{"id":12027,"date":"2012-08-20T08:06:38","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T13:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=12027"},"modified":"2012-08-20T08:18:37","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T13:18:37","slug":"paul-ryan-an-unserious-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/08\/20\/paul-ryan-an-unserious-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Ryan – An Unserious Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/em> has the Paul Krugman piece An Unserious Man<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney\u2019s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate led to a wave of pundit accolades. Now, declared writer after writer, we\u2019re going to have a real debate about the nation\u2019s fiscal future. This was predictable: never mind the Tea Party, Mr. Ryan\u2019s true constituency is the commentariat, which years ago decided that he was the Honest, Serious Conservative, whose proposals deserve respect even if you don\u2019t like him.<\/p>\n

But he isn\u2019t and they don\u2019t. Ryanomics is and always has been a con game, although to be fair, it has become even more of a con since Mr. Ryan joined the ticket.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At first, I misread Ryanomics as a reference to a past President’s economic plan.<\/p>\n

Krugman concludes with:<\/p>\n

The first sign of trouble has already surfaced over the issue of Medicare. Mr. Romney, in an attempt to repeat the G.O.P.\u2019s successful \u201cdeath panels\u201d strategy of the 2010 midterms, has been busily attacking the president for the same Medicare savings that are part of the Ryan plan. And Mr. Ryan\u2019s response when this was pointed out was incredibly lame: he only included those cuts, he says, because the president put them \u201cin the baseline,\u201d whatever that means. Of course, whatever Mr. Ryan\u2019s excuse, the fact is that without those savings his budget becomes even more of a plan to increase, not reduce, the deficit.<\/p>\n

So will the choice of Mr. Ryan mean a serious campaign? No, because Mr. Ryan isn\u2019t a serious man \u2014 he just plays one on TV.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It occurs to me that the mentality that brought you toxic mortgages and the tricks and traps hidden inside them is the same mentality that is bringing you these various Republican economic proposals.\u00a0 In the case of the mortgage fiasco, the big banks got armies of expert lawyers to write complicated contracts that no sane person would agree to if they understood them. Then they went out in droves to sell these things to the rubes.\u00a0 They invented something called liar loans.\u00a0 It wasn’t the borrowers who were lying.\u00a0 It was the mortgage brokers who put in the lies, many times unbeknownst to the borrowers.\u00a0 The same type of people are now doing this scam in the political realm.<\/p>\n

Remember that Romney was the one who figured out how to just skirt the laws so that he could take over companies, strip out their assets, rob the employees of their pensions and health care, and then leave the bones of the company on the scrap heap.<\/p>\n

If you think these economic proposals make sense, common or otherwise, then you are one of the rubes they are depending on to get elected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has the Paul Krugman piece An Unserious Man. Mitt Romney\u2019s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate led to a wave of pundit accolades. Now, declared writer after writer, we\u2019re going to have a real debate about the nation\u2019s fiscal future. This was predictable: never mind the Tea Party, Mr. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12027","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12027"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12029,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12027\/revisions\/12029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}