GOP All-Out Assault on Working Families

Paul Ryan * Libertarian, Free Market, Milton Friedman, Economic Ideolog - Link

Stars Over Washington - Link 

Never Elect Republicans

The basic economic reality is very simple and everyone in Washington knows it. There is no way that future generations of workers will be poorer than the current one due to benefits like Social Security and Medicare.

But they could end up poorer if we continue to see economic growth shifted to the top. The latter is the result of the corruption of politics in Washington. And at the moment, Mr. Ryan is the poster boy for that corruption.

 

 

 American Progress Action - Koch Brothers Report * pdf

Congressman Paul Ryan is the new darling of both the Republican Party and the major media outlets. He has put forward bold plans for dismantling Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congressman Ryan is prepared to tell tens of millions of workers that they can no longer count on a secure retirement and decent health care in their old age. In Washington policy circles, this passes for courage.

Outside of Washington, people have a different conception of bravery. After all, over the last three decades the policies crafted in Washington have led to the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of the population has seen is share of national income increase by close to 10 percentage points. This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as Representative Ryan might say, $90 trillion over the next 75 years. That's almost $300,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

This upward redistribution creates the real possibility that many of our children will be poorer than we are. ~ by Dean Baker,  co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research 

 
The New Yorker:August 2012

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.

Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air yesterday. This is what he had to say about Mitt Romney:

And if Romney were to be elected president, I think this would be an unusual presidency in that it would be led from Congress. You know, one quote I didn't include in the piece but I think is instructive is there's this phrase you hear in Washington from some Republicans and some conservative activists that we don't really want a president with a whole lot of ideas. We know what we want to do, we being House Republicans. We just want a president who's almost like an auto-pen. We'll pass the legislation, send it to the White House, and it will be signed. Now granted, Mitt Romney may have a thing or two to say about that, but that's the - that is the feeling, that is the sentiment among the very conservative members of the Republican class who were elected in 2010.

Ryan's biography that Lizza expanded upon in his interview with Terry Gross.


First, Ryan didn't need the Social Security benefits from when his father died. He used them to pay for his private college tuition.

He grew up quite - I don't want to say well-to-do, but he was OK. And in fact, you know, his - the Social Security benefits from his father, he didn't actually have to live off of them. You know, he saved them, and he used the money when he went off to college. You know, other people who are less well-off might have to live on that money.

Second, he's never really worked in the private sector:

Yeah. It's one of the central ironies in his career, that from his internship in college, working for a Republican senator, right up until the present day, his only private sector experience is a very brief period when he was on the doorstep of running for Congress, of returning to Janesville, Wisconsin, returning from Washington and working as what he described as a marketing consultant for his family's construction company. Frankly, I say in the piece that this was, you know, clearly just a bit of resume padding so he could have some, you know some small business qualification to identify with, But it was a very, very brief period. And I don't know for '97 but 1998, when he was running for Congress, he in his financial disclosure he only listed $1,800 in income coming from that company. So basically no private sector experience outside of summer jobs in high school and college presumably, although I'm not 100 percent sure about that. But from high school till the present day.

Ryan's family got rich from construction work building the Eisenhower Interstate System.