Unless you’ve been living under a blanket, or have a life, you’re well aware that House Speaker Paul Ryan just had a meeting with Republican presidential nominee to be Donald Trump. Virtually everything about the Republican Party is a joke these days—most of them, of course, very unfunny. The biggest, and least funny is the fact that Trump is the party’s nominee, but the second biggest, and, this time, fairly funny, is the notion that Paul Ryan is a “policy wonk” who earnestly wants to do good, at least as he sees the good.
IMHFO, as we say on the web, nine tenths of Ryan’s notoriety hangs on his youthful good looks, rather than what’s (supposedly) in his head. Ryan is, after all, younger and better looking than most TV newscasters. Years ago, Ryan Lizza, writing in the New Yorker, sighed over Paulie—“tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair”1, and, five years later, Paulie’s press hasn’t changed one bit.
The press never tires of telling us how dedicated Paulie is to “reforming entitlements”. Folks, here’s the story on Paulie’s dedication, which I have told more than once. Writing back in 2013, during the Republican-engineered shut down, I opined the following:
“Let’s recall that Ryan’s original budget called for no cuts at all, ever, to Social Security, and no cuts to Medicare benefits ever for anyone 55 or over, while at the same time counting on the Medicare savings envisioned by the Affordable Care Act [which he voted against]. When Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, the Medicare savings were discarded, and instead seniors were assured that there would be no cuts, ever, to their benefits—the same thing the Tea Party said while riding to victory in 2010. After the election, Ryan bragged about how seniors had supported the Romney-Ryan ticket. Then he put the ACA savings back in his brand new budget, and then (of course) also voted against the ACA. How many times are you going to eat that cake, Paulie?
“Earlier this year, the Republicans in the House of Representatives approved the spending targets set by Ryan’s new budget—no cuts to entitlements, “restored” spending for defense, to make up for sequestered funds, and deep cuts in domestic discretionary spending. But when it came time to vote on actual appropriations bills to make those cuts, the House leadership didn’t even bring the bills to the floor, because they knew they couldn’t pass them. Which is the real reason we had the government shutdown in the first place.
“Despite all their grand talk, the Tea Party does not want a grand bargain, because that would involve making actual cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and the geezer vote is their ace in the hole. What they really want to do is cut spending on the poor, and no one else. House Republicans did vote to split the old “farm” bill into two pieces, one for farm subsidies and one for Food Stamps, cutting Food Stamps by 10 percent while providing full funding for crop insurance subsidies for millionaires. And Ryan voted with them on this one.”
Paul Ryan wants to balance the budget by cutting revenues (massive tax cuts for the rich), while increasing expenditures (massive increases for defense), counter-balancing all of this entirely unnecessary fiscal irresponsibility by massive cuts in discretionary domestic spending, which, for Republicans, means Medicaid and Food Stamps and anything else that smacks of “welfare”. Paul Ryan is a liar and a fraud and a puff of wavy dark hair, and nothing more.
- Yes, a “puff” of wavy dark hair. Everything that sucks about the New Yorker is in that sentence. ↩︎
