“Don’t cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.” So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.Go read the whole article to appreciate the sleazy cynicism of Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future".
And irony died.
Now, Mr. Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare — death panels! — have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What’s amazing, however, is that they’re getting away with it.
Why is this amazing? It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare — and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts.
After all, you could explain this about-face by supposing that Republicans have had a change of heart, that they have finally realized just how much good Medicare does. And if you believe that, I’ve got some mortgage-backed securities you might want to buy.
No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program. And the process of dismantling would begin with spending cuts of about $650 billion over the next decade. Math is hard, but I do believe that’s more than the roughly $400 billion (not $500 billion) in Medicare savings projected for the Democratic health bills.
Ryan's "plan" should be literally hair-raising for most Americans (i.e. those not in the top 0.5% income earners):
The broad picture that emerges from the “roadmap” is of an economic agenda that hasn’t changed one iota in response to the economic failures of the Bush years. In particular, Mr. Ryan offers a plan for Social Security privatization that is basically identical to the Bush proposals of five years ago.Just think. If Bush had "privatized" social security and people were signed up by all those retirement planning "experts" to put their money into the stock market, it would be just the lost of $1 trillion in house values, but the lost of trillions in stock values that would contribute to the impoverishment of "the average American". This is the vision of the Republicans: lots of chickens to be plucked. And the plucking takes place in clear view of the pens where middle class Americans can watch their fate. Voters saw Bush's treatment. The Republicans want to bring this back. Oh boy! Not one 2008 crash but a 2011 crash, a 2012 crash, a 2013 crash... Those big boys on Wall Street will be rolling in an unending supply of bailout boodle!
3 comments:
Have you seen this clip of the Daily Show? The part about Hawaiian healthcare is just hilarious and sad at the same time... poor republicans..
Thomas: Thanks for the link. I must admit I hadn't seen it, so it was fun to watch. I loved the bit about the "experiment" that had only lasted 40 years, so it was too early to tell if this would work in the rest of America.
Yeah, America is only a about a 200 year old experiment, so we still don't know if this "government by the people" thing is going to work out. I loved the little interview segments of the silly conventioneers.
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