Archive for category Paul Ryan
Medicare Cost-Shift Theory Debunked
Posted by Richard Warnick in Health Care, National Politics, Paul Ryan, Republicans, Vouchers on May 8, 2013
Via Jon Walker on FDL (emphasis added):
A new study in Health Affairs appears to disprove the commonly cited myth that public insurance programs “cost-shift” onto private insurance.
…In reality, the study found lower Medicare payment rates actually reduce what private insurance companies pay.
…This study reinforces that the real issue at play is market power, not cost shifting. Compared to other countries with single-payer or all-payer systems, providers in the United States have more power to demand higher prices.
Something to think about before attempting to voucher-ize Medicare.
More info:
How Much do Hospitals Cost Shift? A Review of the Evidence (PDF)
A Review of the Evidence on Hospital Cost-Shifting (PDF)
Paul Ryan Does A Complete 360
Posted by Richard Warnick in Federal Budget, National Politics, Paul Ryan, Republicans on January 28, 2013
August 1, 2011
Congressman Paul Ryan voted for the Budget Control Act of 2011, which raised the debt ceiling and set up “automatic” sequestration cuts of $109 billion in 2013, including $55 billion to defense. These cuts are now set to take effect on March 1. “The goal was never that these defense cuts actually occur,” Ryan lamely said later.
August 17, 2012
Ryan accused President Obama of wanting to make “devastating” defense cuts. Although Republicans typically maintain that government spending cannot create jobs, while campaigning for Vice President Ryan flipped and said: “Now there’s one thing we’re going to have to deal with to make sure we protect jobs in Virginia and around America. And that is these devastating defense cuts that president Obama is promising. That is the lack of leadership that he is providing. They call it sequester and all of that…”
January 27, 2013
Ryan now says “I think the sequester is going to happen because that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, we can’t lose those spending cuts.” Ryan rules out raising revenues to reduce the federal deficit.
UPDATE: On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning, Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman took the deficit scolds to school.
“If you spend a lot of your time talking about the debt and the entitlements are the big problem, the message that actually what we need to is promote jobs gets lost. And in fact, we spent the last two and a half years focused entirely on arguing about the long-term deficit and entitlements and doing nothing for employment right now.
…“People like me have been saying for five years, don’t worry about these deficit things for the time being, they’re a non-issue,” Krugman observed. “Other people have been saying, ‘Imminent crisis, imminent crisis!’ How many times do they have to be wrong and do people like me have to be right before people start to believe this?”
UPDATE: Media Matters: Media Talk Deficits, Ignore Economic Growth
Experts like Paul Krugman consistently argue that economic growth is more pressing of an issue than deficits, and that the focus on deficits and debt distracts policymakers from the very real problem of sustained high unemployment and a weak economy. But television media are largely ignoring these experts.
UPDATE: The GOP’s Big Sequester Bluff
UPDATE: Three Charts Reminding The GOP That Domestic Spending Is Already Headed Toward Historic Lows
UPDATE: Austerity Is Dead: Can Someone Please Tell Paul Ryan and His Deluded GOP Cohorts?
Michael Grunwald: GOP’s Up-is-Downism Puts News Reporters in an Awkward Position
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), Health Care, Mitt Romney, National Politics, Paul Ryan, Republicans on December 1, 2012
Great post by Time’s Michael Grunwald (the whole thing is worth reading):
It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.
This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.
…The next fight is likely to involve the $200 billion worth of stimulus that Obama included in his recycled fiscal cliff plan that somehow didn’t exist before Election Day. I’ve taken a rather keen interest in the topic of stimulus, so I’ll be interested to see how this is covered. Keynesian stimulus used to be uncontroversial in Washington; every 2008 presidential candidate had a stimulus plan, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. But in early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version. The current Republican position seems to be that the fiscal cliff’s instant austerity would destroy the economy, which is odd after four years of Republican clamoring for austerity, and that the cliff’s military spending cuts in particular would kill jobs, which is even odder after four years of Republican insistence that government spending can’t create jobs.
…Whatever. I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But we’re not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day.
What Foreign Policy Debate?
Posted by Richard Warnick in 2012 Elections, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, National Politics, Paul Ryan, Republicans, This Blog on October 22, 2012
The problem with tonight’s presidential foreign policy debate is that both major political parties are committed to the almost the exact same foreign policy. Despite the fact most Americans are against it.
E-mail from RootsAction:
Even the New York Times has reversed its position of over 11 years and editorialized for withdrawal from Afghanistan now.
The crowd at the Republican National Convention cheered for immediate withdrawal when Clint Eastwood and Senator Rand Paul proposed it.
The U.K. and other allies are speeding up their withdrawal plans.
A strong majority of Americans has favored withdrawal in polls for years now.
And who’s left favoring two more years of war, followed by 10 more years of lower-level war?
These guys: Obama, Romney, Biden, and Ryan.
Tell them to give up on endless war in Afghanistan.
The military-industrial complex shouldn’t get to have two candidates for president.
UPDATE: What Jill Stein would say if she were allowed to debate tonight:
“We support a Green New Deal, which will put everyone back to work, at the same time that it puts a halt to climate change and it makes wars for oil obsolete.”
