“Representative Ryan, how many years of tax returns did you provide to the Romney campaign in the vetting process?”

That is all.

Game. Set. Match. Election.

Apparently Mitt Romney is going to announce on the U.S.S. Wisconsin in Virginia today that Paul Ryan (r), not Joe Lieberman, will be his vice presidential running mate.

April 4, 2011

GOP Aim: Cut $4 Trillion

Budget Plan Would Transform Medicare, Reset Budget Debate; Democrats Balk

….The budget has been prepared by Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and the new chairman of the House Budget Committee….

….The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills…..

….Conservative activists who are familiar with the Ryan plan said they expect it to call for a fundamental overhaul of the tax system, with a 25% top rate for both individuals and corporations, compared to the current 35% top rate….

Medicare in the Ryan Budget

By Paul N. Van de Water

March 28, 2012

….Most Medicare beneficiaries live on modest incomes and are in no position to pay much more for their health care.  The median income of Medicare households is about $25,000 a year, and only about 15 percent of Medicare households have total household incomes over $50,000.  Medicare households also spend three times as large a percentage of their budgets on out-of-pocket health expenses – 15 percent compared to 5 percent – as non-Medicare households do.  The Ryan budget would significantly raise the out-of-pocket health costs for Medicare beneficiaries with modest incomes, even as it proposes huge new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans….

End Medicare as we know it and cut taxes for people like Mitt Romney (r). Sounds like a winner. For Obama.

Uh, for Ayn Rand true believers the timing for “going Galt” was supposed to be after the November election, not before.

From a comment at Charles Pierce, the Obama/Biden campaign ads will write themselves:

….Vote for Willard & Paul, and believe me, it’s not going to be a problem: you won’t be able to use the words “health”, “care”, and “affordable” in the same sentence ever again.

Game. Set. Match. Election.

The posting guidelines for SMP caution posters about unnecessary invective, noting quite correctly that:

If you’re a good writer it’s relatively easy to show everyone else that someone is a stupid troglodyte without actually using those two words – and it’s much more fun to watch them slink away in silence after it finally dawns on them that they’ve been mocked into oblivion.

I, however, imperfect being that I am, struggle with that provision. There are certain epithets, usually having to do with intelligence, that, crude though they may be, seem to have been tailor made for certain Missouri politicos and it’s frustrating in the extreme to refrain calling it the way you see it. It seems, though, that I have company and the White House has been having the same problem. Today, on the topic of the Ryan Budget, Jay Carney finally let loose and socked its GOP cheering section with the observation that:  

… that Republicans who support the Paul Ryan budget’s cuts to education and clean energy have a “severely diminished capacity” and are “aggressively and deliberately ignorant” of the global economy.

I’ve got to admit that labels like “severely diminished capacity,” and even blunter designations – like “dim bulb” or plain, old, unvarnished “stupid” – have long been paired in my mind with the image of Rep. Todd Akin (R-2). And guess what? Todd has come out slugging for the Ryan Budget. Is that evidence of “severely diminished capacity” or what?

Not that Akin’s position is surprising. Nor is his basic complaint new, just hilarious. His nose has been perpetually out of joint because:

Under Republican leadership in the House, we have passed budgets which have died in the Democratic-controlled Senate which has not passed a budget in over 1,000 days. I am pleased with the product that Chairman Ryan and the House Budget Committee have produced to maintain our obligations to our constituents.

Even a sweet, naive creature such as myself can figure out that the budgets emanating from the House are not really meant seriously. That would require thinking about how to reach agreement with the Democratic Senate, which is to say, figuring out how to craft a balanced approach. The House’s budgets make no such concessions to the realities of governing in a two-party system, but are nothing so much as the caterwauling of unruly Tea Party Tomcats who want to mark their territory. And you know what that means – House budgets are going to stink  until somebody takes care of those Toms.

