patoot-smooching

By Mustang Bobby

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) tried to keep the family feud civil and suck up to his base overlords.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), one of the budget deal negotiators, on Sunday defended conservative groups criticized by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for coming out against the budget agreement this week.

“I think these groups are valuable,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”"They’re part of our conservative family. I’d prefer to keep these conversations within our family.”
Ryan did say that he was not pleased that groups opposed the deal so quickly, but still said that the Tea Party is valuable.

“John was frustrated because they came out against our agreement before we even reached an agreement,” he said. “I was frustrated as well. But I see the Tea Party as indispensable.”

Because he knows he will need to call on them when he makes his attempt to run for the presidency in 2016, following in the footsteps of all those vice presidential candidates from losing tickets that came back to win the next time around like President Dan Quayle, President Joe Lieberman, and President John Edwards.

Sycophancy only works if you don’t mean it.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

You want a Republican civil war? Here's your Republican civil war.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A liberal? Really?

It didn't just start. It was in the making for a long time, and it got underway a while ago, at least in formal terms. Actually, it just sort of started happening, but it was also pretty much inevitable. And now, well, the word "war" has come to the fore:

Tea Party Patriots said Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has "declared war on the Tea Party" with his "smug and pretentious rant" against certain right-wing organizations.

The group made the charge in a fundraising email to supporters, seeking to win donations over the public feuding.

In the past two days, Boehner has repeatedly attacked the conservative groups that championed the October effort to defund ObamaCare and are now opposed to the recent budget deal negotiated by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

He has criticized the groups for being more interested in raising money than actually solving problems.

The letter quotes Boehner's statement that "outside groups" were "using our members and... the American people for their own goals."

"The last time we checked, we are the American people," the letter said.

The letter goes on to refer to Boehner as a "ruling class politician" who only pretends to be conservative while remaining a "tax-and-spend liberal" at heart.

Of course, that's all complete nonsense. Boehner has been critical of right-wing Republican groups that threaten the party's position in Congress, if not also nationally, but that's about it. If anyone or anything has declared war, it's the Tea Party itself, which is obstinate in its ideological extremism, dismissive of the realities of politics, and confrontational regarding the rest of the GOP, throwing primary challenges even at hardcore conservatives.

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GOP craziness may end crisis

By Frank Moraes 

Jonathan Chait wrote what I think is a very insightful article today, even if the title is a bit deceptive, "House Republicans' Ransom Demands Falling." What I would say is that their demands are changing, not falling. He provides some important history about the current standoff. The House Republican leadership (John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan) have been planning this blackmail scheme, most likely since Romney lost the last election. The idea was to use the Debt Ceiling to force Obama to accept the usual Republican budget policies. You know: cut tax rates (supposedly without cutting overall taxes, but you know how that goes), cut entitlements, and so on.

Unfortunately, Ted Cruz ruined their plan by getting all the Republicans to support a government shutdown threat to somehow end Obamacare. This was the real reason that Boehner was promising his caucus a fight on the Debt Ceiling and why he tried to get the continuing resolution (CR) out of the way. Most observers (including me!) thought it was just Boehner's usual short term planning: get the CR out of the way and then deal with the Debt Limit. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I was right about one thing, though: all the supposed reasonable Republicans don't exist. Boehner is just as extreme as all the rest; he may just be a little more tactical.

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Losing badly, Republicans look desperately for a way out of their self-made political crisis

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Gotta love these headlines and what they, and the articles below them, say about the current state of the Republican Party:

-- New York Times: "As Pressure Mounts, House G.O.P. Weighs Short-Term Debt Deal";

-- The Hill: "House GOP 'negotiators' to meet Obama";

-- Washington Post: "Key Republicans signal willingness to back down on effort to defund health-care law"; 

-- Politico: "GOP quietly backing away from Obamacare"; and

-- Politico: "GOP unity frays, frustration builds."

