Ryan's Paymasters Will Never Let Him Give Up Trying To Enslave Ordinary Americans-- Really

Wednesday the House Budget Committee approved Paul Ryan's latest Ayn Rand Budget, which cuts trillions in healthcare spending and repeals the Affordable Care Act. "His budget," reports Hospital CFO, "would make significant changes to Medicare, reducing program spending by $129 billion over the next 10 years. Starting in 2012, it would convert Medicare to a premium support program, under which beneficiaries would receive funds from the government with which they could purchase either traditional Medicare coverage or private health plans." A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan policy organization, reports that "Some 69% of the cuts in House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s new budget would come from programs that serve people of limited means." While Ryan claims to want to strengthen Medicare, the CBPP report said $2.7 trillion of the cuts will come from Medicaid and at least 40 million Americans would become uninsured by 2024. None of the popular parts of the Affordable Care Act would survive the Republicans' meat cleaver. He's says they're too expensive and have got to go.

The committee vote to approve Ryan's drastic budget was 22-16. All the Republicans voted for it and all the Democrats voted against it. Several Republicans not on the committee said they will vote against it next week when the full House takes it up. Walter Jones (R-NC) said he will oppose any budget with foreign aid in it and is one of the few Republicans who agrees with the Democrats that Ryan's scheme to convert Medicare into a partially privatized insurance system would be a catastrophe for American seniors. Other likely Republican "no" votes next week include Jack Kingston (R-GA), Justin Amash (R-MI), Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), Raúl Labrador (R-ID), Tom Massie (R-KY), and Rick Crawford (R-AR). These are the Republicans on the Budget Committee"

• Paul Ryan (WI-01), Chairman
• Tom Price (GA-06), Vice-Chairman
• Scott Garrett (NJ-05)
• John Campbell (CA-45)
• Ken Calvert (CA-42)
• Tom Cole (OK-04)
• Tom McClintock (CA-04)
• James Lankford (OK-05)
• Diane Black (TN-06)
• Reid Ribble (WI-08)
• Bill Flores (TX-17)
• Todd Rokita (IN-04)
• Rob Woodall (GA-07)
• Marsha Blackburn (TN-07)
• Alan Nunnelee (MS-01)
• Scott Rigell (VA-02)
• Vicky Hartzler (MO-04)
• Jackie Walorski (IN-02)
• Luke Messer (IN-06)
• Tom Rice (SC-07)
• Roger Williams (TX-25)
• Sean Duffy (WI-07)

Meanwhile, House Democrats have been furious about Ryan's slash-and-burn Austerity approach to programs that provide services and benefits to the middle class and those least able to afford the cuts. Barbara Lee (D-CA) pointed out yesterday was the 46th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, and that Ryan's Godless budget cuts are “exactly the opposite of what Dr. King stood for.” Ryan's adolescent ideas, straight from his favorite school girl Ayn Rand novel, have already failed in Europe; he wants to implement them here anyway. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who would become Budget Chairman if Nancy Pelosi removed Steve Israel as head of the DCCC and allowed the Democrats to win back the House in November, said that the Ryan cuts approved by the Republicans on the committee "tells the American public exactly what Republicans in Congress would do to the country if they have the power to impose their will."

"It's the budget that ransacks the future of America's children," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said during a press briefing in the Capitol. "Education is the best investment that a person, a parent, a country can make in its future... This is key to employment, to growth, to innovation and for the success of our economy.

"I view the Ryan budget as an ideological manifesto," she added.

Other Democrats piled on.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said the Ryan plan would cut $18 billion in early education programs, $89 billion in K-12 programs and $205 billion in higher education initiatives over the next decade, versus the levels established by December's budget deal between Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA).

Rep. George Miller (D-CA), ranking member of the Education and Labor Committee, said the GOP budget would eliminate more than 170,000 spots for early education benefits-- "and it gets worse every year after that," he added.

"These are the exact children that we know, if they have an opportunity in early childhood education, they will do much better in school, they're more likely to graduate, they're more likely to get a job, they're less likely to go to jail and they're more likely to earn a higher income than children who don't get that opportunity," Miller said.

