Friday, August 10, 2012

Will Paul Ryan Be Romney's VP Candidate?

One can only hope.  Just for reminders, this is Paul Ryan's budget proposal:
The fact that this budget is shot through with political chickenshit is relevant because this is primarily a political document, a campaign blueprint for the Republicans this fall. (It's also an attempt to establish bargaining position in the upcoming budgetary brawl with the White House. Whether that succeeds, of course, is completely dependent on whether the White House takes any part of this bag of horrors seriously enough as an actual budget to negotiate on it.) As a plan for governing, it's yet another blueprint for economic dystopia from a man who either doesn't know, or doesn't care, what life is actually like for the people who don't buy him $4000 bottles of wine in restaurants far from the Time Out Pub in Janesville. It's a supply-sider's wet dream, in technicolor, with Jenna Jameson serving you popcorn at intermission. Food stamps and Medicaid — which loses $770 billion anyway, according to Ryan's plan — get handed back to the states in the form of block grants which, if our experience with stimulus money and the tobacco settlement are any indication, the states will then use to fund those things that get their governors re-elected, and you may have noticed that healthy poor people are rarely one of those things. There's what amounts to be a flat-tax: two basic income-tax rates, the top being 25 percent. Also the corporate tax rate gets cut to 20 percent. Because he has to pretend that he's visiting this radical restructuring of the American economy on us because of his great concern over The Deficit — and we'll get to that particular canard in a moment — Ryan proposes to close "loopholes", which means that the upper one percent loses some boutoniere money while you lose your mortgage interest deduction, but you and Steve Forbes will be paying the same flat rate, so it's all good!
And there was the usual conservative boilerplate about lazy poor people whose initiative has been blunted by government cheese or something:
"We propose welfare reform, round 2," he added, charging that aid programs were encouraging people to sponge off the government. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people ... into complacency and dependence."
Says a guy who got through high school and college on Social Security survivor's benefits. Can I mention right here that Paul Ryan, while not yet as colossal a dick as Rick Santorum, is working very hard at it?
Yse, indeed.  The poorest Americans have it too easy and the richest have it too hard.  Maybe in Bizarro Land.  I can only imagine seeing a guy making $20 million a year and paying a lower percentage of his income in taxes than most middle class families teaming with this toolbag to blow an election in which the incumbent, if not running against the least likable political candidate oh, wait, Romney did beat Gingrich) and the most blind to reality platform ever , would get blown out of the water.  It used to be only the Democrats who could snatch defeat from what should be an easy victory.  Now the Tea bag led Republican party can top them.

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