I’d be surprised if we hear the term “climate change” tonight from either Romney or Obama.
UPDATE: Suddenly Centrist Romney Repeatedly Praises Obama’s Foreign Policy In Debate
NYT: “Mr. Romney’s problem is that he does not actually have any real ideas on foreign policy beyond what President Obama has already done, or plans to do.”
Obama boasts of the massive amount of military spending under his presidency. Romney then says he wants to spend more. It is inconceivable that anyone would suggest that spending almost more than all other countries on the planet combined is excessive. That is the election in a nutshell.
…A primary reason this debate is so awful is because DC media people like Bob Scheiffer have zero interest in challenging any policy that is embraced by both parties, and since most foreign policies are embraced by both parties, he has no interest in challenging most of the issues that are relevant: drones, sanctions, Israel, etc.
VP Biden: ‘Take Responsibility’
Posted by Richard Warnick in 2012 Elections, Federal Budget, Foreign Policy, Joe Biden, National Politics, Paul Ryan, Tax Policy on October 11, 2012
That’s my take-away from tonight’s vice-presidential debate. Vice President Biden kept asking Congressman Ryan to take responsibility for the nation’s well-being, something the Republicans in Congress have conspicuously refused to do. Their plan has been to sabotage the economy and try to blame the Obama administration.
VP Biden nailed Ryan on his faux concern for the middle class:
Stop talking about how you care about people. Show me something. Show me a policy. Show me a policy where you take responsibility.
And by the way, they talk about this Great Recession as if it fell out of the sky, like, oh my goodness, where did it come from? It came from this man voting to put two wars in a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion- dollar tax cut for a — very wealthy. I was there. I voted against him. I said, no, we can’t afford that. And now all of a sudden these guys are so seized with a concern about the debt that they created —
Biden went after Ryan on his party’s obsession with tax cuts for the rich.
“Instead of signing pledges to Grover Norquist not to ask the wealthiest among us not to contribute to bring back the middle class, they should be signing a pledge saying to the middle class we’re going to level the playing field,” the vice president said.
“It’s about time they took responsibility,” he added.
Now that Ryan is running in a national election, he won’t say what plans he and Willard (“Mitt”) Romney have. He won’t give details or accept any responsibility for tax policy, the budget, national security or foreign policy. In contrast, VP Biden kept emphasizing that President Obama has taken responsibility and made some hard decisions that turned out pretty well.
In all, Biden used the word “responsibility” 13 times. Rep. Ryan used it once, in his closing statement – “We will take responsibility,” Ryan said defensively. But he was referring to a hypothetical future, not now.
Moderator Martha Raddatz deserves credit for excellent follow-up questions, especially on foreign policy. Also for ignoring the rule against addressing Ryan as “congressman.” But she said, “Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke.” That’s false.
More info:
Transcript: Biden-Ryan Vice Presidential Debate
At The Vice Presidential Debate: Ryan Told 24 Myths In 40 Minutes
Biden says Romney revealed true self with ’47 percent’ remarks
ThinkProgress Liveblogs The Vice Presidential Debate
TPM Video: ‘On The Edge of Truth’
Posted by Richard Warnick in 2012 Elections, 4th Estate (Media), National Politics, Paul Ryan, Republicans on August 30, 2012
HuffPo: Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech Ignites Media War Over Facts
TPM: On The Edge of Truth Last night, cable news personalities could not bring themselves to say Paul Ryan lied in his RNC speech.
“I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “I’m sure they will.” Oh, those irrepressible fact-checkers, always caring about the difference between true and false – unlike the oh-so-serious journalists on CNN.
WaPo’s James Downie: “With tonight’s speech, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have doubled down on their twin bets of 2012 — that journalists will sit back and name winners and losers without regard to who is telling the truth, and that voters are too ignorant to care about the truth. Do not let them be right.”
More info: Departure From Usual: Traditional Media Call Out Ryan For Factually Dubious Speech
UPDATE:
Paul Ryan Obscures His Koch-Backed Agenda With a Pack of Lies in Convention Speech
The gamble the Romney campaign has made throughout this campaign, and most obviously in this year’s Republican National Convention, is that the truth no longer matters, and that facts are irrelevant to the voting process. There’s probably less risk to that gamble than one might think.
UPDATE: Jon Walker on FDL: Paul Ryan Blames Obama for Things Paul Ryan Did
UPDATE: Ryan was only a warm-up act for tonight’s festival of lies. Think Progress notes: Romney has led a post-truth campaign. A top adviser even admitted earlier this week, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
Morello Responds to Ryan: Must Read!
Posted by Larry Bergan in Activist groups, Human Rights, Laugh, Paul Ryan on August 20, 2012
When are Republicans going to stop associating themselves with musicians who don’t like them by playing their songs at political events or saying they like them?
Read Morello’s great response to Ryan in Rolling Stone:
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.
I have to admit, I don’t know much about “Rage Against The Machine” or their music, but this interview with Bill Moyers shows his passion and intelligence. Tom Morello cares about people.
Ryan cares about rich people.
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