"Clearly they [Republicans] don't care about these children."

President Obama doesn't think so either. In his weekly address to the nation this morning, he contrasted his own budget with the Ryan document. "[T]he budget I sent Congress earlier this year," he said, "is built on the idea of opportunity for all. It will grow the middle class and shrink the deficits we’ve already cut in half since I took office. It’s an opportunity agenda with four goals. Number one is creating more good jobs that pay good wages. Number two is training more Americans with the skills to fill those jobs. Number three is guaranteeing every child access to a great education. And number four is making work pay-- with wages you can live on, savings you can retire on, and health care that’s there for you when you need it." He has a very different view of what Ryan presented on April Fool's Day.

This week, the Republicans in Congress put forward a very different budget. And it does just the opposite: it shrinks opportunity and makes it harder for Americans who work hard to get ahead.

The Republican budget begins by handing out massive tax cuts to households making more than $1 million a year. Then, to keep from blowing a hole in the deficit, they’d have to raise taxes on middle-class families with kids. Next, their budget forces deep cuts to investments that help our economy create jobs, like education and scientific research.

Now, they won’t tell you where these cuts will fall. But compared to my budget, if they cut everything evenly, then within a few years, about 170,000 kids will be cut from early education programs. About 200,000 new mothers and kids will be cut off from programs to help them get healthy food. Schools across the country will lose funding that supports 21,000 special education teachers. And if they want to make smaller cuts to one of these areas, that means larger cuts in others.

Unsurprisingly, the Republican budget also tries to repeal the Affordable Care Act-- even though that would take away health coverage from the more than seven million Americans who’ve done the responsible thing and signed up to buy health insurance. And for good measure, their budget guts the rules we put in place to protect the middle class from another financial crisis like the one we’ve had to fight so hard to recover from.

Policies that benefit a fortunate few while making it harder for working Americans to succeed are not what we need right now. Our economy doesn’t grow best from the top-down; it grows best from the middle-out.  That’s what my opportunity agenda does-- and it’s what I’ll keep fighting for.

Did you know Blue America has a special page set up for the sole purpose of defeating Paul Ryan. This isn't to "send him a message" by electing some Blue Dog with values not so different from his in some backward red district. This page is dedicated to defeating him and replacing him with a progressive Democrat, Rob Zerban. Rob on Ryan's budget: "Ryan and his Republican colleagues fail to honestly account for their own policies. Free trade deals that have hollowed out our manufacturing industry, giveaways to Wall Street that have let billionaires accumulate all the benefits of our economy-- these are the things that cause poverty, not food stamps or early education programs. I agree with the New York Times that Ryan's report distorts the facts and that his ideas are ‘small and tired.' As the Times says, ‘most successful programs, including the (earned income) tax credit, Medicaid and food stamps, have been those that are carefully designed, properly managed and well-financed.’ I am a shining example of how smart programs can work. My single mother raised us in poverty, and we needed federal nutrition programs to have enough to eat. I needed Pell Grants and Stafford Loans to go to college, but I used all that help to get an education, and then build two successful businesses and employ dozens of people. The truth is that many of these programs are extremely successful, but years of budget cuts, free trade deals, refusal to increase the minimum wage, and giveaways to Wall Street resulted in the Great Recession and driven more and more people into poverty.”

The End of Paul Ryan, Economic Policy Wonk!

I heard The Nation's John Nichols on Sly's afternoon radio show on 93.7 FM yesterday extolling a new study that completely destroys Paul Ryan's argument that because of our troublesome debt to GDP ratio, the country could fall at any time. Fear mongering much?

Nichols thought it was a shame this important story came out at a time when so many huge stories were breaking, because this essentially reverses and changes the nations economic equation. After contributing $15 to save The Nation, I purged the guilt I would normally feel posting so much of Nichols article. You can always read the whole article with the link above:

Paul Ryan’s numbers are wrong. Really wrong. As in: his most urgent argument on behalf of painful cuts to federal programs and the denial of new funding for job creation, education, healthcare and infrastructure repair is based on a coding error.