According to Akin:

Our fiscally responsible common sense FY2013 budget improves upon last year’s Path to Prosperity by saving another $20 billion in American taxpayer funds. Our House Republican budget cuts federal spending, makes responsible cuts to the real drivers of our national debt, ends special interest favoritism and corporate welfare, embraces an all-of-the-above energy strategy, and gives American taxpayers more control over their healthcare decisions.

Come again? According to most analysts, Ryan’s budget will decimate safety-net programs, give big tax breaks to the wealthy and, despite all the misery it causes, still manage to deepen the deficit. Oh, and did I fail to note that the fiscal assumptions upon which Ryan bases this masterpiece have been called out as pure fantasy?

But the best part of Akin’s endorsement is when he declares with a straight face:

This budget also protects the Medicare benefits of near-retirees and helps ensure the long-term solvency of the program.

Let’s see – as has been readily apparent to almost everyone, it’s clear that Ryan 2012 guts Medicare, turning it into an inadequately funded voucher program within ten years, a program that would essentially cut seniors’ access to care and double their costs, effectively “ending Medicare as we know it.” But it also, and this is amusing,  retains the cuts to Medicare that would have been made under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare). These are the same cuts that the GOP have been screaming about in ads directed at Claire McCaskill – cuts to the subsidies that are paid to inefficient Medicare Advantage suppliers.

Of course, on this point, Akin isn’t being totally obtuse, just honest. He’s wanted to end Medicare for a long time and recently observed that, “I don’t find in the Constitution that it is the job of the government to provide health care.” Of course, abandoning programs that work because of ideology is one of those positions that are located far out there in the land of “severely diminished capacity.”

Slightly edited for clarity.

No matter what you might think about Claire McCaskill’s policy decisions, you can’t say that she doesn’t make a real effort to learn what her constituents are thinking – Tea Party, independent or progressive. She tours the state and she or her staff take on all comers. Her town hall meetings in the summer of the Tea Party were models of even-handedness. The same was true of almost all Democrats – they boldly went among the raucous and enraged and tried to talk reason – sometimes gently, and sometimes, as in the case of Barney Frank, by showing a little tough love – but few of them ran away from their obligation to their constituents.

However, now that the GOPers who were victorious in 2010 are showing their real colors, threatening to decimate Social Security and Medicare while trying their best to drive our country off an economic precipice in order to preserve tax breaks for the wealthy, what do we see? Folks are not only getting angry, they are more than willing to tell their representatives about it (see for instance this Paul Ryan town hall meeting). The resultant angry constituent meetings have provided a rude awakening for some of the worst offenders. But instead of listening to what people want and ameliorating their offensive policies, many of the GOP congresspersons are busy trying to figure out how to mute the voice of the very people they are supposed to be representing. They want to the minimize the embarrassment their bad policy decisions have caused them.

Take, for example, Colorado’s GOP Rep. Lamborn who has prohibited protesters from congregating outside his office – unless they are supporters. And then there are the cagy GOPers like Paul Ryan (R-Wis), Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) and Chip Cravaack (R-Minn) who have decided to charge admission to their ersatz “town halls” in order to discourage the shows of dissenting opinion (and outright anger) that have bedeviled them recently and might make it into even more embarrassing Youtube videos.

Bear in mind that these folks, none of whom seem to be to aware of the implications of accepting employment as a representative of the people, any more than they understand the implications of the first amendment, are all beneficiaries of the Tea Party. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that the Tea Party is made up of folks who  have spent the better part of the last two years spouting off about what the Constitution does and does not mandate. Funny how few of the fringers seem to worry too much about the Constitution when you get down to inconvenient particulars.

Of course, this type of one-sided representation is nothing new for those of us here in Missouri who live in Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-2) district. Brother Todd’s been stage managing his appearances for the benefit of the faithful for the past few years. Given Akin’s extreme positions, his skill with easy to manage video and telephone “town halls” and invitation only events should stand him in good stead during his run for the Senate.

