Paul Ryan Supported Stimulus and Unemployment Benefits Under George W. Bush

UPDATE BELOW ON PAUL RYAN'S CONNECTION TO TODD AKIN.


"I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky," - Flannery O'Connor, in a letter to Maryat Lee, May 1960.


Why is it important to keep talking about Rep. Paul Ryan's double-speak hypocrisy?  Because this is the guy Willard Romney believes is qualified to step into the office of the presidency in the unlikely event something tragic should happen to him.

But even more important, this is the guy beloved and idolized by the Teapublicans--the guy they believe is the real standard bearer for their ideology of tax cuts for the rich, fundamentally changing Medicare and Social Security, and their dislike of federal money being used to bail out auto companies or pumped into an anemic economy struggling with a recession. 

But let's look closely at the real Paul Ryan, not the fantasy the Teapublicans have constructed, and let's look at how dedicated he is to his core principles.

We already know that he eagerly sought stimulus funds, which he argued against but at the same time privately praised, for his congressional district--something he denied before he was reminded of the inconvenient truth--he took the stimulus funds he considered antithetical to his hard-core conservative principles, then blamed his staff for the hypocrisy.

From the Associated Press:  "Ryan’s statement directly counters the evidence of four letters obtained by the AP which the congressman wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, praising energy programs supported by the stimulus and requesting funds for initiatives in his district.

Ryan’s private praise for Department of Energy programs and his written requests for stimulus funds contradict not only his public criticism of the 2009 stimulus bill, but also many of the budget priorities he has laid out, including cuts to investments in green technologies.

Raising further questions about the vice presidential candidate’s claim today that he never sought stimulus money, Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck referred AP to previous explanations by the congressman’s office that by requesting funds Ryan was simply 'providing a legitimate constituent service.' ”


Now comes more uncomfortable reality for the Teapublicans to face.  Their anti-tax, anti-entitlement, anti-stimulus hero, in fact, spoke forcefully in favor of how a stimulus can provide jobs and needed funds to shore up an economy suffering during a recession.  He lobbied his fellow congressmen and women to join him in voting for the very thing he, only a few years later, was forcefully against.

When did this happen? 

During the George W. Bush administration. 

"...when President Obama is pushing for the spending. When it was President George W. Bush arguing for more stimulus to boost a slow economy in the early 2000s, Ryan's economic analysis was entirely different.

RYAN speaking on the floor of the House:   "What we're trying to accomplish today with the passage of this third stimulus package is to create jobs and help the unemployed," Ryan said, in comments unearthed by MSNBC's "Up with Chris Hayes" and provided to HuffPost. "What we're trying to accomplish is to pass the kinds of legislation that when they've passed in the past have grown the economy and gotten people back to work."
Ryan continued:  "In recessions unemployment lags on well after a recovery has taken place," Ryan accurately noted in 2002. "

Ryan called such stimulus a "constructive answer" worked out on "a bipartisan basis." Opponents of stimulus, Ryan said, ought to "drop the demagoguery."

"We've got to get the engine of economic growth growing again because we now know, because of recession, we don't have the revenues that we wanted to, we don't have the revenues we need, to fix Medicare, to fix Social Security, to fix these issues. We've got to get Americans back to work. Then the surpluses come back, then the jobs come back. That is the constructive answer we're trying to accomplish here on, yes, a bipartisan basis. I urge members to drop the demagoguery and to pass this bill to help us work together to get the American people back to work and help those people who've lost their jobs,"

["Bush's stimulus, which included an extension of jobless benefits and resulted in checks being mailed to millions of Americans, was signed in March 2002.']

RYAN again:  "We have a lot of laid off workers, and more layoffs are occurring," the congressman continued. "And we know, as a historical fact, that even if our economy begins to slowly recover, unemployment is going to linger on and on well after that recovery takes place. What we have been trying to do starting in October and into December and now is to try and get people back to work. The things we're trying to pass in this bill are the time-tested, proven, bipartisan solutions to get businesses to stop laying off people, to hire people back, and to help those people who have lost their jobs.

It's more than just giving someone an unemployment check," he said then. "It's also helping those people with their health insurance while they've lost their jobs and more important than just that unemployment check, it's to do what we can to give people a paycheck."

h/tHuffPost


"Ryan has denounced the 2009 Recovery Act signed by President Obama as “a wasteful spending spree” and “failed neo-Keynesian experiment,” and – as The Huffington Post pointed out this morning — dismissed as “sugar-high economics” the idea that government spending, through measures like payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits, can help shore up a faltering economy.

But in 2002, when then-President Bush was seeking a roughly $120 billion package of tax cuts, tax incentives for business and unemployment benefits to jump-start the economy, Ryan offered a vigorous defense of the plan." --Up with Chris Hayes

How do we respond to this?

How about this way:  We take everything Rep. Paul Ryan has said against President Obama's stimulus package and extending unemployment or any benefit for Americans and ignore them, because it is as plain as the "R" after his name, that he doesn't believe a word of it, and that is evident from the above statements Ryan made during Mr. Bush's administration.

Ryan doesn't mean what he says.  He truly is an embodiment of Randian thought: 

"Rand's explanation of values presents the view that an individual's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own well-being—it is for his life and his self-interest that an individual ought to adhere to a moral code.^[49]

Ryan adheres to his own "moral code" that directs him to say whatever he has to say in order to achieve his goal--political power.  His "code" is only a means by which he achieves that power.  A few years ago, he enthusiastically supported a stimulus plan and other policies that he has thoroughly rejected under a Democratic president. 

It is obvious that Paul Ryan is not the courageously brave politician willing to say unpopular things in order to solve our economic problems.  Paul Ryan is a typical ambitious life-long politician willing to say whatever his party wants to hear in order to advance his career.  He's a politician, but not the kind the GOP is trying to sell to the country. 

VIDEO LINK HERE.

UPDATE:

Paul Ryan teamed with Todd Akin on anti-choice legislation. Ryan and Akin were original cosponsors of controversial legislation that would narrow the definition of rape.

The proposal, H.R. 3, “changed the definition of ‘rape’ to ‘forcible rape,’ until public pressure forced the bill’s supporters to remove that unacceptable and narrow definition,” according to a New York Daily News account.
'While Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are working overtime to distance themselves from Rep. Todd Akin’s comments on rape, they are contradicting their own records. Mr. Romney supports the Human Life Amendment, which would ban abortion in all instances, even in the case of rape and incest. In fact, that amendment is a central part of the Republican Party’s platform that is being voted on tomorrow. And, as a Republican leader in the House, Mr. Ryan worked with Mr. Akin to try to pass laws that would ban abortion in all cases, and even narrow the definition of ‘rape.’ Every day, women across America grapple with difficult and intensely personal health decisions—decisions that should ultimately be between a woman and her doctor. These decisions are not made any easier when Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan treat women’s health as a matter of partisan politics.”

The GOP war on women continues--and it's getting worse.

Here's a link to Infidel753's blogpost on Todd Akin and his disasterous comments.