What Ryan Says About Romney
Jesse Jackson

Mitt Romney's choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate is most important for what it says about Mitt Romney. Ryan is a darling of the far right for his "hot rhetoric" about deficits and big government, lionized by pundits for his supposed willingness to put out a bold plan on the budget.

So what does this say about Romney?

This should put an end to all hopes that Romney is a closet Republican business moderate, only adopting extreme positions to appeal to the Republican primary base. With his choice of Ryan, Romney has chosen a running mate who champions the most extreme policies of the tea party right on both social and economic issues. Romney is as right wing as he says he is.

Ryan reinforces Romney's strategy of hiding what is in the potion he's selling. For example, Ryan, like Romney, calls for sustaining the Bush tax cuts, abolishing the estate tax and lowering income and corporate taxes. Both claim they will pay for the tax cuts by "closing loopholes." But neither Romney nor Ryan (in his famous budget) indicates just what loopholes they will close. Why? Because as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reported after making the most favorable assumptions possible, it is "mathematically impossible" for the Romney-Ryan tax plans to avoid handing out a huge tax break to the richest Americans while hiking taxes on 95 percent of the population. That isn't the kind of thing you want to admit.

Romney and Ryan claim that they can raise military spending and preserve Social Security and Medicare (for current retirees) while cutting government spending drastically to pay for their tax cuts. Romney refuses to identify the cuts he would make. Ryan gets kudos for showing he's willing to end Medicare as we know it for those under 55 and drastically cut Medicaid, food stamps and Pell grants -- but he, too, refuses to identify the cuts in domestic programs he would make.

The reason is that if you take military spending, Social Security and Medicare off the table for the next 10 years, then it is certain that you have to make brutal cuts in education, Head Start, infant nutrition, environmental protection and much more. When the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities projected spreading the Ryan cuts evenly across all domestic programs, they found that more than three-fifths of the cuts come from the programs for the most vulnerable.

The cruelest cuts Romney and Ryan would make is in health care.

Not only would they repeal Obamacare and deprive millions of affordable health care, but they would turn Medicare into a voucher program and cut Medicaid and turn it into a block grant for the states. This would do nothing to reduce the soaring costs of health care. Rather it would push more of those costs on the most vulnerable who are least able to afford them: the elderly, the disabled, the dying and state governments already strapped for funds.

The vast majority of Americans oppose the core elements of this plan. Here Ryan is invaluable, for no one is more skilled at earnestly pitching his agenda and concealing the pain it would cause to millions of poor and middle class people. He isn't going to end Medicare; he's going to "save and strengthen" it. He won't gut Pell grants; he'll make them "sustainable." He won't cut 19 million people from Medicaid; he'll keep them from being "forced" into it.

All of this is delivered with a sham declaration of bold leadership: " We won't duck the tough issues; we will lead."

Yeah, only they just won't admit to where they are going, and that is toward cuts so harsh that the Catholic bishops decried the plan for failing to meet society's moral obligations, saying it "will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors."

 

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What Ryan Says About Romney | Politics

 

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