* Slightly edited for clarity.

It depends who you are talking to what will be achieved by Privatizing Ryan’s roadmap to ruin budget plan should it be enacted. Most people either come down on the side of “it ends Medicare” or “it ends Medicare as we know it,” while the Randians like Ryan insist on pretending that it “saves Medicare (okay, something we will call Medicare) for future generations.”

Those in the last group are engaging in that age-old-and-time-tested political tactic that we call “lying” when they make that claim. They may call whatever private-insurance apostasy that they want to foist on those of us under 55 “Medicare” but it will look as much like the Medicare our parents know and love as a McNugget looks like a chicken.

Medicare has been wildly popular and extremely effective at delivering healthcare to America’s elderly and disabled people for nearly fifty years, and as a result of that, it has been in the crosshairs of republicans and other assorted miscreants and privatizers for it’s entire existence.

It was Rahm Emanuel who said “never let a crisis go to waste” and immediately he got hammered by republicans and their mouthpieces, but they were only protesting because they wanted to deflect attention from their own pioneering work in that same field of endeavor. It was just short of brilliant the way they ran up the deficit and depleted the nation’s coffers when they were in power, making it possible for them now to scream, wail, gnash their teeth and rend the cloth from their breast as they decry the deficit and insist that “we’re broke!” and all the safety net programs have to be gutted, if not outright shut down, otherwise the republic is doomed.

Credit where credit is due: When they get rolling, they can be far more melodramatic than any 8th-grade girl’s-school production of Romeo and Juliette, and just hope that no one fact-checks them.

For a plan that they insist is necessary because the current system is headed for bankruptcy, it sure doesn’t save any money. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, privatization would actually cost 11 percent more for the exact same services than leaving the current system in place — and that cost disparity would widen over time, not shrink. The CBO, the non-partisan research arm of Congress, estimates that by 2022, the year the Ryan plan would start screwing retirees, it would cost a whopping 34% more than simply maintaining the current system.

The hard, cold truth is that those of us under 55 would pay more for less than our friends, siblings and spouses who are a little bit older. Our out-of-pocket expenses would skyrocket, amounting to about $6400 per year more than those born a year or two earlier.

Pity the person in their late forties who finds him- or herself struggling in this economy, underemployed, and likely to stay that way. Those poor folks get screwed seven ways from Sunday if Ryan gets his way. They will get no respite at age 65. The formerly middle class middle manager who is stocking shelves at Wal-Mart and depleting their 401K to pay the mortgage on a house that has lost a third of it’s value is suddenly paying in a lot less in payroll taxes and this will affect the amount of benefit they are eligible for at retirement. Where they were on track to draw the maximum, they now stand to see their monthly benefit reduced by two or three hundred dollars, and they are depleting their savings now to save their house, so there may be nothing to supplement it. To add insult to injury, that thing they, in the spirit of George Orwell, want to call Medicare takes five hundred and change off the top of what they will get, eating up about half of their future Social Security checks, transfering that money directly to insurance companies and removing it from the economy of the areas where the seniors reside and spend their Social Security checks on living expenses.

The CBO also found that the greater cost-sensitivity could result less frequent use of newer and more expensive — but frequently beneficial — technologies and procedures than occur now under current law. In other words, the Ryan plan would kill that innovation that the republicans are forever insisting that free-market forces will certainly bring to bear if we just unfetter the market and let it work it’s magic on our healthcare system.

There is one thing that republicans always say when healthcare is the topic that I can’t believe they get away with. They always, without fail, say that they don’t want a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor.

This has to register a full five cow-pies on the BS-o-Meter.

Let me provide a little anecdotal evidence and tell you about my experience with reimbursements and the filing thereof, since I did some of that in both of my two most recent jobs.

