GOP politicos in a panic over Ryan pick

August 14, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Remember how late in the 2008 campaign Republican political operatives in the McCain-Palin campaign began dishing to reporters what a godawful mistake Sarah Palin was in the hope of distancing themselves from a trainwreck of a campaign and not being blamed for the Democratic "wave" eelction that followed in November? They wanted to continue working as political operatives after that election.

We are more than a week away from the Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay, Florida, and already the Republican political operatives in the Romney-Ryan campaign are dishing to reporters what a godawful mistake Paul Ryan is — even before the delegates to the convention have voted to seal the deal. I smell panic in the air.

POLITICO reports that GOP pros fret over Paul Ryan:

Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right — and a huge chance of going horribly wrong.

In more than three dozen interviews with Republican strategists and campaign operatives — old hands and rising next-generation conservatives alike — the most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair-on-fire anger that Romney has practically ceded the election.

[M]any of the most optimistic Republican operatives will privately acknowledge that their views are being shaped more by fingers-crossed hope than by a hard-headed appraisal of what’s most likely to happen.

And the more pessimistic strategists don’t even feign good cheer: They think the Ryan pick is a disaster for the GOP. Many of these people don’t care that much about Romney — they always felt he faced an improbable path to victory — but are worried that Ryan’s vocal views about overhauling Medicare will be a millstone for other GOP candidates in critical House and Senate races.

Ezra Klein savages Mitt Romney’s budget

August 14, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

It looks like the "Galt – Gekko 2012" campaign is having a really bad day with budget analysis. First, Reagan's OMB Director David Stockman savaged the Paul Ryan budget in a New York Times op-ed column, and now Ezra Klein savages Willard "Mittens" Romney's budget in the Washington Post. Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy:

Consider what Romney has promised. By 2016, he says federal spending will be below 20 percent of GDP, and at least 4 percent of that will be defense spending. At that point, he will cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, meaning it can never rise above that level.

All that’s hard enough. Romney will have to cut federal spending by between $6 and $7 trillion over the next decade to hit those targets. As my colleague Suzy Khimm has detailed, those budget promises already require cuts far in excess of what even Paul Ryan’s budget proposes.

But Ryan’s budget includes more than $700 billion in Medicare cuts over the next decade, Romney’s budget won’t. And Romney promises that there will be no other changes to Social Security or Medicare for those over 55, which means neither program can be cut for the next 10 years. But once you add up Medicare, Social Security and defense and you’ve got more than half of the federal budget. So Romney is going to make the largest spending cuts in history while protecting or increasing spending on more than half of the budget.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indulged this idea back in May. If Social Security and Medicare are spared from cuts, then to get federal spending under 20 percent of GDP while holding defense spending at 4 percent of GDP, “all other programs — including Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, education, environmental protection, transportation, and SSI — would have to be cut by an average of 40 percent in 2016 and 57 percent in 2022.”

David Stockman savages Paul Ryan’s budget

August 14, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Before the ascendancy of Rep. Paul Ryan as the GOP's latest 'budget guru," there was a similar self-annointed "boy genius" congressman a generation ago, David Stockman. He combined blind faith in supply-side "trickle down" economics with green-eyeshade budget credentials, and became the living symbol of GOP efforts to dismantle the New Deal/Great Society programs. Stockman served as Ronald Reagan’s OMB director until 1985. Today, Stockman Savages Ryan:

Stockman only occasionally bursts into public view these days, but has now done so with a vengeance in a New York Times op-ed column blasting Ryan’s budget plan as a complete fraud. Though using Ryan’s Veep selection as his point of departure and the Ryan Budget as a major talking point, Stockman is generally indicting his own former party and the conservative movement that once praised him in terms identical to its current love-fest with Ryan:

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

The Ryan-Romney Medicaid plan adopts the GOP ‘let them die!’ health care plan

August 14, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Paul Ryan’s Medicare overhaul may be the most controversial part of his budget. But his proposed cuts to the program are not nearly as draconian as his cuts to state Medicaid plans. Suzy Khimm posts at Exra Klein's WonkBlog, Paul Ryan’s biggest budget cuts are to Medicaid, not Medicare:

As Ezra notes, Ryan’s cuts to Medicare “are only 60 percent as large as the cuts to Medicaid and other health-care programs.” What’s more, his biggest change to Medicare wouldn’t kick in until 2023—the start date for his voucher-based premium support program. By comparison, Ryan’s cuts to Medicaid are more drastic, and they start sooner: Between 2013 and 2022, it would make nearly $1.4 trillion in cuts to Medicaid that “would almost inevitably result in dramatic reductions in coverage” as well as enrollment, according to the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Over the next 10 years, the Ryan plan would cut Medicaid by $642 billion by repealing the Affordable Care Act and by $750 billion through new caps on federal spending—a 34 percent cut to Medicaid spending over the next decade, according to Edwin Park of the Center and Budget and Policy Priorities.

Who would that impact? First, by overturning the ACA, the Ryan plan would prevent 11 million people from gaining Medicaid coverage by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimates.

TUSD town hall meetings re: budget shortfall

August 14, 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: TUSD has scheduled town hall meetings regarding its budget shortfall. TUSD's options to bridge shortfall of $17M sought in public meetings: Three town hall meetings have been scheduled for next week to discuss the impending $17 million budget shortfall in the Tucson Unified School District. Options that have been brought before the … Read more

“Just kidding” is the new “I don’t recall”

August 14, 2012

by David Safier Those of us old enough to have watched the Watergate hearings remember the string of Nixon people who claimed "I don't recall" every time they were asked questions about what they said or heard someone else say concerning the Watergate break-in and the cover-up. Unfortunately for them, Nixon made a bunch of … Read more