Beast of the Year 2012: Paul Ryan

The votes are in, and The Konformist readers have spoken. Paul Ryan is your choice for the 2012 Beast of the Year - a choice that is well deserved.

Perhaps the biggest news story of the last year - if not of the last four years - is just how scary crazy the entire GOP has gone in the age of Obama.  And no figure has been more important in the Republican Party to the right-wing movement than Paul Ryan, currently their VP nominee in this year's election.  His 2012 federal budget plan would abolish korporate income taxes, estate taxes, taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest, and heavily reduce tax rates on the wealthy while ruthlessly cutting social programs, partially privatizing part of Social Security to Wall Street and fully privatizing Medicare.  Some would call this "Ayn Rand on Crack" (which may be an unfair smear of Ms. Rand, who was at least a gifted writer) yet all but four Republicans in the the HOR and five in the Senate voting for it.

Runner-Up: Brian Moynihan

In the unlikely event that Ryan can no longer fill his duties as Beast of the Year, Brian Moynihan is ready to take over the crown. Rest assured the BOTY trophy is in good hands either way, as Mr. Moynihan has had great Beastly practice as CEO of Bank of America.

In any case, we salute you, Paul Ryan and Brian Moynihan.  Congratulations, and keep up the great work, dudes!!!

Thank You, Paul Ryan

Robert Kuttner
Co-founder and co-editor, 'The American Prospect'
09/16/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/thank-you-paul-ryan_b_1888870.html

Two years ago, the Democrats handed the Republicans their two crown jewels -- Social Security and Medicare. By targeting Medicare for budget "savings" that could be used to finance what the Republicans called Obamacare, the White House gave the GOP ammunition to contend that the Democrats were taking benefits away from seniors.

Expanding health coverage for the young and defense of Medicare for the elderly got depicted as a zero sum game. Republicans made huge gains in 2010 with seniors. Instead of the political winner it should have been, Obamacare became an epithet.

Then, in the aborted grand budget bargain of 2011, Obama was so eager to achieve a compromise on mostly Republican terms that he very nearly agreed to needless cuts in Social Security. Only Republican intransigence on any kind of tax hikes saved the president from himself -- or more precisely from his deficit-hawk advisers.

Now, however, Republicans have given Social Security and Medicare back to the Democrats (where they belong.) Polls show that Medicare is no longer a winner for the Republicans, and the Democrats have embraced the term, "Obamacare" as positive label.

The reason, of course, is Paul Ryan.

Thanks to Ryan's very explicit advocacy of scrapping public Medicare in favor of vouchers, seniors are returning to their natural Democratic home. The transparently bogus effort of the Romney-Ryan ticket to walk back Ryan's voucher proposal -- and alter it into a plan where seniors get to choose traditional public Medicare or vouchers -- only reinforces the voter perception of Romney as someone who keeps changing his story. The euphemism of "premium support" is fooling nobody and adds to the perception of Republican evasiveness.

The latest New York Times-CBS poll shows that some three quarters of likely voters favor keeping Medicare the way it is, and trust Obama more than the Republicans to defend it. This is a huge shift from last year.

Democrats, meanwhile, have acquired some spine. Defense of public Medicare against "vouchercare" has become part of their standard message.

So far, so good.

Also good ammunition against Romney-Ryan was Ryan's support in 2005 for a George W. Bush plan to allow younger workers to divert some of their Social Security taxes into private accounts -- a proposal that proved a political disaster and was subsequently scrapped.

But never underestimate the Democrats' capacity for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Lurking in the wings is the latest reincarnation of Bowles-Simpson, the bipartisan zombie that refuses to die. A "Fix the Debt" campaign," chaired by none other than Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, has become the darling of the centrist media and of Wall Street.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the National Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, several leading Democratic deficit hawks, and some 70 corporate CEOs have pledged to raise $50 to 100 million dollars in corporate money for this latest campaign, which promotes yet another a grand bargain of tax increases and cuts in Social Security and other social spending.

Bowles continues to be touted as Obama's next Treasury Secretary when Tim Geithner finally (mercifully!) calls it a day. Other Democrats who are part of this effort are former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who was chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2000, and former Democratic Congressman Vic Fazio, who once headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Rounding out this group of Democrats doing Republicans' bidding on fiscal issues are former Georgia Senator Samm Nunn and Wall Streeter and former Obama official Steve Rattner.

Shame!