And the divisions on the right, among conservatives and key Republican stakeholders, are only deepening. Consider, for example, John Podhoretz's piece, "Suicide of the Right." (Forget that Republicans across the board are responsible for the rise of the Tea Party and the GOP's ongoing move to the ever further right.) Consider also these:

-- NBC News: "Kochs to Congress: Focus on spending, not Obamacare"; and

-- Huffington Post: "Heritage Action Bails On Debt Ceiling Fight." 

Even Paul Ryan is caving, distancing himself from the Obamacare defunding nonsense and, while obviously remaining unabashedly partisan and self-promotional, advocating (Republican-friendly) compromise that is rather more conciliatory than anything we've seen from him before.

Republicans obviously still think they can get out of this with some of their demands met, and thus far there's no indication they're genuinely willing to negotiate in good faith.

But the simple fact is that the government shutdown, with the fight over the debt ceiling coming up next, has been an utter disaster for them.

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Childbirth is dangerous; abortion is not

By Frank Moraes 

There is a great deal of pretending in public life. For example, people pretend to care about children who float away in balloons. But they don't really. They like the drama. But they don't know the kid or the parents. The kid is probably a brat and the parents, as we now know, are assholes. This situation is so much worse in politics. The Onion made fun of this recently in an article, "Romney Drops By To See How Down-And-Out Family He Met On Campaign Trail Doing." As we all know, "humanizing" campaign stops are about as real as the Tooth Fairy. Think: Paul Ryan cleaning pots at a soup kitchen.

But the fakery goes much deeper than that. What I most hate are claims by politicians that they are helping rather than hurting. The common argument is that we need to gut welfare programs to protect the poor from the horrors of government dependence. You see, it is those meanie liberals who want to help the poor who are really hurting them. Of course, if conservatives really wanted to help the poor, they would provide universal healthcare for the poor; they would provide good (equalized) schools; they would provide free college. Think about it on the most basic level: if conservatives wanted to help the poor, they would at least provide good food for their children. But what did the conservatives in the House of Representatives just do? The moderates voted to cut nutritional assistance. The extremists voted against this because it didn't cut enough. So I think we can reasonably conclude that when it comes to the poor, conservatives are only using claims of helping as an excuse for taking money away from them.


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Reinhart and Rogoff shown to be wrong -- again

By Frank Moraes 

There was a bit of economic news yesterday that was wonderfully fun and I dare say it would be a shame for you all to miss out on it just because you don't follow the economics blogs. What's more, in terms of truth, it really matters, even if, in terms of politics, it probably won't.

In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two economists at Harvard, published a hugely influential paper, "Growth in a Time of Debt" (pdf). In it, they purported to show that if the total government debt equaled more than 90% of the country's GDP, then there would be a big slowdown in economic growth. This paper was used more than any other to justify economic austerity all over the world, but especially in Europe and the United States. In fact, Paul Ryan, in his The Path to Prosperity (pdf) budget, claimed, "The study found conclusive empirical evidence that gross debt exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth."

That sounds bad, right? In fact, if you look at the paper, it is even worse. Countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of less than 30% see a growth of 4.1% whereas those with a ratio of more than 90% see a contraction of 0.1%. Of course, long ago, I had dismissed the paper for two reasons. (But the fact that I even knew about the paper should give you some idea of just how important it has been.) First, correlation is not cause. And in this case, the cause is probably the opposite of what Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) suggest. When economies are bad, governments have to borrow money. The case is much stronger that bad economies lead to large debts rather than the other way around.

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Inside Obama's budget

By Frank Moraes 

In his "Happy Hour Roundup" at The Plum Line the other night, Jonathan Bernstein provided links to three articles that argue in different ways that there is much to like in Obama's new budget. I've never argued otherwise, but I have been too focused on the entitlement cuts. Let's be clear though: Obama's offer of these cuts is very bad. Even if nothing happens in the next four years, Republicans will go on to accuse Democrats of intransigence: "Even that socialist Obama thought we needed to cut entitlements!"

