Who Is Paul Ryan, Anyway?
Paul Ryan has been in Congress for 14 years but has only recently come to prominence as the godfather of the controversial
Ryan Budget. I got to wondering , just what was Congressman Paul Ryan (R) Wisconsin, doing for all those years before he became a belt tightening budget guru, the darling of the Tea Party and Mitt Romney's running mate?
Most specifically, I started wondering what he was up to during the Bush Administration, when the deficit was created. (Remember that when Bush came into office there was a budget surplus which he proceeded to distribute in the form of $200. checks. Bush then started two wars and lowered taxes so there would be no money to pay for them) Where was Ryan the fiscal conservative when all this was going on?
"The Social Security Administration concluded
that the Ryan-Sununu plan would require huge increases in general
budget revenue to make up the shortfall left in payroll tax revenue.
Specifically, revenue would have to increase by 1.5 percent of GDP every
year, an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found,
or about $225 billion at current GDP. That’s a big honking tax hike.
What’s more, under the plan, investments in the stock and bond markets
would skyrocket such that by 2050, every single stock or bond in the
United States would be owned by a Social Security account. This would
mean that the portfolio managers at the Social Security Administration
would more or less control the entire means of production in the United
States."
In spite of all that legislative activity, Ryan,
according to the Huffington Post, has only managed to get two of his bills passed into law in almost 14 years in Congress.How about that for a stellar record? One of these bills concerned renaming a local Wisconsin post office and the other involved an excise tax on arrows(as in archery, bows and arrows, hunting and all that) Really?
The third thing I discovered about Paul Ryan by rooting around on the internet, is that his foreign policy experience, like that of his running mate, Mitt Romney,is remarkably thin. Check out this
excellent piece by Abby Huntsman on this topic. The guy knows zero, zip, nada about anyplace outside the USA. Not cool, as Mitt demonstrated his own ineptitude in terms of foreign policy finesse quite dramatically on his recent trip abroad. In fact, former Bush administration State Department official
Christian Whiton had this to say on Paul Ryan's lack of foreign policy experience on
Fox News this past Saturday.
“Paul Ryan has said relatively little about foreign affairs and when he
has it generally is brought back to his portfolio as head of the
finance committee, so he’ll talk about how it’s important for America to
thrive economically, to not appear to be in decline…But unfortunately
what we don’t have from either the top or bottom of this ticket is a
clear message on how these people will see the world and react to world
events when they get into the White House if they do.”
Three Strikes for Romney/Ryan and Three Cheers for Obama/Biden
That's three strikes as far as I'm concerned. No wonder Paul Ryan is the darling of the Tea Party. The more I think about it, the more I think this VP pic was a gift to Obama.The more I find out about Paul Ryan and his legislative past, the more I know that I'm sticking with Obama/Biden in 2012, and I bet I'm not the only one--in fact I know I'm not.
