GOP convention myths: the lie behind Love

By Paddy Ryan

If you don't already know who Mia Love is, you certainly will by next Tuesday night, after she delivers her speech at the GOP convention in Tampa.

Mia Love is the African-American, Mormon mayor of small-town Saratoga Springs, Utah. She is also the latest Republican to challenge Congressman Jim Matheson for a congressional seat in Utah.

The story of Mia Love's parents is a classic American “Rags to Riches” story. Love's parents migrated to the U.S. from Haiti in 1973 with virtually nothing.

“Her desire to serve came from her parents, who immigrated to Brooklyn in 1973 with little money and only a hope that the American dream could become a reality for them."

Love's parents were able to reach the American dream, climbing their way into the upper-middle class by the time Love reached college.

Her parents were able to climb out of poverty and achieve the American dream with the help of a society that encouraged government institutions aimed at increasing social mobility.

Now, Love wants to either end or cut those programs aimed at increasing social mobility. Today, Love thinks the same programs that helped her parents attain the American Dream are nothing more than 'entitlements' for lazy people.

Here are a few of Love's policies that would prevent poor, working, and middle class Americans from attaining the American dream:

Love will repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act, which she refers to as Obama Care, because she claims that it is 'bad policy for our country and for our future'. Love's repeal would force nearly 5.4 million seniors and people with disabilities to pay more for healthcare.

Love will fight to end medicare as we know it, privatize social security, and gut social safety programs for the poor.

“I am ready to go to Washington and work to pass the Romney/Ryan agenda"

Love will slash the Food Stamp Program by $133.5 billion - more than 17 percent - over the next ten years, ending assistance for millions of low-income families. Love's drastic cuts "would primarily affect low-income families with children, seniors, and people with disabilities."

Mia Love is a shell, nothing more than a rubber stamp for an extreme right-wing agenda.

And now that Love's own family is upper middle-class, she has no problem supporting policies that would hurt low income families. The classic GOP "too bad, I got mine" approach.

Good people of Utah's fourth Congressional District please don't support Mia Love. The last thing that our country needs is another self-righteous, hypocritical, tea-party rubber-stamp, like Mia Love, in Congress.

Open those checkbooks seniors, Romney/Ryan is going to cost you!

From Igor Volsky - ThinkProgress

republished by Paddy Ryan

The Romney/Ryan proposal to transform Medicare’s guaranteed benefit into a “premium support” structure for future retirees could increase costs by almost $60,000 for seniors reaching the age of 65 in 2023, a new report from the Center for American Progress finds. Current seniors would also have to pay more for preventive, hospital, and physician services should Romney and Ryan repeal the Affordable Care Act, facing an increase in health spending of between $7,900 and $18,600 over the course of their retirement.

Current seniors will pay more. The premium support structure does not kick in until 2023, so current seniors will remain in the existing Medicare program. But should Romney/Ryan repeal the Affordable Care Act’s savings, beneficiaries will face higher cost sharing and premiums (particularly for preventive services) and seniors who have received prescription drug discounts, will now pay more for their medications. What’s more, Romney/Ryan would lower Medicaid spending significantly beginning next year, shifting federal spending to states and beneficiaries, and increasing costs for the 9 million Medicare recipients who are dependent on Medicaid.

Romney camp admits Medicare cuts will hit current seniors

By Joan McCarter from the Dailykos
republished by Paddy Ryan

That cynical ploy of the Romney/Ryan plan to gut Medicare, but to keep the senior vote by putting those cuts off on the next batch of retirees, is looking increasingly empty. That's because their plan to repeal Obamacare, and to "restore" the $716 billion in provider cuts, means that Romney/Ryan will either have to make up those funds with revenues or with cuts to current seniors, because without that money, Medicare becomes insolvent by 2016. The Republican allergy to new revenue pretty much determines they'll squeeze that money out of seniors, and Romney advisers are admitting it.

Romney campaign adviser Ed Gillespie was the first to admit they'd target current seniors by raising the eligibility age for Medicare. And now another adviser is admitting that benefits cuts are definitely on the table.

Avik Roy, an outside health care adviser to the Romney campaign, admits that committing to billions of dollars in higher Medicare spending in the near-term will make it difficult for Romney to achieve its separate goal of reducing overall federal spending to modern lows. But he notes that Romney could make up the difference elsewhere in the budget or, by “mak[ing] other changes to the Medicare program, such as increased means-testing, that don’t alter the program’s basic structure.”