The paper the House Budget Committee chairman has used as the intellectual and statistical underpinning for his austerity agenda has been significantly discredited by the revelation that essential data was excluded from the study, leading "to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth."

The Harvard professors who produced the paper—which Ryan cited as recently as last month—haveacknowledged their mathematical error.

Now, the question is whether Ryan and conservative proponents of austerity will acknowledge that they have built their arguments on a false premise. Ryan positioned himself as an economic "Paul Revere," warning that public debt was stalling out the US economy. This notion was always questioned by savvy economists, such as Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker. But Ryan went all in … preaching an economic gospel based on his absolute certainty that when a country’s debt level tops 90 percent of its gross domestic product, it’s economy will decline and crisis will ensue … how the US economy was heading toward a apocalyptic "tipping point." Ryan has argued that any “pain” suffered by working Americans—in the form of restructurings of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, post office closures and cuts to state and local aid—was necessary in order to avoid an economic meltdown.

But the 90 percent threshold is a false precipice based on a false premise. In a new paper, "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst successfully replicate the results … they reached out to Reinhart and Rogoff … to see how Reinhart and Rogoff's data was constructed … First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries.

When they included all the data from all the years and all the countries, the average growth rate of nations with a 90 per cent debt load does not decline by 0.1 percent … Rather, the growth rate is a positive 2.2 per cent. Reinhart acknowledged to the CBC News business reporting team that “Herndon, Ash and Pollin have written a useful paper, finding a significant mistake in one of our figures.”

Ryan must either alter course or confirm the darkest assessments from his critics: that he cribs data from academics not with an eye for accuracy but with a determination to advance his austerity agenda at any cost. 

Paul Ryan Pushing For Tax Hikes On The Middle-Class

Politiscoop Excerpt: (Sept. 2011)
MADISON-Paul Ryan, author of the plan to end Medicare, went on Fox News this weekend to advocate for tax hikes on the middle class.

Ryan, proponent of tax cuts for billionaires, opposes payroll tax cuts for middle class workers and told his Fox News cheerleaders that it was "class warfare" to suggest his advocacy for only the richest Americans was unfair.

Huff Post Excerpt:
(Sept. 2011)
He also said he opposes the president's proposal to require millionaires to pay the same tax rate as the middle class, known as the Buffett plan. "Class warfare might make for good politics, but it makes for rotten economics," Ryan said.

Quote
"If Paul Ryan wants to claim class warfare, we certainly know which class he's signed up to serve." -- Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate

Paul Ryan-- A Career Built On A Tissue Of Lies By And For The One Percent

Let them eat cake pops

I'm not sure if it was Abby Melamed or Bonnie Simmons, but one of them told me when I was working at KSAN that the reason for playlists is because on the very day that a dj got completely sick of hearing a song he had played a gazillion times... well, on that day, the audience was hearing it for the very first time. The Republicans "get" that much better than the Democrats and they repeat their mindless and simplistic talking points ad nauseum, while progressives would rather debate complex, lofty principles... that don't fit on bumper stickers. We've been writing about the danger of Paul Ryan for 4 long years. Yesterday, though, Paul Rosenberg, did a searing essay on the role of lies in Ryan's career that every DWT reader should take a look at. Like any competent look at Ryan, it starts with the premise that he's a robotic pawn of the one percent and that without an ability to manipulate a lazy media with almost no ability for critical thought he would have no career. Rosenberg writes that "Last week, in an act of profound deception, the American 'fact-checking' organisation, PolitiFact, chose a true statement as its 'Lie of the Year.'" He goes on to show how misguided PolitFact is with this assertion that "Ryan's plan 'is necessary because of the programme's soaring costs.' In fact, the problem isn't Medicare per se, it's the entire cost structure of American medicine as a whole, which is roughly twice the per capita cost of healthcare spending in other advanced countries-- even those that have 50 per cent more people aged 65+ than the US has." 

Indeed, as Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson explained just over a year ago, in their paper "A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession," all of the US long-term federal debt is due to just three oligopoly sectors: the military-industrial complex (the backbone of empire, with bases all around the world and almost half the world's military spending), the medical-industrial complex (with twice the per capita costs of other systems), and the financial sector (which has recently cost trillions of dollars in lost wealth and economic activity).

