It’s a budget that has been embraced by presumed Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney and the Tea Party as a piece of legislation that guts the federal government and the programs that the middle class and poor depend on. And now, House Republicans have passed the Ryan Budget for the second time in two years. But Republicans didn’t pass the Ryan Budget honestly.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
“GOP leaders are advancing the House Republican budget and its proposed changes to Medicare despite opposition in the Democratic-led Senate by using a relatively obscure procedural move — tucking it alongside an unrelated bill that would allow the importation of trophy polar bears. In considering the sportsmen’s hunting legislation, the House approved a provision Tuesday that essentially “deems” the budget from Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) passed, even though the blueprint with its tax breaks and cuts to domestic programs was dead on arrival in the Senate. Republicans said the procedural move was needed to set in motion a 2013 fiscal plan in the absence of an action or agreement with the other chamber. The House voted, 228-184, with no Democrats joining most Republicans, to deem it passed.”
I seem to recall that when Democrats were thinking of doing the same thing to pass the Affordable Care Act, Republicans criticized the move as “unconstitutional.” This was just two years ago. Now all of a sudden, this “unconstitutional” procedure is perfectly acceptable to Republicans because they are the ones doing it. They are huge hypocrites.
The Ryan Budget is tremendously dangerous to our way of life and our economy and health care. Among the things the Paul Ryan Budget does includes:
• An average tax cut of $150,000 per individual for the wealthiest Americans. The budget also extends the unpopular Bush Tax Cuts which will give away $3 trillion dollars in revenues to the oil industry, Wall Street, and several other corporations and wealthy Americans. According to the Center for American Progress, “The only way to pay for such huge tax cuts for the 1 percent is to make the 99 percent pick up the tab.” That means the middle class, the poor, children, and seniors would sacrifice more so that rich people and corporations can have more wealth to hide overseas.
• The plan would wipe out Medicare and Medicaid as we know them. Medicare would become a coupon program in which seniors would receive a voucher to buy a private plan that may not cover the kind of medical care seniors need. Anything the voucher doesn’t cover would have to be paid for out of pocket. Coverage would not be guaranteed, meaning grandma and grandpa are on their own. The Republican budget also eliminates over $1 trillion of Medicaid funding, so low-incomes children, pregnant women, senior citizens and the disabled would be denying coverage. That’s about 60 million Americans that Republicans are throwing under the bus.
• The Ryan Budget keeps billions of dollars of subsidies for the oil industry and Wall Street and doesn’t close tax loopholes either. It also repeals reforms passed in the wake of the financial meltdown that would help prevent a repeat of the Great Recession.
• Education and infrastructure are also affected. Under the Ryan Budget, education funding would be slashed by nearly 50 percent and infrastructure slashed by 24 percent. That means Republicans don’t care about educating the American people, and without education Americans will be less likely to get good paying jobs. And because of serious cuts to infrastructure, bridges, highways, rail lines, and clean energy production will all be allowed to deteriorate. Meanwhile, the rest of the developed world will continue to have better and more efficient infrastructures that are more efficient and better for business.
NOTE: The Ryan Budget also does not include one plan to create jobs for the American people.
The Ryan Budget truly is a plan of decline for the United States. It nearly eliminates all domestic spending that benefits the American people while ignoring the massive and wasteful military budget that has contributed the most to the deficit over the last decade. It is clear that Republicans would rather waste money on war, killing, and conquering, rather than spending that money on making sure that their constituents at home have decent health care, education, transportation, and jobs. Republicans would also rather give millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations free money instead of raising taxes to solve the deficit problems they caused in the first place. This budget punishes the elderly, women, children, the poor, and every single middle class American. It wipes out our health care, education, transportation infrastructure, while giving money away to those who already have way too much. This is certainly the most anti-American budget that has ever been contrived in this nation’s history and puts America on a road to decline that could one day make America the richest third world nation on Earth.
Did anyone really think they would back down and slink away like the weasels they are? The hostile takeover is almost complete already, well before we get to vote on whether they have the right to do it. Corporate and anonymous superPACs have bought out and bought off every stage of the Federal government, and apparently a lot of the states as well. They have purchased the Supreme Court and the vast majority of members of both Houses, both parties. They have anointed their new fake king, the Vulture Capitalist Romney, whose training, experience and predilection is toward selling off the infrastructure of whatever he is put in charge of.
He WILL privatize/sell off anything and everything that could possibly be made to turn a profit, no matter how harmful to the economy, the people or the environment.
He WILL steal the money Americans have paid for decades into Medicare and Social Security, give it to his buddies and privatize the systems, so people like Ken Lay can come in and steal the entire trillion-dollar pot.
He WILL do his damnedest to sell America down the same river his Bain Capital sold the many companies and lives they destroyed.
The Ryan budget is only one small step in the process of completing the GOP goal of transferring ALL property, ALL resources, ALL wealth (and, coincidentally, ALL freedoms) into the hands of the uber-wealthy. They stole your houses so they could transfer ownership of all land to the 1% (some banks are ALREADY selling off blocks, even entire areas of some of the poorer cities, in bulk for maybe 5 cents on the dollar – of the prices they had inflated to guarantee high profit; either you paid and they made money, or you didn’t and they got to keep what you had already paid, plus resell to another sucker.)
They stole your jobs, both to guarantee more profit by paying Chinese workers a buck a day, and – by eliminating YOUR job, you lost YOUR house, and THEY got to buy it for 5 cents on… You get the point, I hope.
If this is the vision you want for America, I suggest you leave now, before the civil war starts. ‘Cause we aren’t going down that easily. What you sell off to the Kochs or the Saudis can be nationalized, to return to control of the people instead of the profiteers. As will be necessary if we allow the conscience-free to win in November. This group of “legislators” is a criminal conspiracy created to steal America. Proof of “conspiracy”? For starters, AFP and ALEC…
Here is the definition of “Depraved Indifference”, from USLegal.com:
“To constitute depraved indifference, the defendant’s conduct must be ‘so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant the same criminal liability as that which the law imposes upon a person who intentionally causes a crime. Depraved indifference focuses on the risk created by the defendant’s conduct, not the injuries actually resulting. ”
And by this legal definition, I call ALL Republicans who signed the Norqist quisling’s Pledge, ALL those who support the Ryan budget, and ALL legislators of either party that voted for NDAA both traitors and criminals, guilty of at the very least, depraved indifference and violation of their oath of office, and I call for their detention (for psychiatric evaluation to determine of they are competent to stand trial for treason, or should simply be locked away for the good of the species…)