Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Last Call

To recap today:  Republican Paul Ryan pledged to destroy Medicare, completely annihilate Medicaid, all but eliminate public education, federal infrastructure, general public safety, decapitate the New Deal and end the American Dream with his perverse, cruel budget that would crush generations of Americans under austerity and finish transferring basically all the country's wealth to the richest 0.5% or so.

And the Democratic party reaction to that?

Liberal Democrats challenged President Obama on Tuesday over his willingness to cut Social Security benefits.

People still wonder how we lost control of the House.   If you think President Obama is the bad guy in this scenario, resign from reality now and let's get somebody in here who isn't a useless sack of pus.

At a meeting that lasted just less than 90 minutes, Obama was peppered by questions from Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), among others, who challenged Obama on adopting “chained CPI” — a less generous formula for adjusting benefits under Social Security and other programs for inflation.


Obama has said he is open to chained CPI as part of a “grand bargain” that would include spending cuts as well as new revenue. And he didn’t back down from that support during a closed-door meeting with Senate Democrats, despite pushback from Harkin and Sanders.

House Republicans will pass a budget that will obliterate us.  And you stupid clowns are worried about chained CPI?   That's like worrying about if you left your stove on when your city is being nuked from orbit.

Ahh, sweet release...


The Rise Of The Austerians

Paul Ryan's Austerity Budget, 2013 Edition is pretty much the end of the New Deal, a budget that obliterates spending from Medicare, Medicaid, nearly every aspect of the social safety net, education, infrastructure, public safety, and more.  It's nothing less than Paul Ryan telling America's 310 million people "You're on you're own, deal with your own problems."  Ezra Klein rocks the bad news:

Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.



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And yes, we'd see catastrophic cuts in Medicaid, 50% by 2023. Tens of millions of people who would have gotten health insurance under Obamacare will go back to being uninsured, and they'll be joined by tens of millions more who would certainly lose their Medicaid health insurance as states simply toss them off the rolls.

Ryan would balance his budget on the backs of tens of millions of the poorest Americans, in order to cut the one percent's tax load to 25%.  It gets worse, his crushing Austerity would last a generation, surpluses that wouldn't go to help the scores of millions of American poor, with no schools, no roads, no cops, no hope of getting out of the hell they're in.  It would all go to pay off the national debt over the next 35 or so years.

It isn't just austerity.  It's soulless cruelty that will simply sacrifice the poorest Americans by the trainload to be fed to the Randian altar.

In short, Paul Ryan is pretty much as evil as it gets.  And he's assuming that the voters who rejected this plan wholesale when it was the Romney platform don't have any say now.

Austerity by the minority.  Awesome.

StupidiNews!