Paul Ryan: Big Spending Conservative

Paul Ryan, the big-spending conservative supported:


The Medicare prescription plan

The Troubled Asset Relief Program,

The auto industry bailout vote in the House, ( after Romney wrote The New York Times op-ed titled “Let Detroit go bankrupt.”)

A massive highway bill that included the “Bridge to Nowhere.”

Ryan, like many Republicans, also voted to raise the debt limit at least five times during the Bush administration, when such votes were considered routine and uncontroversial.

Ryan’s votes on spending came on top of his support for the Bush-era tax cuts,

Ryan’s voting record shows that he was willing to vote for expensive government programs when some other fiscal conservative said no.

Ryan accepted stimulus money for his state while criticizing President Obama's stimulus package:



"JANESVILLE, Wisc. — In 2009, as Rep. Paul D. Ryan was railing against President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package as a “wasteful spending spree,” he wrote at least four letters to Obama’s secretary of energy asking that millions of dollars from the program be granted to a pair of Wisconsin conservation groups, according to documents obtained by the Globe.
The advocacy appeared to pay off; both groups were awarded the economic recovery funds -- one receiving a $20 million grant to help thousands of local businesses and homes improve their energy efficiency, agency documents show.


Ryan’s letters to the energy secretary praising the energy initiatives as he sought a portion of the funding are in sharp contrast to the House Budget Committee chairman’s image as a Tea Party favorite adamantly opposed to federal spending on such programs.

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The additional letters include his praise for the energy program’s aims, and clash with his own budget priorities, which call for curtailing many of the same Department of Energy investments that are designed to spur the growth of green technologies and reduce reliance on fossil fuels..




“I was pleased that the primary objectives of their project will allow residents and businesess in the partner cities to reduce their energy costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and stimulate the local economy by creating new jobs,” Ryan wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu on December 18, 2009, on behalf of the Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation."

Paul Ryan admits that President Obama's stimulus package  helps the local economy and creates jobs!





In his 14 years as a Congressman, Paul Ryan has passed two bills:  One renames a post office (passed in 2000) and the other (passed in 2008) changes the way arrows (as in bows and arrows) are taxed.

Ronald Reagan's Budget Director, David Stockman:  "Paul Ryan's budget plan is a fairy tale."

Stockman writing in the New York Times:

"PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.
      

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

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Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

      

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

      

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

       

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

      

Like his new boss, Mr. Ryan has no serious plan to create jobs.

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In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons. "

David A. Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts Free Markets and Democracy.”