Bowles and Simpson were featured on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday where they were described as "widely hailed as serious thought leaders on dealing with the country's economic problems."

Hailed, that is, by the same corporate media. The mainstream media just laps this stuff up, because Simpson, a Republican, is willing to criticize the Romney-Ryan ticket and Bowles, a Wall Street Democrat, is not shy about criticizing Obama. So they must be both courageous and right. As Bowles said on Meet the Press Sunday, "We don't think President Obama has gone far enough in his reduction on entitlement spending."

But Social Security continues to be in surplus, and to lend the rest of the government money. Its projected future deficits did not cause the current economic crisis. Its reduced revenues are the result of the crisis.

Social Security is financed by payroll taxes. If median worker pay rose with productivity, instead of most of the gain in national income going to people like those on the "Fix the Debt Campaign", Social Security would be in surplus indefinitely. Social Security's modest projected shortfall can be erased by raising the ceiling on income subject to payroll tax, not by slashing benefits.

The corporate elite lives in a self-reinforcing bubble, where the deficit is the economy's most dire problem. An important study by political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Nathan Seawright interviewed a sample of very wealthy Americans. Not surprisingly, their views on the importance of budget balance versus job creation and social supports were far to the right of those of most voters. (Fully 87 percent of very wealthy respondents put deficit reduction as the most pressing national issue.)

This is conventional wisdom among the top one percent. Corporate CEOs of the sort who are underwriting this latest Bowles-Simpson assault don't need Social Security for their own retirement and don't mind sacrificing it on the altar of budget balance.

Back in the real world, Social Security is both good policy and good politics. As private pension plans keep being gutted and seniors interest earnings on savings accounts are basically nothing, Social Security is the one government guaranteed portion of retirement income. It is immensely popular, and to the extent Democrats are resolute in its defense, the program's popularity rubs off on them.

But because of pressure from corporate-funded groups like this one, the Obama Administration keeps coming close to buckling on the issue of traditional Democratic defense of Social Security. This will arise again as Congress gets closer to the dread "fiscal cliff," made up of expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January 2013 and the threatened budget sequester (that is the fruit of Republicans holding the government hostage in 2011.)

Given the importance of Social Security to regular Americans and its partisan value to Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt, no sane Democrat should be associated with these efforts. But in an age of Citizens United and unlimited corporate donations, where Obama tacks back and forth between criticizing Wall Street and soliciting Wall Street executives for campaign funds, it is all too tempting to demonstrate fiscal "soundness" by joining this parade.

Thanks to Paul Ryan, however, the president may be spared again. The association of Romney-Ryan with the gutting of Medicare and Social Security offers just too tempting a political target to throw away for the sake of impressing Simpson, Bowles, and their corporate cronies. Or so we must hope.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.

Ryan's budget plan would destroy the middle class

Paul Ryan's budget plan would destroy the middle class
Michael Hiltzik
August 15, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120815,0,1949780.column

It certainly hasn't taken long for the blue-eyed, smiling visage to be scrubbed off Paul Ryan's putative policy masterwork, a federal budget proposal that supposedly would cut the government deficit to a shadow of its former self, as if by magic.

Within hours of the Wisconsin congressman's anointing as Mitt Romney's vice-presidential running mate, the budget plan's salient features were being widely publicized: It would deliver a handsome tax cut to the richest Americans while eviscerating the programs and services the rest of the country depends on. These include healthcare services, banking and clean water regulations, road repair and education assistance.

Yet all the discussion has overlooked the real damage the Ryan budget would do to an important segment of the American public. We're not talking about the very poor and the near poor. Their lives would be made immeasurably worse, to be sure, by a budget that would shrink Medicaid and force cutbacks in food stamp, educational and law enforcement services, among so many other things. Ryan at least pays lip service to maintaining the national safety net, ineffective as his proposals to do so may be.

But the middle class would be destroyed. The Ryan budget's impact on middle-income Americans comes in many forms, some of them exceedingly disingenuous. Let's look at a few.

Start with the revenue side. Here, as in other respects, the Ryan plan is silent on specifics, beyond asserting that "the key to pro-growth tax reform is lowering tax rates while broadening the tax base."

Ryan advocates cutting the top income tax rate to 25% (from 39.6%, the pre-Bush top marginal rate scheduled to take effect Jan. 1).

The only way to do so while keeping overall tax revenues at 19% of gross domestic product, Ryan's stated goal, is to eliminate a wide range of tax breaks. On the surface, this might look palatable to a middle-class taxpayer convinced that the fat cats get all the breaks anyway. In fact, the most popular breaks save billions for the middle class.