All three of these are enormous cash cows for the one per cent, and equally enormous cost-centres for the 99 per cent. Without the costs imposed by lack of competition, regulation and accountability in these sectors, the US would have no long-term debt problem. We would be paying it down, rather than running it up.

This connects with yet another Paul Ryan "pants on fire" lie: that his budget plan is what it claims to be-- a deficit reduction plan. It's not. In the next decade-- the maximum time-frame in which budget projections are normally done-- the Ryan Plan produces just $55bn in deficit reduction over the next 10 years, according to an analysis from the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities. This is because $4.2tn in tax cuts (heavily tilted toward the rich) almost entirely offsets $4.3tn in spending cuts (largely targeting low- and middle-income Americans). 

Reductions in healthcare spending from ending Medicare kick in just after that, and-- as Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted on his blog last April, "spending on everything other than healthcare and Social Security… is projected to fall in half as a share of GDP in just 10 years, and eventually to fall to levels comparable to those during the Coolidge administration-- even as the US presumably maintains a post-isolationism-level military force."

In short, the Ryan Plan is really an extreme (and extremely unrealistic) government-slashing plan. That is its goal and purpose. Calling it a deficit-reduction plan is a pants-on-fire lie, which PolitiFact would surely recognise as such, if it were actually in the fact-checking business, as it misleadingly claims to be. In sharp contrast, it should be noted, the Congressional Progressive Caucus "People's Budget" plan would balance the budget by 2022, with a $31bn surplus. But there's a bipartisan one per cent consensus to utterly ignore it, as if it did not even exist as a possibility, much less a publicly offered plan.

Instead of Ferguson and Johnson's realistic analysis of special interest waste, the bipartisan one per cent conventional wisdom in Washington is exactly the opposite: the problem is "wasteful government spending" on programmes that benefit the vast majority of the American people: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, not to mention investments in infrastructure, education, developing green energy, etc. This basic obfuscation and inversion of the politics of public debt is best thought of not as a lie-- a discrete, isolated speech act-- but as a fraud-- a continuous, ongoing practice to deceive, which is all about misleading people with half-truths, rather than outright lying to them. After all, outright lies can attract unwanted, sharply-focused negative attention. Far better to keep things far blurrier, with half-truths that take forever to analyse and argue.

PolitiFact's "lie of the year" this year is just one more part of that fraud. Drastic cuts to Medicare are not needed. A drastic expansion, to include all Americans of all ages, would be far more cost-effective for bringing the US' healthcare costs in line with the rest of the advanced industrial world. But that's the last thing that the one per cent special interests in Washington want. They don't even want you to consider that possibility. And PolitiFact is here to help them with that, presenting broadly-shared one per cent opinions as if they were facts, and not even realising what it is doing in the process.

...If Americans cannot cast off lies that directly steal money from their own pockets, and steal their children's future from them, what chance is there confronting lies that only harm them indirectly? What chance is there with lies told in their name? With lies purportedly told in their interest? Lies told for their own benefit? What chance is there to stop being, at bottom, a people of the lie? What chance to once more become a people of the dream?

Welcome to Paul Ryan's crabbed little world-- a world he wants to impose on your children, whose role is serfdom or indentured servitude. It's Mitt Romney's world as well, of course. A lot needs to be done to stop that-- starting this year with replacing Ryan with Rob Zerban. You can help do that by contributing $5 or $10 to Zerban's campaign at that link. To read the rest of this post-- it's pretty long-- go to the original at DownWithTyranny.

Wyden Isn't The Only Democrat Who Wants To Help Paul Ryan Kill Medicare-- Blue Dogs Are Salivating

Last week we saw how Wisconsin Democrat Rob Zerban pushed back against Ron Wyden's harebrained scheme of working with Paul Ryan to destroy Medicare. Obviously Wyden isn't the only bad Democrat in Congress. Many of the worst conservative handmaidens of the 1%-- the Blue Dogs and the New Dems (essentially Blue Dogs without the KKK robes and the anti-gay/anti-Choice fanaticism)-- are quietly lining up behind Wyden and Ryan in the push for a transpartisan death blow against the New Deal and the middle class.

