Tag Archives: budget cuts

The Two Faces of Paul Ryan…. 11

Cultures, In The News, Politics • Tags: , , ,

I have spent the better part of a week looking at the new vice presidential candidate for the GOP. Up until now I was not familiar with him other than superficially. This will be the last post in this area so I am going to try to summarize what I have learned about the man.

  • Paul Ryan is definitely a passionate person who is true to his principles  taught to him by his heroes in life such as Ayn Rand who says money is the source of all good and altruism is stupid. I’m also sure he thinks each one of his ideas is somehow for the greater good of the country.
  • As shown by his recent convention speech he is a very articulate person to much the same degree as Barak Obama but at the exact opposite end of the political spectrum.
  • He adamantly supported the stimulus packages of President Bush in both 2002 and 2008 but when a Democratic president was just continuing the same it somehow became totally wrong to him.  Everything he supported during the Bush years are now somehow unacceptable.  That seems highly partisan to me and that is not something I want to continue seeing in our elected leaders in the coming years.
  • His budget proposal that he claims is compassionate is totally rejected by his faith leaders in the Catholic church as very uncaring for the least among us.
  • 62% of his proposed budget cuts for 2012 comes from cuts to the country’s safety net. This is hard to take especially when at the same time he is proposing big additional increases in our already very blotted military spending. Since we spend about forty times more than any other country on our war machine he seems to be a hawk to the nth degree.
  • He plays politics with the best of them. He gets people from the other party on board by promising things that he then leaves them out of his proposed bill when it is submitted. He then wonders why the colleagues who he betrayed object to his calling his bill bipartisan. These types of actions show he can’t be trusted to keep his word.
  • His original proposal for “fixing” Medicare was to give seniors a limited voucher to buy private insurance. If the private carrier even agreed to offer them insurance they would end up paying thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for less coverage than their current Medicare plan. Because of the huge backlash he modified his plan somewhat but given his propensity to got back on his word I think we have to assume that the first option if it could be passed is his preference.
  • He is a favorite of the radical fringe Tea Party. This alone says much about his spirit of compassion and compromise.
  • But maybe worst of all is that he seems to enthusiastically want to toss aside the people at the lower end of our society in order for the upper echelons to prosper even more.  Ayn Rand, who is his hero taught him well in that area.
  • Finally, I’m sure Mr. Ryan is a good family man who loves his wife and children but he seems to lack even a basic empathy for so many others.

At the end of this week-long investigation I still don’t understand why my clergy friend from the past reveres him so.  On the surface Mr. Ryan seems like a nice guy but when you look at his other face he has a very narrow and seemingly dark view of life.

There are three qualities I believe must be used to judge a person’s character. One is his spiritual side; does he have a moral compass? The second is who are his heroes in life are and the third is whether he is true to his word; in other words can he be trusted? Even from this cursory study of Mr. Ryan I don’t see a lot about him in any of these three categories that entices me to vote the GOP ticket this time around.

Cutting Spending (Republican Style)….. 4

Politics • Tags: , ,

There is an article in the Christian Science Monitor (see the link at the bottom of the post)  about how the Republicans want to cut spending on the federal budget. When Mr. Bush was in office and borrowing hundreds of billions of off budget dollars to fund his wars there was not a squeak from any of them. They suddenly got religion after the fact I guess. I wonder if it has anything to do with a Democrat now holding the White House???   Anyway, here is an excerpt from the article.

One of the plans is the measure passed by House Republicans, which cuts nearly $62 billion from fiscal 2010 levels. It’s also $100 billion less than President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget proposal. The GOP measure makes cuts in virtually all elements of nondefense, discretionary spending.

I applaud budgetary constraints, but how they get there is very troubling! The Republicans are proposing taking it all out of “nondefense”. There is something terribly wrong with this.  The military budget currently makes up 60% of the discretionary spending and is not taking any of the hit in budget tightening? Military spending has doubled in less than eight years where the rest of discretionary spending has only gone up a fraction of that.  But their view is that all of the savings must come from the other 40%.  In other words we should eliminate policemen on our streets so that we can maintain “peacekeeping” forces in Iraq, Japan, England, South Korea, Germany and dozens of other places.  As if none of those countries can afford to do that themselves?  Instead, we should lose 200,000 jobs in the U.S. so that we can keep the Afghan tribal leaders appeased.  I might agree with the $62 billion if it were to be apportioned consistently; that is taking $38 billion of it out of our war machine and then the remainder from maintaining stability and safety in our own country.  Taking the military spending off the table is insane to me. But who said the current crop of Republicans are sane!

But what do I know…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20110305/ts_csm/367633