More than 70% of the mortgage interest payments claimed as deductions ($240 billion) appear on returns filed by people in the income range of $60,000 to $200,000, according to the IRS. Many of these middle-class homeowners base their annual financial planning on tax breaks such as the mortgage deduction. Only about 1.4% of the total is claimed by taxpayers earning $1 million or more.

This is among the reasons that, as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center recently calculated, sharply lowering marginal rates while cutting out the most popular tax breaks results in net tax cuts for the wealthy and increases for everyone else. (This is what Ryan means by "broadening the tax base" — it means he's coming for you.)

The more insidious assault on the middle class comes from program cuts. Most of the commentary on Ryan's budget has focused on his master plan for Medicare and Medicaid, both of which he would gut. But it's a mistake to think the burden would be shouldered exclusively, or even chiefly, by the poor.

Ryan would replace the existing Medicare system of guaranteed treatment (with a nominal individual premium) with one providing vouchers for service through private commercial insurance plans. By design, the vouchers wouldn't cover all costs, and because their value would rise in accordance with a standard inflation measure, not with medical inflation, the gap would widen over time.

The Kaiser Family Foundation calculated that in 2022, the out-of-pocket medical expenses of the typical 65-year-old would come to half his or her Social Security income — double the level under traditional Medicare. There are two reasons. First, private insurers would deliver benefits at a higher administrative cost, and second, the vouchers would low-ball the retirees' real costs.

As a device to reduce the growth in healthcare costs, which is the principal component in government spending going forward, this is pure sleight of hand. Costs will keep rising, and at a faster rate than before (Ryan would also repeal the healthcare reform act, including its cost-reducing provisions). Less of the increase would show up on the government's ledgers only because more would show up in family budgets. The average American would be poorer for it.

Ryan contends that shifting the delivery of care from the Medicare bureaucracy to private insurers will wipe out waste. Everyone who has contact with Medicare, his plan states, "has stories about waste in the system — unnecessary tests, redundant treatments, and the cost ... of mistaken billings and misplaced records." Now, I've never come directly in contact with Medicare, but I've experienced all those things — at the hands of the private insurers Ryan thinks have the magic answer to rising medical costs.

Who are these Medicare beneficiaries? For the most part, their economic status tracks that of America's elderly as a whole (as it should, as the program is open to almost all Americans over 65). Some 60% get sizable portions of their income from private pensions, more than a third get at least 10% from investment income. On average they get 39% of their income from Social Security.

What happens if medical costs start taking up half their Social Security? Much of the burden might shift to their children and grandchildren. Keeping in mind that Social Security and Medicare always have aimed to remove this burden from the next generation, that's a real leap backward.

A tsunami of pain for the middle class comes from the Ryan plan's treatment of Medicaid. (In California, this joint federal-state program for the infirm and destitute is known as Medi-Cal).

Ryan would push more of the expense of Medicaid onto the states. Repealing the Affordable Care Act would remove funding for a Medicaid expansion that would have covered 17 million people. It would also replace the current open-ended federal subsidy to states with block grants keyed to population growth and standard inflation. In other words, completely unconnected to the real drivers of healthcare costs, which are the aging of the population and medical inflation.

States will be able to relieve the resulting pressure on their budgets only by cutting Medicaid enrollments, providing enrollees with fewer services, raising taxes or covering the shortfall out of budgets straining to keep up with road repair, K-12 education and public safety.

The Ryan budget won't do much to help states with those other items; his insistence on reducing non-defense federal spending outside the health programs and Social Security by more than one-fifth starting in 2014 implies unprecedented cuts for state and local governments, which today get one-third of those dollars. That's money spent today on education, law enforcement, roads, clean air and water programs, and disaster response.

When payment for those services is demanded at the point of sale, as in a post-Ryan world, it's the middle class that will pay. They've reached into their pockets to pay for school arts and enrichment programs lopped out of state budgets and carried the burden of tuition hikes at state universities. Teachers of middle- class students — stalwart members of the middle class themselves — will lose their jobs by the thousands. Under Ryan's budget, they'll pay higher federal taxes for the privilege.

What accounts for the Washington establishment's tolerance for policymaking that delivers so little of what it claims? For no one impolite enough to examine the Ryan plan's assumptions and numbers, as opposed to taking Ryan's word for it, believes that it would cut the budget deficit, either according to its own terms or in the world of practical politics.

