[Nesster]

The Paul Ryan Legend Dissipates -- Daily Intel

Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential candidate is subjecting him to all manner of strange new indignities, such as questions about public policy that are different than those that his own press staff would have written. The Washington Post reported this weekend that Ryan has opposed bipartisan compromises to reduce the budget deficit. The facts in the story aren’t new. (If anything, they understate the active, crucial role Ryan has played in killing these deals.) What’s new is that the publicly available facts about Ryan’s opposition to bipartisan deficit reduction is penetrating the media narrative about him, which has always presented him as the very opposite.

And then there was Ryan’s surreal interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News:

You Tube

You Tube

Wallace is trying to do something that Ryan is not used to: ask him how the numbers in his plan add up. The Romney tax plan is premised on a mathematical impossibility. It promises to reduce tax rates by 20 percent and cover the lost revenue by eliminating tax deductions, exempting tax breaks for investment income. Even making a series of assumptions ranging from friendly to impossibly friendly, it can’t add up. The lost revenue from the tax rate cuts on income over $250,000 exceeds the available revenue from eliminating deductions. Even Republican attempts to disprove this finding have inadvertently confirmed it.

In the interview, Wallace tries to walk through the facts with Ryan. He begins by asking about the cost of the rate cuts, which is about $5 trillion over a decade. Ryan refuses to answer the question. He tries various tricks to avoid it. First he pretends Wallace is asking a different question — that he’s asking about the net cost of the entire plan, rather than the gross cost of the rate cuts. He cracks jokes about the unreliability of statistics. He filibusters by making a speech about economic growth.

Wallace asks the question seven times, and Ryan fills one minute and 48 seconds avoiding it. Finally, the final time Wallace asks Ryan to give him the math, Ryan asserts, “It would take me too long to go through all the math.” There was plenty of time if he hadn’t spent two minutes dodging the question! In any case, the math doesn’t take a long time to explain, but Ryan doesn’t want to explain it, because it would reveal unavoidable and unpopular trade-offs in the campaign’s tax plan that he’d rather conceal.

A person who thinks highly of Ryan, or who notes the sudden souring of his media coverage, might suspect that the problem lies in the fact that he is now defending Romney’s plan rather than his own. But that is not the case. Ryan’s plan is worse. His would cut tax rates lower than Romney’s (the Ryan budget would reduce the top tax rate to 25 percent, against the 28 percent Romney proposes) and rather than hold rates on investment income constant, he would eliminate all taxes on investment income. Taxes are one of the many black holes in the Ryan budget. He asked the Congressional Budget to score his plan as if it held revenue at a constant level, and the CBO basically said, “well, okay, if you say so,” but Ryan never comes close to saying how he would fill in the trillions of dollars of missing revenue that would require.

And nobody has ever asked him. Because Ryan’s role in the budget discourse was not to be questioned, but to question others. If he was asked to comment, it was to express his sadness over Obama’s alleged unwillingness to enact the bipartisan debt plans that Ryan in fact killed.

Ryan is still an extremely skilled bullshitter — vastly better at it than Romney. But he’s actually seeing, for the first time, questions that attempt to pry information out of him, rather than the batting practice lobs to which he’s accustomed. He’s going to emerge from the race with his legend punctured.

[boriscleto]

Daily Kos: Paul Ryan not yet onboard with his campaign's 'no whining' policy

[JohnInIndy]

Still better than this:

You Tube

You Tube

[jeffkrol]

Still better than this:

Pelosi: "We Have to Pass the Bill So That You Can Find Out What Is In It" - YouTube

er.. no.. no it is not...................

[boriscleto]

Daily Kos: Ryan: Untax the rich! (Even*if*it*means*bigger deficits.)

Of course, it's obvious to anyone with a calculator that you can't cut taxes by $5 trillion and make up for it by ending tax breaks—unless you're willing to increases taxes on the middle-class. That's why Ryan dodged Wallace's question in his answer, falling back on his classic "it gets wonky" formulation.

[jeffkrol]

What legend??? Weiner mobile operator.................
Anyways the grift continues.............