Annie Lowrey over at the Economix blog argues that Obama's entire focus, not just his budgets, have been about reducing income inequality. She rightly notes that the ACA (Obamacare) will help the issue. Just on the face, giving people healthcare who didn't have it before makes them richer; it doesn't matter that you aren't giving them cash. But perhaps as important, it will make medical bankruptcies far less common. (Remember the big push by the feds to make bankruptcy harder because all of these spendthrifts were abusing the poor bankers? It was mostly bankruptcies because of our broken health-care system.)

She goes on to mention a number of good things that are in the new budget. It includes a rise in the minimum wage, universal preschool, and of course, slightly higher taxes for rich people. One thing that is in there really surprised me: the earned income tax credit (EITC). The budget would make it permanent. I thought it already was, especially since traditionally, that is one form of welfare conservatives agree with. Well, it is only in effect until 2017. That's a big deal. The idea that President Paul Ryan would end the program is very troubling.

In the great Wonkblog fashion, Brad Plumer presents the "Winners and Losers in the White House Budget." The winners (at least in terms of programs) are primarily the poor. As Lowrey points out, there is the EITC and the minimum wage. But in addition, although Medicare is cut, Medicaid is not. To some extent, this defines Obama's economic policies. I can see that he truly does care about the poor. It is when you move up the income ladder to the middle class, that he thinks things are fine. But they aren't fine. And helping the middle class thrive is really important to all of the classes.

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Media accountability

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, I wrote about Liz Cheney's insane rant against Obama and Obamacare. The insightful health care policy observer Aaron Carroll wrote about the Reagan quote she used that freedom was over because of the evil which Cheney dare not speak its name. That evil, of course, is Medicare. Cheney conveniently left out that context for the quote because it only would have highlighted how wrong Reagan was and Cheney is with their hysterical domino theorizing.

Carroll puts it all into context:

Yes, Medicare was the death of freedom in 1961. It was tyranny. It was the end of America.

Last I checked, Medicare passed, and America is still here. Now it's Obamacare that will kill freedom, enact tyranny, and end America.

At what point do people who use such hyperbolic rhetoric stop and recognize that their dire warnings never come to pass? One would imagine that people who repeated Reagan's talking points back in 1961 might find it a bit humbling to see how wrong they were. You'd think they'd shy from repeating those arguments again.

But, no. They get op-ed space in the WSJ.

This, I think, is the real problem. No one ever loses anything because they are shown to be shockingly ignorant. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, no one wants to be around others who make them look bad. So someone like John McLaughlin is not going to fill his panel show with people who were right about the Iraq War or the housing bubble. The mainstream media will continue to be wrong about major policy issues because they don't want to admit being wrong in the past. Another reason is just that the people on the TV machine and in major newspapers are not there because they are right or smart; they are there because they are friends with with the people who run the TV stations and newspapers.

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Not the only game in town

By Mustang Bobby

Charlie Pierce explains that while the Paul Ryan exercise in repetitive motion syndrome for budgets is getting all the attention, there’s actually another plan that makes more sense and actually works. Which means it has no chance whatsoever of getting debated, much less passed.

There’s a lot of buzz at and around the Cool Kidz table today because, glorioski, there’s actually another budget proposal out there, the one put together by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and it not only seems to make more sense to more people than, for example, Paul Ryan’s exercise in Magical Unicorn Math, or even than the principles underlying the president’s proposal, which seem to be that, before we act on it, we should carefully check the Magical Unicorn’s work before appointing the unicorn to the Council Of Economic Advisers. Moreover, that budget is certainly more consonant not only with the blog’s First Law Of Economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money — but also with the results of the latest Gallup Poll, the sub-themes of which latter is, quite clearly, “Why In Hell Are We Listening To Joe Scarborough On This Stuff Anyway?”

That’s 77 percent of the respondents who want some sort of WPA 2.0 to make sure the bridges don’t fall down while we’re driving to work. That’s 75 percent who want a federal jobs creation program. These two numbers include, respectively, 63 percent and 56 percent of Republican respondents. You could poll Paul Ryan’s immediately family and not get these numbers. Neither Mr. Simpson nor Mr. Bowles could score this well on Christmas morning with the grandkids. You could ask Americans the question, “Would you favor immediate federal action that would provide you with unlimited whiskey and the sexual favors of your favorite movie stars?” and come close. Maybe. Does the House progressive budget, which proposes programs that track these numbers, have a chance in hell of passing? Of course not. It’s barely in the conversation.

