So, you heard Mitt Romney say: “for people 55 years of age and older, there’s no change.” You won’t like the translation.
Under the Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare, if you are younger than age 55, let’s say 54, and Romney-Ryan are elected to office, you will see a Medicare that is completely different from the one that your parents and grandparents enjoyed. It will be a voucherized plan, entailing fewer benefits and much higher costs to the beneficiaries.
Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman on Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, emphasis mine:
In the first decade, the big things are (i) conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, with much lower funding than projected under current law and (ii) sharp cuts in top tax rates and corporate taxes.
Is this a deficit-reduction program? Not on the face of it: it’s basically a tradeoff of reduced aid to the poor for reduced taxes on the rich, with the net effect of the specific proposals being to increase, not reduce, the deficit.
A new Obama Campaign ad touches on some of the least savory aspects of the Paul Ryan Plan. Watch:
On Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as a running mate, I agree completely with what Bob Cesca said:
If Sarah Palin represents the most irresponsible decision John McCain and the Republican Party had ever made, the selection of Paul Ryan seems like a no-brainer smart choice for Mitt Romney.
The press is deferential to Ryan because he comports himself as a very serious budget wonk (we all know he’s an Ayn Rand crackpot who’s all too willing to genuflect to Glenn Beck et al); he’s another “central casting” Republican presidential stereotype who will ultimately run circles around Romney on the campaign trail unlike, say, Chris Christie who probably wouldn’t have survived the rigors of a national campaign; and he hails from a swing state.
Credit where credit is due, Romney could’ve picked a fire-eater like Santorum, Gingrich or Christie and he went with someone who is absolutely the opposite of Sarah Palin. Paul Ryan is wrong on everything, but he’s not a moron.
All that said, Ryan’s influence on a would-be Romney White House would be utterly disastrous for the economy and the instantaneous austerity measures, along with the dismantling of the Obama agenda, would spell doom for millions of working and middle class Americans. On the other side of a four-to-eight year Romney term will be a privatized Medicare, massive deficits from radical tax cuts for the rich, and an economic depression without any real ability for the government to inject emergency cash into the economy.
But if Romney really wants to win this thing, he made the right choice. For him and the Republicans. The rest of us will be screwed a thousand different ways.
Going forward, we absolutely must tie the Ryan Plan and the Ryan Budget around the neck of both Plutocrats if we are to win
Adding….Charles Pierce has dubbed Ryan the “zombie-eyed granny-starver”, and we must make people think of this term every single time they see, hear or think about Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney!
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