Paul Ryan, like Mitt Romney, is also a big believer in the idea that you should only get as much health care as you can afford. And that includes you, grandma.
With the Romney campaign’s neck-breaking flip flop this week (they’ve tried to pretend Romneycare never happened up to this week when the campaign began praising it in defense of a political ad), The Pensito Review reminds us that “the campaign is going to have to somehow walk back Ryan’s thorough trashing of Romneycare — including the individual mandate, which was created at the Heritage Foundation…” Go here to watch video of the following transcript:
C-SPAN HOST: Do you believe that the Massachusetts healthcare reform system worked? The system that Gov. Romney …
Rep. PAUL RYAN: Yeah, no, well. No, actually, I’m not a fan of the system. And I think that [garbled]. I’ve got some relatives up there in Massachusetts. My uncle’s a cardiologist in Boston, and I talk to a lot of healthcare folks up there who — what’s happening now, because costs are getting out of control, premiums are increasing in Massachusetts. And now you have bureaucracy that [garbled] all these cost controls and now rationing on the system.
So people in Massachusetts are saying, yes, we have virtually universal healthcare. I think it’s like 96 or 98 percent insured. But you see the system bursting by the seams. They see premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts. And so they’re frustrated with this system.
Number one, they’re already paying for it. They don’t want to pay for another system on top of it. That was, I think, Scott Brown’s message. They see how this idea of having the government being the single regulator of health insurance, defining what kind of health insurance you can have and then an individual mandate. It is a fatal conceit. And these kinds of systems, as we’re now seeing in Massachusetts, are unsustainable.
REMINDER: we do still want to see Mitt Romney’s tax returns.
Many times there are images that come across my Tumblr feed that I want to post here, but I first try to find the actual photographer or, failing that, I try to find out some background on the image. Here’s what I found on the images above:
From the website Eyes On Colombia, is this post: Tequendama Falls & The Haunted Hotel: “In 1924, the then-luxurious Hotel (Refugio d)el Salto was inaugurated on the cliff facing the waterfall but due to contamination of the river water, believed to be a result of the popular locale, it was closed in the early 90′s. There has been talk of reopening it and restoring it to its former glory (but as a museum or even a police station) which might help rid the place of its apparent ghosts. They are said to haunt the hotel and according to the caretaker, are believed to be from the old days when bar fights on the second story would end up on its balcony, sometimes resulting in a drunk patron losing more than the fight.”
Tequendama Falls – Wikipedia: [Google translated] “The Tequendama jump is a natural waterfall of Colombia , located in the province of Tequendama in the Department of Cundinamarca . It is located approximately 30 miles southwest of Bogota… [...] In 1897 he opened the first hydroelectric Colombia whose name is The Charquito using the Bogota River water before the jump. By 1928 opens “The Hotel del Salto” a luxury accommodation next to the drop, which shows the great interest represented by then. In 1940 work began on the dam reservoir Muña that the river in the municipality of Bogotá Sibate, with the large and disorderly growth of the capital Bogota River and its tributaries were contaminated. The whole of the hydroelectric dam Charquito and Muna, made the leap lost much of its flow more serious water pollution, caused the jump Tequendama lost much of its attraction, leading to closure of the luxury accommodation which is currently abandoned.Still, many tend to stop Bogota next hop ears Tequendama to eat meat skewers grilled or offered by some locals and admire the stunning landscape that recount Humboldt.”
“When you redistribute money from the bottom to the top, the economy gets weaker. And all this stuff about the top investing in the country is (nonsense). No, they don’t. They’re asking where they can get the highest returns, and they’re looking all over the globe. So they’re investing in China and Brazil and Latin America, emerging markets, not America.” — Joseph Stiglitz (via theamericanbear)
Gawker: Ryan’s budget plan inspires lists like this and in Paul Krugman’s case, descriptions like “inconceivably cruel.”His cuts to the top income tax rate and the corporate tax return $3 trillion in revenue to the top earners.Ezra Klein breaks it down thus: in addition to cutting the “$1.5 trillion that the Affordable Care Act uses to purchase health insurance for 30 million Americans… it cuts Medicaid and related health programs by $770 billion—which is to say, by about a third.” It then adds $200 billion in Medicare cuts. But that leaves out the Paul Ryan mathemagic.
“[...] Paul Ryan Budget Kept Big Oil Subsidies And Slashed Clean Energy Investment. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed FY 2013 budget resolution retained a decade’s worth of oil tax breaks worth $40 billion, while slashing funding for investments in clean energy research, development, deployment, and commercialization, along with other energy programs. The plan called for a $3 billion cut in energy programs in FY 2013 alone. [CAP,3/20/12]“
4. Romney’s original intention was to make the 2012 election a referendum on President Obama’s management of the economy. Ryan makes it a choice between two competing plans for deficit reduction. This election increasingly resembles the Obama campaign’s strategy rather than the Romney campaign’s strategy.
6. Consider the case for Romney until today: He’s a relatively moderate businessman running because his experience in the private-sector gives him crucial insight into how to manage the economy. Now consider Ryan: He’s worked in politics his entire life, beginning as an aide to Sen. Bob Kasten, then working for Sen. Sam Brownback and as a speechwriter to Rep. Jack Kemp. He’s known as a relatively ideological politician who has put forward a detailed policy plan to remake the federal government. It’s a rather different message about what’s important. And how does Romney say the problem with Barack Obama is that he’s “never spent a day in the private sector” and then put Ryan a heartbeat away from the presidency?