Paul Ryan’s budget flimflam - The Washington Post

Finally, if you heard a glimmer of responsibility from Mr. Romney lately, think again: Mr. Ryan pulled back on it. Mr. Romney has been saying that middle-class families shouldn’t expect their tax bills to go down very much, if at all, because their lower rates would be offset by, yes, curtailing deductions. Fox News’s Neil Cavuto pressed Mr. Ryan on that score. “Was he trying to brace us for some bitter news?” Mr. Cavuto asked. Mr. Ryan: “No, not at all. . . . Middle income taxpayers get higher take-home pay.”

[Ratmagiclady]

For a little reality, what the Baggers and GOP have *actually* been doing to the Upper Midwest: it's really always been more like a war on the blue states than anything that actually can even claim to do any good:


Michigan's Hostile Takeover | Mother Jones

So much for 'will of the people,' eh?

[boriscleto]

I think the Rude Pundit said it best today...

So yesterday, Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan appeared on Fox "news" Sunday with Mike Wallace's gallstone named Chris. Ryan was there because his role at this point in the election cycle is to be a little bitch. Not a manwhore, but a little, yappy bitch dog, Mitt Romney's papillon, ready to leap into his master's lap and just yelp little bitchy barks at whoever dares to move close to them.

[Nesster]

Now he was on Bloomberg, still evading...
Paul Ryan Asked for Tax Math, Offers Gibberish -- Daily Intel

This last weekend, Paul Ryan repeatedly dodged questions about the mathematical impossibility of the tax plan he and Mitt Romney are running on, and then, having burned through seven repeated questions and two minutes of dodging, insisted he couldn’t answer because the math would take too long. Today Bloomberg News spoke to Ryan and promised he could have all the time he wanted to get into the math. Guess what? He still didn’t.

Rather than try to reconcile his irreconcilable promises, Ryan dissembled his way through another interview. To briefly review, the Tax Policy Center showed that people earning more than $250,000 a year would have to get a big tax cut from the Romney plan. The revenue lost from the income tax rate cuts they propose exceeds the available revenue from reducing deductions:

Ryan insisted the study has been discredited, which it hasn’t. The only reason he cited as to why it’s discredited is that “It doesn’t even assume economic growth.” This is a classic gripe of Ryan’s supply-side wing against mainstream economic analysis. It fails to assume that cutting tax rates will spark waves of economic growth, as conservatives are certain it will. But in fact, the study, in one of the many ways it bent over backwards to make the most favorable assumptions for Romney, assumed it would create faster economic growth. It adopted the model proposed by a name Romney and Ryan may recognize. Let me quote the study:

Nevertheless, even if one were to use the model from Mankiw and Weinzierl (2006) and assume that after five years 15 percent of the $360 billion tax cut is paid for through higher economic growth, the available tax expenditures would still need to be cut by 56 percent; on net lower- and middle-income taxpayers would still need to pay higher taxes.

“Mankiw” is Greg Mankiw, former Bush administration economist and current advisor to Mitt Romney.

Ryan likewise insisted that he would not spell out which deductions he would close, because this would make it impossible to negotiate:

You don't say to Congress, to Democrats that you want to work with, "Take it or leave it, it's everything, it's all my way or the highway." You say, "Here's my framework. Obviously, the numbers add up. We've shown that. ...

the best way to maximize success is to leave room for negotiation on how to accomplish the goal and, more importantly, we don't want to cut some backroom deal like they did on Obamacare. We want to have, you know, Congress and the public participate in this debate about how best to do this.

But you haven’t shown it! Incredibly, Ryan is arguing here that public participation requires him to withhold his plans, rather than letting the public evaluate them during the campaign. Detailing your plans during the campaign would amount to a “backroom deal.”

[jeffkrol]

Now he was on Bloomberg, still evading...
Paul Ryan Asked for Tax Math, Offers Gibberish -- Daily Intel

we don't want to cut some backroom deal like they did on Obamacare. We want to have, you know, Congress and the public participate in this debate about how best to do this.

In my state.. in the US gov this is N....E.....v.....E....R done and will never be done.. who lives in a fantasy world...........???

[boriscleto]

Youtu.be

Youtu.be

The '70s are gone baby and it's hard for your friends who like gummy bears!

[boriscleto]

Daily Kos: Paul Ryan: 30% of Americans want "welfare state"