Means testing would apply to people on Medicare now, and it would be a cut to benefits, benefits that retirees earned through years of work and contributing to the system.

That's not the only thing seniors would be losing under Romney/Ryan. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, with it goes the $4.1 billion seniors and disabled people have saved on prescription drugs. That amounts to an average of $768 in annual savings for Medicare patients, a significant chunk of money for anyone on a fixed income. Also gone with repeal are the free cancer screenings, mammograms and other preventive services.

Romney and Ryan are lying, no surprise, when they say that anyone on Medicare now won't see a change in their benefits. They're playing a shell game with American seniors.

With Romney-Ryan, GOP Becomes Grand Old Private-Equity Party

By John Nichols from The Nation

republished by Paddy Ryan

The ticket Republicans will nominate in Tampa next week is uniquely connected to the "vulture capitalist" constituency, and uniquely committed to protecting the interests of today's robber-baron class.

Paul Ryan grew up in a wealthy family with a Republican bent and all the right political and corporate connections.

He could easily have made his way into the private sector -- doing business with family and friends, as have generations of wealthy Ryans.

But Paul was always the starry-eyed, perhaps wild-eyed. idealist. He read Austrian economic texts and far-right authors with a passion, committing to memory the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and his intellectual heartthrob, Ayn Rand. Reading Rand, the newly-minted Republican vice presidential contender once said was "the reason I got involved in public service."

Ryan has since tried to distance himself from Rand's extreme atheism and even more extreme attitudes regarding the least among us. But his older brother, Tobin, told reporters: “Paul can still quote every verse out of Ayn Rand.”

Rand's greed-is-good thinking plays well with hedge-fund managers, private equity players and the "vulture capitalist" class that enjoys taking a break from pillaging to plod through novels about, well, guys like them.

But, as the youngest Ryan child, Paul got a little mavericky.  Much as he talks up the private sector, Paul Ryan forged a career in the public sector. He's worked as a congressional aide and congressman -- with brief breaks as a conservative "think tank" associate and a speech writer for Jack Kemp's 1996 presidential campaign -- since leaving college.

But older brother Tobin followed the more tradition route for sons of privilege.

As Fortune magazine notes, Tobin Ryan is a full partner with Seidler Equity Partners, a California-based "private equity investment firm that partners with visionary executives to grow their businesses." Before he went to Seidler, Tobin worked with a politically-connected Wisconsin-based private equity firm, King Capital (founded by former Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman Steve King, who served as finance chair for Paul Ryan's congressional runs). He also put in a stint with Bain & Company, the consulting firm where Mitt Romney says he "enjoyed working with a team of people to arrive at ideas and solutions" for what Texas Governor Rick Perry described as "vulture capitalist" interventions.

Tobin Ryan joined the Bain & Co. team after Romney moved to the private-equity firm that the consulting firm spawned, Bain Capital. But the connection has raised eyebrows, and spawned plenty of headlines, in the financial press.

The Ryan brothers are, in Tobin's words, "very close." Indeed, they live "about a three-wood away from each other" in the town where the Ryans have for decades been a preeminent (construction and contracting) business family. Tobin, a frequent media spokesman and surrogate for his brother, refers to Paul's first U.S. House race as "our first campaign."

"So we've now got a former private equity executive running for president alongside the brother of a current private equity executive,"" observes Fortune senior editor Dan Primack.

And Paul Ryan, like Mitt Romney, is politically committed to the aiding the masters of the universe who run the private-equity empires that now so dominate the U.S. economy.

The "Roadmap for America's Future" budget plan that Ryan wrote in 2010 -- the document that, arguably, launched into orbit as a Republican star -- pledges to change tax policies to create "an enhanced investment climate."

Specifically, Ryan proposed to:

* eliminate taxes on "interest, capital gains, or dividends" and estate taxes

* allow investments to be "fully deducted immediately" by corporations

" eliminate the corporate income tax entirely" and replace it with "a single-digit consumption tax" that businesses and investors would calculate themselves.

* repeal the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to assure that millionaires and billionaires who take advantage of tax-code loopholes will have to pay something

How good would a Romney-Ryan administration be to the private-equity constituency?

According to a study by the chairman's staff of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, most working Americans who earn under $200,000 a year would see their taxes go up under the latest version of the Ryan budget. By the same token, Mitt Romney -- whose income is "comprised of interest income, capital gains and dividends" -- would pay less than one percent of his income in taxes.