8. It’s not just that Romney now has to defend Ryan’s budget. To some degree, that was always going to be true. What he will now have to defend is everything else Ryan has proposed. Ryan was, for instance, the key House backer of Social Security privatization. His bill, The Social Security Personal Savings Guarantee and Prosperity Act of 2005, was so aggressive that it was rejected by the Bush administration. Now it’s Romney’s bill to defend. In Florida.
Paul Krugman: But the continuing defense of Paul Ryan is a remarkable phenomenon. He’s still being treated by many pundits as a man deeply concerned about deficits, when the fact is that his policy proposals are all about redistributing income upward, and make no serious effort to curb debt. He’s even given credit for advocating higher taxes on the rich when he has more or less specifically rejected the things for which he’s given credit.
When the following reports say “GOP / House / Republican” budget — they mean the Paul Ryan budget that has been embraced by the current GOP / House / Republican Party:
Romney-Ryan: Back to the failed top-down policies that crashed our economy:
… “Paul Ryan is the mastermind behind the extreme GOP budget plan. It’s a plan Mitt Romney endorses. But what does that budget mean for America? The GOP budget plan hurts seniors, it hurts middle-class families, and it hurts students. All to pay for tax cuts for those at the top…”
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan wave after Romney introduced Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate during a campaign event at the battleship USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, Virginia, Saturday.
Charles P. Pierce on the Ryan pick: “Leave it to Willard Romney, international man of principle, to get himself bullied into a bold decision.
“[...] Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn’t believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he’s ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.
“[...] He does not have the raw balls to explain to the country that, no, he does not believe in government — not the federal government, anyway, and not as it was originally conceived, as the fundamental expression of a political commonwealth. He’s grandfathered his plan to chloroform Medicare so that, despite the deficit that he considers such an urgent problem, nobody alive today who might vote against him will be affected by it. For the same reason, he will not specify the cuts that he will make or the tax “loopholes” —coughMortgageInterestDeductioncough — that he will close. In any way that will come to matter to the people whose lives his policies will make harder and more miserable, Paul Ryan is still the high-school kid living off Social Security survivor benefits and reading Ayn Rand by flashlight under the sheets. Instead, he’s a guy pretending to be something he’s not, and doing so back in Janesville in a very swell Georgian mansion, which just happens to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“Which, among other things, means that Paul Ryan, who lies awake at night worrying that The Deficit will come and eat our grandchildren, lives in a house overseen by the National Park Service, which means that he qualifies for a 20-percent investment tax credit for the house he lives in. Of course, his “budget” would largely decimate the NPS, but that would be only those parts of it enjoyed by other people. Yes, Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver, has done very well by the federal government that he seeks to dismantle. Come to think of it, so has Willard Romney, although we may never know exactly how well he’s done by it. It turns out this is a match made in heaven, after all.”
“In naming Congressman Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has chosen a leader of the House Republicans who shares his commitment to the flawed theory that new budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on the middle class and seniors, will somehow deliver a stronger economy. The architect of the radical Republican House budget, Ryan, like Romney, proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid. His plan also would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors. As a member of Congress, Ryan rubber-stamped the reckless Bush economic policies that exploded our deficit and crashed our economy. Now the Romney-Ryan ticket would take us back by repeating the same, catastrophic mistakes.”
The Wall Street Journal on Thursday strongly urged Romney to pick the seven-term congressman. “The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election,” the paper wrote. “More than any other politician, the House budget chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline.”
“There’s nothing wrong with inherited wealth. Lord knows great presidents from FDR to JFK came into their fortunes through the luck of birth. But there is something wrong with winners of the lineage lottery who want to hammer those who did not have the foresight to select wealthy sperm and egg.
“[...] Paul Ryan, the darling of the New York-Washington media elite, is almost certainly not the most qualified person Romney could have picked. Unlike governors like Chris Christie or Tim Pawlenty, or a former high-ranking White House official like Rob Portman, Ryan has never run anything larger than his congressional office or the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile. The elite love Ryan because he speaks for more cowardly members of their class; his stridently anti-middle class policies are music to their ears.”
LOL: “I represent a part of America that includes inner cities, rural areas, suburbs and factory towns. Over the years I have seen and heard from a lot from families, from those running small businesses, and from people who are in need. But what I have heard lately troubles me the most. There is something different in their voice and in their words. What I hear from them are diminished dreams, lowered expectations, uncertain futures.” — Rep. Paul Ryan • In prepared remarks the just-tapped vice-presidential candidate plans to give this morning. (more here) via: shortformblog
The Ryan Pick: Vulture / Voucher 2012: “This is Romney’s Palin moment—a desperate Hail Mary pass from a campaign that must be in deeper shit than even we suspect. Here’s an excerpt from an NBC interview with Romney that positively reeks of flop-sweat: “Romney also said in the interview he would like a pledge (of sorts) with Obama that there be no “personal” attack ads. “[O]ur campaign would be—helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon—business or family or taxes or things of that nature.””
“Did he just ask Obama to help his campaign? Yes, he did. Romney’s entire candidacy is premised on his business experience, but now mentioning it is a personal attack. Oh, and taxes. Thank you, Mr. Reid, for driving Romney into making a desperation move.”