The main reason it’s barely in the conversation is because the plan bears the unfortunate label of “progressive.” That immediately dooms it among the Villagers because as we all know, progressives never win elections or the White House. The only people who are serious about reducing the deficit and not blowing all sorts of money on wasted efforts like schools, roads, and bridges in America are conservatives. After all, look at all the money we spent on stuff like that in Iraq and where did it get us?

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Rep. Paul Ryan flames out

By Richard K. Barry

Yeah. This goof.

What's up with Rep. Paul Ryan's popularity? A new Rasumussen poll finds that just 35% of all likely U.S. voters view Ryan favourably, which is down 15 points from his 50% favourability rating last August just after Mitt Romney picked him as his running mate.

Fifty-four percent (54%) have an unfavorable opinion of the Wisconsin congressman. These figures include 17% with a Very Favorable view of him and 23% with a Very Unfavorable one. Twelve percent (12%) are undecided.

So, what happened?

Two things: The stench of defeat rarely helps anyone's popularity, and then there's this, as noted by The Week:

In his new budget outline unveiled last week, Ryan once again put forward the policies he championed in the 2012 election: Lower tax rates across the board and cuts to programs aimed at the poor. Those policies did not sit well with voters last year, and they're not getting any more popular. Even the Republican National Committee conceded that point, saying the GOP had to change its ways because voters considered the party's positions "scary" and "out of touch."

Democrats were supposed to be oh-so-scared of this very serious Republican thinker after he was chosen by Romney to share the ticket. I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now. Paul Ryan's ideas suck and the American people get that. 

That's what's happened. 

Familiar sound

By Mustang Bobby

As previously noted, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) came out with his budget proposal. Not only is it that same thing he’s proposed before, he didn’t even bother to change the title: it’s still calledPathway to Prosperity. What, Pathway to Prosperity – The Movie was already taken?

The only difference is that this time it craters the economy and nails the middle class in ten years, not forty. And what it lacks in revenue it makes up for in irony: it keeps the tax increases the GOP screamed about in the fiscal cliff deal because, well, that law has passed and it’s a done deal. But then he calls for the repeal of Obamacare (but keeps the tax increases from it) because, well, he doesn’t like the law. Hamana hamana.

Ezra Klein chimes in:

Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government.

Read more »

The Republicans' Obamacare lie and why it will continue to help them

By tmcbpatriot 

When I think if the GOP, I often hear the voice of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore as he sits in the helicopter looking down at the carnage he is dropping onto that Vietnamese village. In a forever frustrated voice, he utters, as only he can: "Don't these people ever give up?"

Well there's that voice again because Paul Ryan is at it again. He is making the rounds in his forever lame attempt to remain relevant while touting yet another budget plan, same as the old plan, that promises to make the world a better place, provided of course that Obamacare is not part of it. Ugh. I feel your frustration, Bill.

Thing is, though, this boring regurgitation of repealing Obamacare, while tired and rote, continues to provide returns for the GOP and will for years to come. Obamacare is much like those other pesky liberal initiatives, like Medicare and civil rights, and much like those we intelligent people understand that Obamacare is here to stay while Republicans need to pretend it's not. Politicians like Ryan need to play dumb in order to maintain support among their fast-dying, brain-dead followers who need to believe otherwise.

Read more »

Keep trying

By Mustang Bobby

One of the bright ideas the GOP is coming up with in the budget debates is — wait for it — repeal Obamacare.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday that the budget blueprint he plans to unveil later this week will promote repealing President Obama’s signature health care law.

“Yes, our budget does promote repealing Obamacare and replacing it with a better system,” Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” 

Past House Republican efforts to repeal the president’s health care law have failed and the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of law last year.

But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t keep trying. After all, elections don’t really have consequences.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)