Shamus Cooke guessed Christmas Day would be as good a time as any to expose this unholy alliance.

Politicians are attacking Medicare and Medicaid on all sides--Democrats and Republicans alike. Obama's national health care bill will slash hundreds of billions from Medicare over the next decade, an act supported by so-called "progressive" Democrats. Soon after this "victory" Obama created the Super Committee to balance the budget, which included automatic "triggers"-- if no decision was reached-- that are now slated to cut $600 billion more from Medicare. 



On a state-by-state basis, Medicaid-- a program that provides health care to the poor-- is being cut in virtually every state, where they are using their manufactured budget crises as an excuse. This under-funding of Medicaid has created a lack of doctors for patients, according to USAToday: 



"With a shortage of doctors...[Medicaid] patients have little choice but to use hospital emergency rooms for more routine care." (July 5th, 2011).



But it gets worse. Now, "long term solutions" are being sought. After critically wounding the system with disfiguring cuts, Medicare's plug is about to be pulled. Different privatization plans have been put forth that would instantly kill Medicare. One such plan was recently announced by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, which, if enacted, would deliver a deathblow to Medicare as we know it. Some commentators have wrongly dismissed Wyden as a "crackpot" risking political suicide; in fact, Wyden is a cautious, "pragmatic" politician, i.e. he blindly follows party leaders and their corporate bosses.



The Wyden-Ryan plan has deep roots not only amongst Republicans, but also Blue Dog Democrats and the New Democrat Coalition-- the powerful congressional caucuses that actually run the Democratic Party. These are the people that create the right-wing economic policies that President Obama has been pursuing since his election victory-- thus Obama's ability to work in a bi-partisan manner with the Republican Party. The Wall Street Journal commented on Obama's right-wing health care plan:



“To listen to President Obama and his closest Democratic allies, you’d think John McCain had won the election and their bill had been drafted by Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn and the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute [a right wing think tank].” (February 26, 2010).



By attaching his name to Paul Ryan (the anti-Medicare crusader), Wyden is now revealing the ultra-right, pro-corporate trajectory of the Democratic Party leadership. And although the White House has spoken against the bill, Obama's own health care reform bill created the framework now copied by the Wyden-Paul plan.



Why does the Wyden-Ryan plan amount to privatization? A brief glance at the recent history of Medicare is necessary to explain. 



Medicare was once dominated by the federal government, where, as a result, administrative costs were low and quality was high. In the 1990's Medicare patients were given an option to have their Medicare services performed by private providers, who were now able to profit off Medicare by charging extra fees for extra services, which they added to the basic amount of funds received via Medicare.



The reason that people often chose private providers was that Medicare funding was being cut and consequently, less services were being offered under traditional Medicare. For those who could afford it, private providers became preferred, since people could then purchase the services they needed but were not offered under traditional Medicare. This "option" created the beginning of a two-tier system of Medicare, opening the door for the systems fracturing.



The Wyden-Ryan plan would crack the nut wide open. But instead of saying privatization, a dirty word, "premium support" is used instead, a sterile sounding term with nasty consequences. It essentially means that each Medicare patient will receive a set amount of money for their Medicare that they can use to "shop" for their insurance. This would be the first time that Medicare spending would be capped, and the rate of growth of this capped fund would not match the rate of growth of health care prices. Once you've accepted the cap, the cap can be continually lowered by Congress or not raised to keep pace with inflation.



Instead of reducing Medicare costs by going after profit-hungry pharmaceutical corporations, patients will have their services curtailed via the cap.



The "choices" offered under the Wyden-Ryan will fully insert the profit motive into the national health care program: Medicare patients with poor health or chronic conditions would find that most private plans are closed to them, since it's unprofitable to actually offer the necessary, varied treatments for these patients. Thus, Medicare participants in poor health would remain in traditional Medicare, where costs would rise as more chronic patients joined and healthier patients fled to cheaper plans that allowed only healthy people. Richer patients would also flee to private plans for another reason: Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals are being continually lowered, doctors would naturally refuse to take Medicare patients as they now refuse to take Medicaid patients.