Perhaps it's that American politicians have become so notorious for dodging tough questions that in a hick town like Washington anyone who produces a plan, no matter how nebulous and flawed, will be hailed as an intellectual giant. ("At least it's something," goes the refrain.)

Now that Ryan's in a national race, his budget will get nationwide scrutiny. It's about time. People will learn that the strangest thing about Paul Ryan's vision of America is how distant it is from the reality they face on the ground.

Ryan calls for eliminating consumer-friendly financial reforms enacted after the 2008 crash, removing environmental oversight of oil and gas production, and eroding legal protection for unionized workers. With a straight face, he lists these initiatives under the heading, "Ending Cronyism and Corporate Welfare." The original version of his plan envisioned the national economic safety net as "a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and despondency." (He removed this Ayn Randian phrase from the 2012 revision.)

What's frightening about the rise of Ryanesque policymaking isn't merely that in today's Washington, the man with the plan is supposed to have credibility even if the plan is incoherent and destructive. It's that Ryan has credibility because he's amiable and earnest.

In a recent article, Peter Orszag, the former Obama budget director and current executive at Citigroup, dismantled the Ryan plan but felt constrained to mention, twice, "I like Paul Ryan."

How very Washington of Orszag. Outside the beltway, no one is talking about Paul Ryan because he's likable. They're talking about him because he is now up for an important national office, and he got there by promoting a vision of policy that the average American should find repellent.

'Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine'

Tom Morello: 'Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against'
Rage Against the Machine's guitarist blasts Romney's VP pick and unlikely Rage fan
TOM MORELLO
August 16, 2012
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tom-morello-paul-ryan-is-the-embodiment-of-the-machine-our-music-rages-against-20120816

Last week, Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, the Republican architect of Congress's radical right-wing budget plan, as his running mate. Ryan has previously cited Rage Against the Machine as one of his favorite bands. Rage guitarist Tom Morello responds in this exclusive op-ed.

Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn't understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn't understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.

Ryan claims that he likes Rage's sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

I wonder what Ryan's favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of "Fuck the Police"? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!

Don't mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta "rage" in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he's not raging against is the privileged elite he's groveling in front of for campaign contributions.

You see, the super rich must rationalize having more than they could ever spend while millions of children in the U.S. go to bed hungry every night. So, when they look themselves in the mirror, they convince themselves that "Those people are undeserving. They're . . . lesser." Some of these guys on the extreme right are more cynical than Paul Ryan, but he seems to really believe in this stuff. This unbridled rage against those who have the least is a cornerstone of the Romney-Ryan ticket.

But Rage's music affects people in different ways. Some tune out what the band stands for and concentrate on the moshing and throwing elbows in the pit. For others, Rage has changed their minds and their lives. Many activists around the world, including organizers of the global occupy movement, were radicalized by Rage Against the Machine and work tirelessly for a more humane and just planet. Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening.

My hope is that maybe Paul Ryan is a mole. Maybe Rage did plant some sensible ideas in this extreme fringe right wing nut job. Maybe if elected, he'll pardon Leonard Peltier.  Maybe he'll throw U.S. military support behind the Zapatistas. Maybe he'll fill Guantanamo Bay with the corporate criminals that are funding his campaign – and then torture them with Rage music 24/7. That's one possibility. But I'm not betting on it.

Awesome Quotes: Dee Snyder

"There is almost nothing on which I agree with Paul Ryan, except perhaps the use of the P90X.”

Paul Ryan Pick Was Political Suicide

Gerald Celente

KINGSTON, NY 15 August 2012 — One year ago, in the Summer 2011 Trends Journal, we focused on the 2012 Presidential election. At that time, we analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of both President Obama and the cast of Republican challengers.

Trends Journal subscribers were provided with yet another vivid, important insight into “History Before it Happens” as we spelled out, in great detail, why the Republicans were on a political suicide mission and singled out Paul Ryan as the chief suicide strategist. Even though he was not in the running, we devoted an entire story to his policies, his credentials (or lack of them) and the consequences the GOP would suffer by adopting his policies.

Thus, a year before the media was looking closely into Ryan’s past and his qualifications for designing a massive budget deficit reduction plan, we had singled him out as THE politician whose views and values best represented a Republican platform that led us to forecast an Obama victory in October.

