Rep. Paul Ryan on Not Seeing the Great Recession Coming: "Wouldn't you want to fire that congressman?"

Rep. Paul Ryan claims his critics are using baseless attacks against his "Road Map to Dickensian America," never acknowledging the actual point by point criticism in the reality based world. I'm assuming Ryan would prefer no "attacks" and a bit more media fawning, but let's face it, his utopian Milton Friedman/Ayn Randian dream world is pure carnival barker stuff his own party is distancing itself from. Sure people will gather around wanting to believe, but even county fair crowds catch on pretty quick to the con.

Upfront host Mike Gousha (goo-Shay) catches Ryan's hypocrisy when he claims people criticising his plan makes it tougher for everyone to come together. Gousha points out Ryan might have made it "tougher" when he said the president "demonstrated an astounding lack of leadership" on this issue (health care). Ryan's response: "Yeah it does....He did...what I'm saying is..." Ooops!



Gousha asks Ryan about his districts "very high unemployment," and what he can do to help them. Ryan... help? That's a laugh.

Ryan: "They don't need us to go out and borrow a trillion dollars and spend it..." blah blah blah.


Finally, Ryan poses this ironic question to Gousha: "If your congressman knew the fiscal crisis that accured in 2008 was going to happen and did nothing about it because of politics, wouldn't you want to fire that congressman?"

You betcha, even more so if that congressman DIDN'T know his policies would tank the global economy.

And the voters of his district will continue to re-elect this "sincere" corporate huckster.

In fact here's someone else making my argument for me. Enjoy:

Thinkprogress.org: Roll Call has a nice little piece by Steven Dennis about how House GOP budget chief Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget by eliminating Social Security and Medicare is putting some of his colleagues on the hot seat:

A Republican who asked to have his name withheld said the party’s leadership and rank and file aren’t ready to follow Ryan’s lead. “There’s a lot of worry that we beat the Democrats up on health care for cutting Medicare and now we’re going to turn around and do it,” the Republican said.

To be clear about the difference, though, the Democrats had a targeted proposal to try to eliminate specific inefficiencies. They want to take out some bonus subsidies to private insurance firms that Republicans larded onto Medicare in the 1990s. And they have a plan for a beefed-up Medicare payments commission that, in theory, should allow reimbursement rates to be made in a more technically sound manner. Some people claim these measures will have an adverse impact on patients, but that’s really a quite debatable claim.

The House GOP budget, by contrast, just goes after Medicare with a chain saw. Right now, the rapidly rising cost of health care implies rapidly increasing Medicare costs. Ryan doesn’t have a plan to control those exploding costs. Instead, his plan is to refuse to pay the bill. This saves a ton of money. If instead of paying for old people’s health care you just . . . don’t pay for their health care, then you reduce expenditures