The subsequent higher costs of traditional Medicare would then push up premium prices, co-payments, and deductibles, where very soon the "public option" of Medicare would be unrecognizable to its ancestor. The poor and those with chronic conditions would be legally discriminated against, since private companies are allowed to do so; a once proud public program will have been mutilated and rendered unusable, i.e. it will have been privatized. 



Medicare was first hijacked by the health care corporations in the 90's with the introduction of Medicare Part C, the original "option" to have privately run Medicare; and because Part C was privately controlled, it received 14 percent more money in inflated payments than did traditional Medicare patients (so that patients would be pushed into the program while corporations could turn a profit).



Later, Medicare Part D was designed and implemented by these same health care corporations to boost profits (a gift from President Bush Jr.). It thus became common for private companies to have their hand in the Medicare honey jar.



How is profit made in the health care business from Medicare? These companies get a set amount of money from the federal government, and if they provide less health care service than what they are paid, they turn a profit. They also profit by providing additional, unneeded services at inflated costs. The Government Accountability Office reported that in 2006, the private plans earned profits of 6.6 percent while having much higher administrative costs than traditional Medicare. 



By 2030 Medicare is expected to enroll 78 million people. Medicaid already provides health care to over 50 million Americans. The number of uninsured Americans stands at 50 million and is rising fast. Tens of millions of more Americans cannot afford the health care plans they are currently in, and millions more would prefer quality health care plans, not the ones they actually have. 



Hundreds of millions of Americans thus have a common interest in health care, yet the above attacks on health care continue while costs continue to rise.



It makes sense that Americans should unite in a single health care constituency. Medicare cannot be defended by only current Medicare recipients; nor can Medicaid be saved by current benefactors. In order to unite all working Americans into a powerful coalition, Medicare for All should be demanded, so that all Americans will see their interests reflected in the fight. Few issues so directly affect so many people, but to expand the fight still further, a coalition could be formed that demands jobs, peace, and education, the other "big" issues that-- when put together-- directly affect nearly every single working person.



The raw material for such a coalition already exists. If the labor and Occupy Movements unite to organize massive, ongoing demonstrations for these basic demands, the potential for a mass movement will have been realized. The majority of Americans would find common cause with such a movement, and after seeing masses of people in the streets, will believe that the fight can be won.

Like Social Security, Medicare is a self-funding program that can be easily preserved by raising taxes on the richest Americans and corporations. Taxing the rich can also help create a national jobs program, save public education and other vital social services, while also helping to galvanize such a movement.

Politicians are using the national and state budget crises to implement drastic austerity measures-- destroying public jobs and services from libraries and health care to roads and education. In Europe the fight against austerity has aroused the entire working populations of several countries, including Greece, England, Italy and Spain. The working people of the U.S. are facing the same austerity crisis and need to unite in the European fashion.

Want to fight back? You can help retire Paul Ryan here and help make the Blue Dog coalition extinct here; and you can send a message to the Democratic Party here. The DCCC and the Democratic Party establishment is in a quiet but deadly war against actual progressives and fully supporting conservative candidates who buy into the Wyden-Ryan plan. If you're not seeing Democratic candidates vowing to join the Progressive Caucus, you're seeing Democrats unwilling to stand up and fight for the New Deal. This week old-line Democratic establishment hack Walter Mondale endorsed anti-labor, reactionary and corrupt ex-Albuquerque Mayor Marty Chavez for Congress against progressive state Senator Eric Griego, something we've been warning about since last spring. The DCCC is quietly lining up conservative candidates to run against the best progressives working to represent working families in Congress. Is the DCCC as toxic for America as the Republicans? I'll leave that for you to decide.

Tea Party Induced Stock Market Crash A Paul Ryan Downgrade

Give "Capper" at Cognitive Dissidence the credit through all the other distractions for noticing the troubling relationship between the recent Tea Party/S&P driven stock market dive and Paul Ryan's scheme to shift SS payroll taxes to the highly volatile investment markets. That the markets have proven to be susceptible to congressional brinksmanship and political posturing makes it even less the infallible pillar of trust that is crucial to its existence.