In that Trends Journal we wrote:

Not Playing with a Full Deck In the Spring of 2011 Republican hopefuls were on a political suicide mission. Yes, entitlement excesses had to be addressed, but making that the main focus of their campaigns was a strategy that might have been devised by insidious Democratic infiltrators … .

The Republican final solution was to reduce and/or eliminate “entitlements” ­ a word that had taken on a pejorative meaning. How dare people who had worked all their lives, acted responsibly and paid their taxes, feel entitled to anything from their government? Health care, elder care … Republicans were running on a “we don’t care” platform. And, if they got their way, any care the people did receive would be less than what they got before and would come from the private sector; the health industry that gives generous campaign contributions (i.e., bribes and payoffs) to politicians for passing legislation that will further enrich them.

Another main Republican plank was the reform of Social Security. Under a complex partial privatization plan crafted by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan (Roadmap For America’s Future), Social Security and Medicare benefits would be cut, cost-of-living increases trimmed, and the retirement age for those under 55 would be “modernized” to eventually reach 70. At the same time, the Social Security agency itself would be significantly downsized to a level of predictable inefficiency.

The end result of their “Roadmap” would be to steer as much tax money as possible away from the public sector and into the private sector. It was passionately held GOP Gospel that corporations operated more efficiently than government bureaucracy.

The third major plank of the Republican platform called not only keep in place the Bush-initiated and Obama-perpetuated tax policy that gave breaks to the richest, but under the Ryan plan, to further lower the top tax rate from 36 percent to 25 percent. Incredible as it may sound, the GOP genuinely believed that the more the very rich made and the less they paid, the better off everyone else would be.

The Republican platform boiled down to: “What can we do to make the biggest bigger and the richest richer?” Not surprisingly, for the small percentilethat stood to benefit, the Republican platform was attractive.

Just as we wrote “History Before It Happens” before it happened, so now we are forecasting “The Next Four Years: What to Expect, What it will Mean.”

Zeke West
Media Relations, The Trends Journal
zwest@trendsresearch.com
(845) 331.3500 ext. 1
©MMXII The Trends Research Institute

Admit It, I Scare The Shit Out Of You, Don't I?

Admit It, I Scare The Ever-Loving Shit Out Of You, Don't I?
BY PAUL RYAN
CANDIDATE FOR VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
AUGUST 13, 2012 | ISSUE 48•33
http://www.theonion.com/articles/admit-it-i-scare-the-everloving-shit-out-of-you-do,29160/

When Mitt Romney selected me as his running mate, I knew the Democratic attack dogs would come out in full force. They would say I’m a right-wing ideologue. They would say my views on entitlement programs are far too radical. They would say putting me on the ticket immediately kills Mitt Romney’s chances of becoming president because I’m a liability. But if we’re being honest with each other—if we’re able to put aside the talking points for a few minutes and say what we’re all actually thinking and feeling—I believe we can acknowledge the real truth here.

I’m young, I’m handsome, I’m smart, and I’m articulate. And that scares the ever-loving shit out of you. You can pretend like you have this thing in the bag, but you know good goddamn well that this race just got real interesting, real fast.

It’s okay to admit it. You’re frightened to death of me. It might actually be healthy for you to face your fears now rather than later, when Mitt and I are leading by a few points in the polls and it looks like this thing might end badly for you. Face it: I’m not some catastrophe waiting to happen, like a Sarah Palin or a Dan Quayle. On the contrary, you have the exact opposite fear. I’m a solid, competent, some might say exceptional, politician.

Did you get nervous when you read that last sentence? Is it because you know in your heart of hearts that it’s 100 percent true? Is it because, even if you strongly disagree with my beliefs on Medicare, Social Security, women’s rights, and marriage equality, you know my talent as a speaker and my well-thought-out approach to these issues—no matter how radical and convoluted you find them—might just be enough to win over independent voters?

Do you get chills just thinking about how strong my appeal actually is?

I have another question for you: How scared are you that I can convince people I’m right? Because I’m good at it. No, I’m really good at it. You see, I know how to turn up the charm and charisma without putting people off. Then I back up what I’m saying with arguments that, when they come out of my mouth, sound completely accurate and well-reasoned. And I do it with such passion that people automatically recognize me as a man with deep convictions he will stand up for, no matter what.

The American people love that shit. They love it.

Passion, intellect, and a magnetic personality. Pretty damn intimidating combo, if I say so myself. You want to talk about polish? Man, I’ve got polish for miles. Oh, and by the way, I’ll go ahead and say this next thing because, if we’re being honest, why the hell not, right? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m white. Hoo, brother, am I white.

