So now that Mitt Romney has appointed prominent Koch dealer, Paul Ryan as his accomplice in the Romney for Plutocrat project, very earnest people are working overtime to make Paul Ryan look good.
There's a video that has gone viral with right-wingers showing Bill Clinton's former chief-of-staff praising Paul Ryan as an "amazing" numbers guy with a budget proposal more serious than the President's.
A video of former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles began circulating in conservative news outlets today. In the clip, the Democratic co-chair of President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform gives high praises to Paul Ryan's budget plan.http://news.yahoo.com/..."I'm telling you, this guy is amazing. I always thought I was OK with arithmetic. This guy can run circles around me," Bowles tells a class of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"He is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did by four trillion dollars."
The video was shot on September 8, 2011, but was just uploaded to YouTube yesterday. What's striking is that not only does Bowles, a former U.S. Senate candidate from North Carolina, praise Ryan's effort, but he is also highly critical of the budget offered by President Obama.
Bowles was also appointed in 2010 as the Democratic co-chair of President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
What's amazing to me is Paul Ryan's ability to amaze presumably intelligent people.
Washington Post did a breakdown of how Ryan's "amazing" and "marvelous" budget would actually affect people who have not been privileged with prestigious careers in government and academia like Erskine Bowles.
The truth is that the Ryan budget’s largest long-term savings don’t come from Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security, or even Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security put together. They come from everything else. Ryan says that under his budget, everything the federal government does that is not Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security will be cut to less than 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means defense, infrastructure, education, food safety, energy research, national parks, civil service, the FBI — all of it. Right now, that category of spending is 12.5 percent of GDP.http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
How is this amazing? This is radical and dangerous. In another article the Washington Post digs deeper on the real world consequences.
Over the next decade, Ryan plans to spend about 16 percent less than the White House on “income security” programs for the poor — that’s everything from food stamps to housing assistance to the earned-income tax credit. (Ryan’s budget would authorize $4.8 trillion between 2013 and 2022; the White House’s would spend $5.7 trillion.) Compared with Obama, Ryan would spend 25 percent less on transportation. He’d spend 6 percent less on “General science, space, and basic technology.” And, compared with the White House’s proposal, he’d shell out 33 percent less for “Education, training, employment, and social services.”Unlike Erskine Bowles, I am profoundly not about numbers. I am concerned about how budget priorities affect people and by that measure the only thing that amazes me is that anyone takes Paul Ryan's dangerous proposals seriously at all, let alone praises them.How might this lower spending play out in the real world? Let’s take transportation as an example. Right now, the United States is facing a number of pressing infrastructure challenges. The National Highway System, first built in the 1950s, is reaching the end of its natural lifespan. Our air-traffic control system is outdated, causing airport delays around the country. About one-quarter of the country’s bridges are either “structurally deficient” or inadequate to today’s traffic needs, according to the GAO.
A variety of think tanks and analysts have pegged the cost of repairing and upgrading our transportation networks at somewhere between $200 billion and $262 billion per year over the next decade. The White House’s budget envisions spending an average of about $104 billion per year over that time. Ryan’s budget, meanwhile, allocates $78 billion per year. In his summary, Ryan claims he can meet the country’s needs by cutting back on “imprudent, irresponsible, and downright wasteful spending,” though it’s not clear what waste Ryan has in mind, much less whether it would make up the gap.
Alternatively, we can look at what specific cuts might ensue in the very near future. Third Way has tried to game out the impact of Congress’s recent debt-ceiling deal on specific government programs. The cuts to domestic spending, if applied across the board, would lead to fewer food inspectors, fewer air-traffic controllers, and so forth. And Ryan’s budget, for its part, goes even deeper than the debt-ceiling deal.[...]
Likewise, spending on natural resources and the environment would be 14.6 percent lower under Ryan’s budget in 2014 than it is today. Assuming those cuts hit all programs in this category equally — and, again, this is for illustration purposes — then this is how it would affect weather forecasting. “Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,” estimates Kendall. “For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.”