The GOP — Garbage In, Garbage Out

From “Paul Ryan’s budget:  Social engineering with a side of deficit reduction,” Ezra Klein, Washington Post:

“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. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.”

“The problem is that these ideas are not, on their own, popular.  In fact, they’re deeply unpopular, and considered quite radical.  That’s why Newt Gingrich rejected Ryan’s initial budget as ‘right-wing social engineering’….  But presented on their own, Ryan’s plans scare people.

What Ryan has found is that the way they’ll get a hearing is if they’re presented as necessary, prudent measures to forestall an even more dramatic debt crisis.

“But whether these are good or bad ideas, they are not, under any reasonable definition of the term, necessary ideas.”

We’ve got Paul Ryan using phony scare tactics on the budget, and Rand Paul doing the same on the drones.  When I think of the GOP today, I think, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  We have neither a debt nor a drone crisis.  How can we solve  our real problems when one party is so focused on imaginary ones?

Health Care? Fuhgeddaboudit.

So Paul Ryan would balance the budget in ten years.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that 70% of the cuts he makes to accomplish that goal are from health care.  Because, you know, we’ve got to keep producing all those weapon systems that the military says it doesn’t need.  We have to be prepared to fight World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror.

Besides repealing Obamacare, Ryan would slash Medicaid, shifting much more of the burden to the states, and hand out Medicare vouchers to seniors to go find health insurance, while raising the eligibility age two years.

Isn’t this what we all voted against in November?  Isn’t he what we all voted against in November?

Take two aspirin and don’t call him in the morning, America.

Hey, Jindal, Brown Called and They Want Their Diploma Back

GOP Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of the 2016 hopefuls, has a degree in biology from Brown University and was a Rhodes Scholar.

Yet, even with his Ivy League education and Oxford experience, he signed the Orwellian “Louisiana Science Education Act,” which in fact has nothing whatever to do with science, but brought creationism to the state’s biology classes.

He also lets state vouchers be used for tuition at bible-based private schools, where kids are taught that The Flintstones is history, not a cartoon.

Um, Bobby, you’re looking kind of cartoonish yourself.

Lyin’ Ryan

From “Facts Took a Beating In Ryan’s Speech,” Michael Cooper, NYT:

“But an interesting question unfolding is whether there is a tipping point at which a candidate becomes so associated with falsehoods that it becomes part of his public persona — which hampered Vice President Al Gore during his run for president in 2000, when his misstatements on the campaign trail were used to stoke the perception that he could not be trusted in general.

“In the case of Mr. Ryan’s speech, the jury is still out.  It was received rapturously by the Republican Party faithful, but his many questionable assertions ensured that much of the analysis on Thursday focused on his accuracy more than his acumen.”

I think Ryan, who was a media favorite even among those who didn’t agree with his budget and his Medicare vouchers, has hurt himself badly.  He’s perceived differently and more warily now, and it will be reflected in the reporting and punditry about him.