Yup, you should be scared shitless of me, because guess who isn’t? The people of Wisconsin. They love me. Republicans and Democrats there love me. Hell, I get Democrats to vote for me even if my policies make zero sense when it comes to their livelihoods. Do you know why? Because they like me. They like my story. Young, good-looking kid who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to make something of himself. Christ, I'm a storybook candidate. I balance out this ticket so well it’s almost too perfect. The people of Ohio are going to think that. And seniors in Florida—the state we supposedly lost when Mitt picked me—won’t be so scared as soon they know that my mother lives in Florida, and that all I want to do is reform the health care system so she can receive care that makes good fiscal sense.

Boy, I’m going to sell the shit out of that talking point. And I’m going to do a great job of it. Why? Because I’m Paul Ryan. That’s what I do.

And if we’re having trouble getting Pennsylvania on board, just wait until I absolutely wipe the floor with Joe Biden in the vice presidential debates. Don’t think for a second that I don’t know you’re terrified of us facing off, because in the back of your mind you know it could be a bloodbath up there.

Well, that’s 77 electoral votes, and by my math that means you can kiss your golden boy goodbye after four short years. All that promise. All that energy. All that potential. Gone in one November night.

I’m your worst fucking nightmare.

Oh, and by the way, don’t even try to pretend you haven’t imagined me being elected president one day.

Lies, Bigger Lies, and the Ryan Budget

Pat Choate

Economist, Author and Ross Perot's Vice Presidential Running Mate in 1996
08/16/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pat-choate/lies-bigger-lies-and-the-_b_1792580.html

The Presidential campaign now seems to hinge on whether the financing of Medicare and Social Security is going to kill the American economy. It is not. This is a faux issue being pushed by radical Republicans who want to eliminate these two programs altogether.

The financial reality is that the Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance Program (OASDI), the Disability Insurance Program (DI) -- what we call Social Security -- and the Medicare Program have huge trust funds paid for by workers over the past 40 years and both Social Security and Medicare are solvent well into the future.

The Social Security trust fund has more than $2.7 trillion of assets and Medicare's trust fun has $244 billion. No other federal programs have such large reserves to finance future operations.

In their 2012 Annual Report, the Social Security System's Board of Trustees reported that the "dollar level of the combined trust funds (OASDA and DI) declines beginning in 2021 until assets are exhausted in 2033."

Yes, the Social Security System is fully funded for another 21 years. Even if no changes are made between now and then, the System will provide 75 percent of benefits to recipients for an additional 50 years. This is hardly a financial crisis.

The Trustees also reported that Medicare is fully funded until 2024 -- that is another 12 years.

Small painless steps, such as increasing the cap on wages taxed to fund Social Security, can extend its surpluses until the last part of the 21st Century -- for us, our children and children's children.

Shifting U.S. health care to a single pay medical system, such as Israel's, which Mitt Romney found so outstanding during his recent trip there, could cut medical costs from the present 16 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product to 8 percent and provide even better care. That would create more than $1 trillion of annual savings alone.

What is particularly striking about all this is that even as the GOP ticket and their surrogates are making these specious arguments, our infrastructure is falling apart because of underinvestment. Cities and states are firing hundreds of thousands of teachers, firemen and police, because they have too little money. More than 25 million American workers who want a job remain out of work. Apparently, these are not crises that merit the candidates' or the nation's immediate attention.

The real crisis, according to Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the Republican Party is the financing of Social Security and Medicare. To "save" Medicare, Ryan's plan advocates creating a voucher program for those 55 years old and under. To "save" Social Security, they want to privatize it. Subtly, they are even implying that these two programs are the source of the present federal budget deficit of $1 trillion annually.

The true goal of these Republicans is to use the current fiscal crisis as a Trojan horse to gut both these programs. Our federal budget deficits exist because of lost revenues created by the Bush tax cuts, the two wars that are being financed by more debt, and the economic collapse created by federal deregulation of banks and Wall Street. Therein lies the real solution.

Simply put, both the Republicans and Democrats are filling the presidential and Congressional campaigns with noxious lies.

But of all these lies, the Ryan Budget's attack on Medicare and Social Security is the greatest and of the most consequence.

Awesome Quotes: Stephen Colbert

"Paul Ryan -- the man who has electrified the party base with his home spun down-to-earth way of telling the poor to suck it up."