Cognitive Dissidence Excerpt:

You will remember that Ryan, the Republicans' shining star, has, as a key part of his budget from hell, privatizing Social Security and allowing people to invest it in the stock market themselves [...]Even the bullheaded Ryan has to realize that only the extreme lunatic fringe would want to invest their retirement into the market right now. Read more here.

Or invest even a year or two ago. That's twice in the past three years and three times over the past ten years that stock market volatility has eaten away at modest gains. These are precisely the economic times Social Security was meant to protect vulnerable seniors from.

If I recall accurately here, Ryan's Social Security proposal guarantees recipients a return equivalent to a minimum standard SS benefit which means that during times like these, not only would participants lose hard-earned dollars to the profit-takers on Wall Street but government will also have to go into more debt and borrow to restore minimum guaranteed benefits. Under this scenario, Ryan's proposal transforms Social Security into a generous subsidy for private investment firms. But with losses like these, its participants would find themselves enrolled in little more than a welfare program.

The GOP Will Run On Ryan's Kill Medicare/Austerity Platform After All

Here's a reason for this!

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousands words and the one above, should get across the point we're making this morning. Wednesday night, Sioban Hughes, writing for the Dow Jones Newswires, hit the transom with these points from an interview Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor did in that day's Wall Street Journal, the parent company:

--Cantor: Government promises 'aren't going to be kept for many'

--Cantor: Younger Americans will have to adjust

--Cantor: Americans will see current cutbacks as paring back government waste

Republicans will continue a push to overhaul programs such as Medicare, saying in an interview that "promises have been made that frankly are not going to be kept for many" and that younger Americans will have to adjust.

"What we have to be, I think, focused on is truth in budgeting here," Cantor told the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal. He said "the better way" for Americans is to "get the fiscal house in order" and "come to grips with the fact that promises have been made that frankly are not going to be kept for many."

His comments suggest that Republicans are committed to overhauling entitlement programs such as Medicare even after President Barack Obama signed into law a debt package under which Medicare recipients weren't hit with direct cuts. Congress left Medicare recipients untouched directly in order to win enough Democratic votes for the debt package to become law.

But Republicans could make a new push to cut back on Medicare as the debt-reduction deal is implemented. The law initially provides for $917 billion in spending cuts over a decade, but a bipartisan committee of lawmakers must come up with a proposal by Nov. 23 to find an additional $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. The panel's members--half of whom will be Republican lawmakers-- could try again to change Medicare.

"When we came out with our budget, we said, look, let's at least put people on notice, but preserve those who are 55 and older," Cantor said, referring to a Republican-written budget plan that would turn Medicare, now a fee-for-service program, into a program that subsidizes private health insurance. "The rest of us have got ample time to try and plan our lives so that we can adjust to reality here when you look at the numbers. Again the math doesn't lie."

So... voters completely rejected Paul Ryan's plan to kill Medicare-- you'll recall the election of Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York's mostly deeply red district (a district where Obama only managed to win 46%, his worst showing in the state)-- but the Ryan model is still what the GOP wants to hang its hat on going forward.

Or do they? Boehner and Cantor do. Ryan does. But their troops in the field? Tuesday Wisconsin state Senator Alberta Darling, not just a firm ally of Scott Walker's and the author of some of his most notorious anti-family legislation but a loud advocate for the Ryan budget, will be facing the voters in her recall election. She was considered a shoo-in... before she adopted Ryan's kill Medicare talking points. Wednesday she seemed to back away. Questioned by journalists in Milwaukee, Darling, whose polling has been trending down, said she now doesn't know enough of the details of Ryan's plan to endorse it-- though she already did-- but that she supports his "fiscal goals."

This is going to be the great debate that rages between now and 2012. Since Obama is totally conflicted and tied in knots, congressional Democrats have to make their own case that they are NOT the party of right-wing Austerity. Democrats are doing it quite well in Wisconsin. Tuesday will tell us a lot about how the rest of this election cycle plays out.