The Romney-Ryan approach, forged and advocated for by candidates with personal and family ties to private-equity concerns, will yield great benefits for those very wealthy Americans who understand private equity as a personal reality.

But as the Joint Economic Committee report says, "House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan claims that the policies outlined in his budget will reform the broken tax code and put 'hardworking taxpayers ahead of special interests.' In reality, the Ryan plan gives the largest tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and will pay for those tax cuts by raising the tax burden on middle-class workers."

Indeed, the report concludes, "The richest households would receive the greatest benefit from these changes. The top 0.1 percent, for example, would receive an estimated average federal tax cut of close to $1.18 million per taxpaying household in 2015."

America's robber barons have had to wait for more than a century -- since Teddy Roosevelt went rogue and joined the anti-trust campaigners -- for a Republican ticket that would truly represent their interests.

But every indication is that the Romney-Ryan ticket will be of, by and for the private-equity managers who have become the masters of America's economic universe.

The Romney-Ryan ticket rejects not just the American faith of Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt but of Republican presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt.

"The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power," Teddy Roosevelt warned at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910. "The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise."

That remains the prime need.

Now, unfortunately, the party of Teddy Roosevelt is preparing to nominate a ticket that is passionately at odds with the principle that the general welfare must prevail over the passions of men 'whose chief object is to hold and increase their power."
 

Copyright © 2012 The Nation

Romney Advisor Says Medicare Eligibility Age Would Increase

By David Dayen from firedoglake

republished by Paddy Ryan

Considering what we learned this morning, between Paul Ryan defending a third stimulus to extend unemployment and COBRA benefits and deliver cash payments in February 2002, when unemployment was at the astronomical 5.6%, and Ryan arguing for a bailout of the auto industry to save his hometown GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, perhaps we should not hype all these dire warnings about what a Mitt Romney Administration would do in office. Both parts of the ticket seem ideologically malleable enough to say one thing when the economy is in the hands of Democrats and do another when the responsibility falls to them. Still, we should probably take this statement from senior Romney advisor Ed Gillespie at face value:

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie how the campaign would extend the life of the program if the Romney-Ryan reforms won’t kick in until 2023, long after Medicare reached insolvency. Gillespie replied by insisting that a Romney administration would raise the age eligibility to 67:
WALLACE: But the problem is, those reforms don’t kick in until 2023. It doesn’t affect any seniors or anybody close to being a senior. But that doesn’t solve the Medicare part A problem which kicks in in 2016. What are you going to do to keep solvent between 2016, after you have repealed Obamacare, and 2023?
GILLESPIE: Governor Romney supports increasing over time bringing Medicare eligibility in line with the Social Security retirement age … The Congressional Budget Office says assumptions about the Medicare trust fund being solvent through 2024 under the Obamacare proposal is unrealistic.

This is the action that gets the Romney campaign out of the box where it has confined themselves. They have said that they would entertain no Medicare changes for current or near-retirees. But with no changes, and indeed with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Medicare trust fund runs out of money in 2016, at which point you have to make a number of drastic changes because otherwise your spending authority runs out. So in exchange for giving more subsidies to Medicare Advantage, and more payments to hospitals and health care providers who already voluntary gave them back in the ACA deal for more covered customers, Romney would have to do something like increase the eligibility age, and do it sometime in the first term.

The Obama Administration is not just an imperfect but an impossible messenger for the proposition that this is a horrible idea, since during the debt limit negotiations, the President proposed it. But let’s briefly recap why this would be terrible. You would actually raise costs in all insurance risk pools by increasing the eligibility age. Moving 65 and 66 year-olds off Medicare would mean that the younger senior citizens would phase out of the Medicare risk pool, making that a sicker population, and that those 65 and 66 year-olds would phase into the individual and group market pools, making THAT a sicker population, too. As a result, health care costs would rise across the board, far more than the savings to the federal government. Individuals would pay for those savings, and the health care system as a whole would end up more expensive. In addition, this would of course be a nightmare for 65 and 66 year-olds, many of whom would find themselves unable to access coverage in those years. They would probably delay necessary medical treatments until they reach Medicare-eligible age, making those treatments more costly to the government. And because of the trust fund issue, this would simply have to happen right away.

I’m perfectly willing to believe that Romney and Ryan are frauds on fiscal policy, and would put in some kind of tax-cut stimulus immediately to boost demand. But if they hold to giving back the Medicare savings, which they’ve now signaled very loudly they would, they would have to come up with some alternative method to extend the life of the trust fund. And increasing the eligibility age is the only policy they’ve proposed.