Update: The GOP Road to Ruin

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Update to The GOP Road to Ruin

The Rachel Maddow Show has caught up to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his Roadmap for America's Ruin, and adds this disturbing behind-the-scenes story to this radical far-right plan (oh, the irony). 'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Thursday, February 11th:

Congressman Paul Ryan is the Republican Party‘s budget guy. He has proposed a GOP budget this year that would essentially get rid of social security and Medicare in the long run.

It slashes both programs dramatically and then privatizes them. So good-bye Medicare safety net. Good-bye social security safety net. The Republicans are proposing to get rid of them. Republicans like Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Jack Kingston, Jim DeMint – these folks have recently been very happily arguing to kill social security and Medicare. But they are thought of as being on the far, far right of even their own party.

Paul Ryan proposing to kill social security and Medicare is another thing. His is the only budget the Republicans have proposed for 2010. He is supposed to be the Republican Party‘s big brain on policy. He‘s supposed to be a serious guy.

Well, in the interview with “The Daily Beast” yesterday, Palin's Favorite Republican – The Daily Beast, Paul Ryan was asked why, if he is so fiscally conservative, he voted for the bank bailout. In response, the Republican Party‘s serious big brain policy guy explained that he voted for the bank bailout because of this. (watch video)

["Ryan said his vote for the bailout was influenced by Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, a popular book among conservatives that argues that Nazism and other fascist movements were actually left wing in origin, and his belief that a second Depression would threaten capitalism—and rescue Obama's presidency." – The Daily Beast]

Get it? See, it‘s a smiley face but it has a Hitler mustache. Because liberals seem nice but they‘re really Nazis. Nazis were liberals and liberals are Nazis.

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Paul Ryan, the budget guy for the Republican Party, tells “The Daily Beast” that a conservative book of revisionist history [by Jonah Goldberg] about how the Nazis were secretly liberals and liberals today are secretly Nazis convinced him to vote for the bank bailout because otherwise we‘d have a great depression and then Obama could use that great depression as an excuse to impose his secret Nazi agenda.

Obama‘s liberal fascism. And that is both an admission that even the Republicans admit the bailout staved off the next great depression and a revelation that even the supposedly sane Republicans in Congress right now believe this stuff.

Keep that in mind the next time someone proposes a bipartisan compromise with guys like Paul Ryan who proposed to kill Medicare and social security and justify their votes on worries Obama might secretly be Hitler.

NB: The Arizona Daily Star has taken to publishing the opinions of the intellectually dishonest demagogue Jonah Golddberg in recent months. You know what to do.  letters@azstarnet.com

UPDATE: Paul Krugman has more on this topic in his opinion today Republicans and Medicare – NYTimes.com (excerpt): 

What I’m talking about here is the “Roadmap for America’s Future,” the budget plan recently released by Representative Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee. Other leading Republicans have been bobbing and weaving on the official status of this proposal, but it’s pretty clear that Mr. Ryan’s vision does, in fact, represent what the G.O.P. would try to do if it returns to power.

The broad picture that emerges from the “roadmap” is of an economic agenda that hasn’t changed one iota in response to the economic failures of the Bush years. In particular, Mr. Ryan offers a plan for Social Security privatization that is basically identical to the Bush proposals of five years ago.

But what’s really worth noting, given the way the G.O.P. has campaigned against health care reform, is what Mr. Ryan proposes doing with and to Medicare.

In the Ryan proposal, nobody currently under the age of 55 would be covered by Medicare as it now exists. Instead, people would receive vouchers and be told to buy their own insurance. And even this new, privatized version of Medicare would erode over time because the value of these vouchers would almost surely lag ever further behind the actual cost of health insurance. By the time Americans now in their 20s or 30s reached the age of eligibility, there wouldn’t be much of a Medicare program left.

But what about those who already are covered by Medicare, or will enter the program over the next decade? You’re safe, says the roadmap; you’ll still be eligible for traditional Medicare. Except, that is, for the fact that the plan “strengthens the current program with changes such as income-relating drug benefit premiums to ensure long-term sustainability.”

If this sounds like deliberately confusing gobbledygook, that’s because it is. Fortunately, the Congressional Budget Office, which has done an evaluation of the roadmap, offers a translation: “Some higher-income enrollees would pay higher premiums, and some program payments would be reduced.” In short, there would be Medicare cuts.

* * *

The bottom line, then, is that the crusade against health reform has relied, crucially, on utter hypocrisy: Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

And if Democrats don’t get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

UPDATE II: More Paul Krugman Having It Both Ways on Medicare – Paul Krugman Blog:

Consider the “Roadmap for America’s future” released by Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House budget committee. In the long run, this would convert Medicare to a voucher system and impose sharp cuts in Medicare spending as a percentage of GDP. And even in the next decade, it would involve substantially less Medicare spending than under the Obama administration’s budget. Here’s the head-to-head comparison:

You almost have to admire the audacity: Republicans are denouncing Obama for proposing Medicare cuts, while themselves proposing much deeper Medicare cuts. And they’re getting away with it.