RYAN'S RADICAL, RIDICULOUS, RIP-OFF ROADMAP.... <...>
Today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveils his plan for fiscal year 2012. He promised a truly radical approach to our entire system of government, and he wasn't lying -- Ryan's budget is based on his radical "roadmap" and effectively rewrites the American social contract.
Medicare would be eliminated and replaced with a voucher system. Medicaid would be gutted and sent to the states as a block grant. The Affordable Care Act would be scrapped, tax rates on corporations and the wealthy would be slashed, and all told, Ryan's plan intends to slash roughly $6 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years.
This is madness.
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Those of us hoping the chattering class will recognize the Republican plan as extremist nonsense are likely to be disappointed.
David Brooks gushed today about the radical roadmap.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president's passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.
His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion.... Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He's forcing everybody else to do the same.
Jonathan Zasloff's point-by-point
takedown of the Brooks column is worthwhile, but my biggest fear is that the D.C. establishment will start to assume that Brooks is correct. He's not. Ryan's budget plan is stark raving mad.
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The Ryan rollout begins: All of a sudden, GOP Rep. Paul Ryan and his proposals to remake Medicare and Medicaid as we know them — to be
unveiled by House Republicans today — are everywhere. He has an
Op ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning arguing that our “path to prosperity” is to cut “trillions,” adding: “The threat posed by our monumental debt will damage our country in profound ways, unless we act.”
Ryan is also rolling out a
new Web video that repeats the “path to prosperity” tag line and features him looking very earnest and professorial as he says somberly: “The only solutions will be truly painful for us all...we face a crushing burden of debt which will take down our economy.”
There’s a lot to say about Ryan’s rollout, but the immediate point to be made is that the optics of it have been carefully thought through and are very slickly done. Ryan’s sales pitch will rely on repetition of the phrase “path to prosperity,” on persuading the public that these proposals spread the pain around to everyone, and on creating a profound sense of crisis as a means to selling the public on ideas that are deeply unpopular and ideologically far out of the mainstream.
Indeed, recall that John Boehner
recently spelled out this strategy in an interview, acknowledging that “entitlement” cuts will be unpopular, and that the way to sell them to the public will be to get Americans to “understand how big the problem is.” That’s the key gambit at the heart of Ryan’s rollout.
Did anyone gush and hail Andy Stern's
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=433&topic_id=643769&mesg_id=643769">proposal as courageous?
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