Paul Ryan's 2013 Budget: Fatuous Figure Finagling

by Sunnyjane

Can I interest you in my latest scheme to screw over average Americans?  Hello?  Anyone?  Would you like some candy?

Paul Ryan's latest budget iteration is much like naugahyde stew prepared in your slow-cooker: no matter how you slice it, dice it, and spice it, the results will be completely devoid of the essential nourishment that poor and middle-class Americans need to survive.

Priorities, Priorities, Priorities 

We can and must be smarter with our spending decisions and make cuts in ways that do not intentionally and unnecessarily inflict hardship and aggravation upon the American people.  If you think this sentiment might possibly appear in the new and improved budget, you'd be wrong, of course.  So it must surely have been a noble caution from President Obama, right?  No, no, that indignant little homily was put forth courtesy of Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas.  And was he talking about the budget?  Good gracious, NO!  Senator Moran has his Jockeys in a jumble because White House tours have been canceled due to the sequestration -- which, of course, the Tea Party legislators were all for until they came up against a cut that is not only easily observable by the public, but one that has a direct and immediate consequence.  Oops!  See how that works, guys?

As the Daily Kos reported recently, When Rep. Paul Ryan insisted two years ago that his budget "vision" wasn't truly unpopular, it was just misunderstood, it made for a good laugh. The laughs only got better when he insisted that his constituents love his vision after he got booed out of a town meeting. After Ryan's vision was put on the national ballot, and lost, you might think Ryan would change his tune.

So don't expect that Paul Ryan will go all mushy for the least of us.  While the newly elected pope of the Roman Catholic Church has been hailed as a fighter for social and economic justice, don't count on seeing any of that in Ryan's 2013 effort to swindle average-income and poor Americans.  To whit, at his papal installation Mass on March 19, Pope Francis implored world leaders to protect the environment, the weakest, and the poorest.  As a practicing Catholic, perhaps the representative from Wisconsin needs to rethink his budgetary priorities and engage in a little more, um, practice. 

2012 Election Rejection

It's what the people want.  Honestly!  Cross my heart and hope to...OK, maybe I won't go THAT far!

The latest Republican failed vice presidential candidate, like many on the dark side of the political spectrum, simply refuses to admit that the American electorate soundly rejected his ad nauseam budget plans in November 2012.  Americans want jobs.  Americans need jobs. Americans need jobs NOW. Oh, well, I guess Ryan figures that at least he's keeping the Government Printing Office folks employed.

It's worth noting that the Congressional Progressive Caucus has presented a starkly different alternative to the Ryan plan, the Back To Work Budget.  This is an easy-to-read detailed outline for job creation.  And no, it's not a make-work, herding-unicorns proposal.  Rather, it's a plan that would, in part, spend money to repair the country's crumbling infrastructure.  But like all Republicans and too many Democrats who would rather see children murdered by AR-15s than risk their do-nothing jobs, so might they rather see a school bus full of dead children at the bottom of an abyss, thanks to a collapsed bridge. 

When the Future is the Past -- On Steroids

I realize this may come as something of a shock, but the newest version of Ryan's piece of shit budget legislation easily passed the House of Representatives on March 21st.  Not long afterward, the Senate soundly rejected it, 40/59.  Even five Republicans didn't like it enough to vote for it, because it projects a balanced budget in a decade but relies on $600 billion-plus in tax revenues on the wealthy enacted in January to do it.  The three Republican Tea Party members (Rand, Cruz, and Lee) couldn't let that happen, now could they?  The two other Republicans, Susan Collins and Dean Heller voted Nay because it cuts sharply from safety net programs for the poor and contains a plan to turn the Medicare program for the elderly into a voucher-like system for future beneficiaries born in 1959 or later.

Earlier on that same historic day, Michele Bachmann (she of the President has five Air Force One chefs, two projectionists, one dog walker -- and, I suppose, a partridge in a pear tree) took to the floor of the House to beg for the repeal of Obamacare before it strangles all of us  in our beds.  Or something like that.  Forget that repeal of Obamacare has been tried more than thirty times in the past, plus having been found Constitutional by the Supreme Court.  The Republican Tea Party needs to get over it!  

(Though I have not been able to find a second source -- and I have no intention of listening to the entire speech -- Jason Linkins at HuffPo reported that at one point in her CPAC 2013 spiel Bachmann also said, You can never count on your cat.  Okey dokey, then!  I declare, y'all, it's just so difficult to keep up with the rantings coming from Our Crazy Lady of the Old Testament Church, isn't it?) 

End Note

Only the skeletal bones of a once proud and powerful Grand Old Party remain.  Today’s Republicans are arrogant, obtuse, crass, and deceitful.

The GOP is now controlled by the scum who run for office by saying that “Government is bad, Washington is broken.”  And once elected, they do their damnedest to make it so. 

News alert to Republicans: It's the GOP that is broken.  Washington and government are what the House and the Senate make it.  YOU are the problem.  Try being part of the solution for a change.