Paul Ryan and GOP Closer to Goal of Phasing out Social Security

Paul Ryan and the GOP care solely and exclusively about its rich contributors

When a disgusted congressional insider. Mike Lofgren, a long-time Republican Congressional staffer, retired in June last year, he decided to blow the whistle and warn America what Paul Ryan and the Republicans were up to—destroy Social Security and Medicare little by little—and reap the accolades that they are fiscally wise and courageous.

Wrote Lofgren:

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be 'forced' to make 'hard choices' - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked. The crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

Wage a few wars in the name of grave threats to our national security, then cut taxes to pay for the war effort, and use the resulting debt as an excuse to phase out Medicare and Social Security.

Paul Ryan's proposed budget will cost the Republicans, but there is nothing courageous about targeting our seniors, our seniors, by decimating Medicare and Social Security.

As the Republican National Committee spokeswoman noted, Republican Economic Platform Will Be the Bush Program, ‘Just Updated.’

Paul Krugman writes contemptuously of the Bush-Cheney record, "Because the worst incomes and jobs record since Herbert Hoover was just an accident."

After Bush went after Social Security in 2005, his administration never recovered politically.

We hope the same fate awaits Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues.

Writes Paul Krugman on national and state (like Wisconsin) Republican parties plundering:

Overall employment in the Obama years has been held back by mass layoffs of schoolteachers and other state and local government employees. But private-sector employment has recovered almost all the ground lost in the administration’s early months. That compares favorably with the Bush era: as of March 2004, private employment was still 2.4 million below its level when Mr. Bush took office.

Oh, and where have those mass layoffs of schoolteachers been taking place? Largely in states controlled by the G.O.P.: 70 percent of public job losses have been either in Texas or in states where Republicans recently took control.