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Many progressives are expressing grave concerns over the thought that President Obama may use his State of the Union address next week to announce a willingness to “compromise” on Social Security and Medicare by giving in to demands from deficit hawks that “entitlements” be trimmed. But it is the Republican Party that has used the president’s speech to the nation as a means of endorsing an extreme agenda that would kill Medicare and Medicaid and fully privatize Social Security.
Republicans continued a political tradition on Friday by their choice to deliver the rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union address, a person and a performance that is usually memorable only for gaffes or if some embarrassing slip-up occurs. The name and the message are usually of little consequence and typically fade away in the aftermath of the commander in chief’s annual message.
But the GOP’s pick for the thankless task of following President Obama on Tuesday night could be dissected and detailed more deeply and with the potential for for permanent effects.
The Republicans chose Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to take on the president and lay out the party’s platform of opposition to the Democratic administration and its legislative goals now that it has once again achieved control of the House after a November landslide win.
Ryan is labeled a “rising star” and a “young gun” from a key battleground state within the ranks of the GOP establishment and chairs the powerful House Budget Committee in the wake of the GOP’s big win. Good, safe choice, say most pundits.
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan will give the Republicans’ response to the State of the Union address, once again putting the Wisconsin Republican center stage as a foil to President Barack Obama.
Ryan, who has drawn the praise of the president in the past, is “uniquely qualified to address the state of our economy and the fiscal challenges that face our country,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Friday.
Picking Ryan for such a high-profile assignment after giving him the chairmanship of the Budget Committee creates the assumption that the GOP endorses the Wisconsin lawmaker’s stack of legislative proposals to solve the “deficit crisis” and cut federal spending. Ryan’s most ambitious proposals would basically remake (or eliminate entirely) the world of “entitlements”; of course “entitlements” being the wonky term for what most Americans know as Social Security and Medicare.
Rep. Ryan put out a highly detailed and absolutely enormous document called “The Roadmap for America’s Future,” a paen to conservative principles of smaller government, remaking the tax code, taking chunks out of federal spending (but not the military) and revolutionizing “entitlements.”
The “Roadmap,” initially ignored by Republican leaders but now receiving a major endorsement, leaves little untouched in the machinery of the federal government that means the most to ordinary Americans.
The Ryan “Roadmap” would…
- Cut the tax rate for the wealthiest one percent of Americans in half while raising taxes on three-quarters of taxpayers.
- Eliminate Medicare and Medicaid, replacing it with a system of government vouchers for recipients to purchase private insurance on their own. Medicare would eventually lose nearly 80 percent of its current size.
- Cut Social Security benefits for most recipients and use money paid in to Social Security to fund a system of private accounts. Social Security would eventually become insolvent under this plan, but would be kept alive by transferring billions of dollars from the rest of the budget to keep it afloat.
Most Americans do not support the ideas outline in Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” plan, leaving the GOP’s tacit endorsement of his proposals a likely political nightmare for the party.
A new poll finds that overwhelming majorities of Americans oppose benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and would rather see higher taxes and cuts to military spending before “entitlements” are touched.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program. And asked to choose among cuts to Medicare, Social Security or the nation’s third-largest spending program — the military — a majority by a large margin said cut the Pentagon.
sure lets give more money to wall street and then when the billionaires swindle our money lets argue for less government regulation
stupid republicans are rich and white and only care about themselves. they dont care about the environment, the poor, or minorities.
Who cares about Greedy Old Party’s response to Obama’s State of the Union address. Any rebuttal planned before they’ve even heard the speech smacks of their never ending dishonesty.
I could care less what Paul Ryan has to say. He’s just another GOP puppet with strings pulled by the super rich.
Paul Ryan and the GREEDY GOP won’t give Seniors a decent Social Security
cost of living adjustment formula with a guaranteed minimum each year, but they gave the
wealthy juicy tax cuts guaranteed each year!
I do NOT agree that Social Security and Medicare are “entitlements!” I paid my OWN tax money into both of these programs, so how come the GOP call these “entitlements?”
What Ryan would suggest is again picking the pockets of middle and low income earners to continue shoving even more money into the pockets of the 2% who pay very little in taxes to begin with, despite the rate they are stated to pay. Loopholes and most of their ‘income’ is from capital gains which means they are paying less than middle & lower income earners already. They have not created American jobs in over a decade although that was the lie they used to lower their tax rates and remove the estate tax.
The majority of the highest 2% inherited their wealth, they didn’t earn diddly squat, they were born into wealth.
Social Security & Medicare are paid into by all wage earners, they are not entitlements or government handouts and the Teapublicans have stripped benefits over & over from Medicare already. Middle & lower income earners have always been the backbone of our country as we are the ones who actually perform work, goods & services.
Mr. Ryan, like so many of his born rich corporate welfare babies have no idea of what it means to work for a living, stretch a dollar, add rice to a meal so there’s enough soup for everyone, do without new shoes because your children need them and your children come first, raise your own children, teach moral values that include being kind to all.
The entire Teapublican platform is based upon greed, corporate welfare and rewarding the rich for being born into the proper family.
Our ancestors left England to get away from the Teapublican party mores and the Teapublicans are Hell bent on taking us back to a time when only rich white men could own property, including other humans, only rich white men could receive an education and only rich white men could vote.
Teapublicans, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers, Pharma, Insurance, Republican party, Chamber of Commerce & evangelicals.
If the costs to service our military debt (thanks “W”), costs for veterans and current costs of the military are all counted as military spending, as they currently aren’t, the Military is our largest spending program, not third largest. Welcome to the military-industrial complex.
And what’s driving the costs in our next most costly spending programs is the insurance-pharmaceutical complex. This is where the insurance companies will pay for drugs and medical procedures with questionable benefit (VIOXX, Fen Phen), marketed directly to consumers to drive demand, as long as someone (corporate group insurance plans or individual insurance plans) will collect the premiums.
If the Teapublicans and Reparty want to cut the deficit, let them start by reigning in unnecessary military spending and the marketing departments of the major pharmaceutical companies.
This will shrink the budget (reduced unwarranted military costs) and lower labor costs (lower group insurance costs), the two things that will certainly boost the economy and make America more competitive.
But — It’ll never happen.
Republicans are no more genuinely interested in cutting the deficit than Democrats. The evidence of decades says that they are, in fact, considerably less so. Our fiscal circumstances were fine until 1981, our debt as a percentage of GDP decreasing continuously since WW2. We are in the hole we’re in because of tax cuts without the slightest effort to bring expenditures in line with revenues.
Ryan works too closely with the progressives. His idea of eliminating the tax-deductions is floating around in the Soros’s think-tanks as well. I would rather see major tax-reform – like a flat tax – instead of patch here and there.
The Debt Commission plan is the closest to what the ‘professional left and right’ can agree on. The progressives even put a carbon tax in it (disguised as transportation tax).
As long as the Congress stays away from VAT, I can live with the Obama Fiscal Commission proposal.