I was the second shift supervisor of a hospital phlebotomy crew…this meant that we had a waiting room full of patients up until 4:30 or so, and then we saw any stragglers that came in. I did the paperwork and filed for payment for the stragglers. When I went to another hospital and worked third shift, part of that job was processing specimens that came in to the hospital lab from doctor’s offices and smaller hospitals either for in-house testing or as send-outs to Mayo, ARUP or Quest/Nichols. After I processed the specimens, I processed the “paperwork” for payment and filed the claims electronically.

I can count on one hand the times I had a Medicare claim bounce back requiring more information or a call to their offices during business hours that I had to leave in the day shift’s inbox — and it was almost always a coding error that was quickly resolved. Private insurance was just the opposite. The technologists on day shift in that facility finally revolted at the revolving insurance-resolution job that no one wanted to do, and the lab director had to go to the budget committee and add a full-time employee to her staff, an associates-level technician who did nothing but resolve insurance claims five days a week, eight hours a day.

The dirty little secret is this: There already is a bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor. But he or she doesn’t work for the government. They are bean counters for an insurance company, and their bonus depends on them denying you the care your doctor deems you need.

If Ryan’s plan were to see the light of day, every claim for every procedure would get that sort of unreasonable scrutiny by a  Utilization Management Panel. You are familiar with these — Sarah Palin called them “death panels” and they are the stock and trade of the private insurance / managed care / profit driven healthcare system she was desperately trying to preserve.

I realize that Ryan tends toward Randianism, and Randians are, by definition, emotionally stunted, amoral and selfish. Indeed, selfishness is not merely a virtue, it is the highest, if not only, virtue to the true Randian.

So I have to wonder, what’s in it for Ryan to put in place a policy that would transfer massive amounts of formerly middle-class wealth to private insurance companies? If he is really a Randian, he has an angle he is working. And if he doesn’t, he isn’t a Randian, he’s just a garden-variety sociopath.

*****

This post is part of a series I am writing as a blogging fellow for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of more than 270 national and state organizations dedicated to preserving and strengthening Social Security.

The budget proposal put forth by Paul Ryan is a vicious and cruel all-out attack on everyone under the age of 55, but the cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that the Ryan plan proposes would be felt acutely by women, who make up more than half of the beneficiaries of both programs, and women retire closer to the poverty line than men do. Women who are alone, who either never married or who are divorced or widowed and never remarried would be particularly vulnerable.

The attack on Medicare is one that rallies everyone. Not everyone over 55 is a psychopath who couldn’t care less so long as they get theirs. I honestly think that Paul Ryan was counting on people over 55, the largest republican voting bloc out there, not giving a damn so long as they got to keep theirs. I think he is so steeped in Randianism that he was taken aback by the pushback he got from people who actually care about their kids and their younger siblings and everyone else who paid in all their adult lives and stand to get rogered roundly if Ryan’s scheme sees the light of day.

The CBO, the non-partisan number-crunching office of Congress, estimates that the Ryan scheme would double the out-of-pocket healthcare expenses of seniors to $12,000 per year. That would leave grandma eating catfood in the homeless shelter. On average, female seniors have an annual income of only $14,000. Of that annual income, about $12,000 comes from Social Security. (Could you live on $2000 per year?)

Here is the bottom line: Ryan’s plan would amount to transfering the entire monthly Social Security benefit for female seniors to private health insurance companies.

I can’t possibly sum it up any more succinctly than Senator Barbara Boxer did when she said “This is a sick proposal,” during a press conference with other Senate Democrats last week.

As bad as that is, the assault on Medicaid is even worse. Women comprise about 70% of all Medicaid beneficiaries, the Medicaid program has been demonized and branded as welfare, as “free” healthcare for “those people.” The right-wing social conservatives have been very successful in projecting the face of Medicaid as an inner city “welfare mother” with several children, presumably with different fathers. That is the implication, anyway, when GOP politicians dismiss Medicaid as a progenitor of promiscuity. But in reality, most Medicaid recipients are elderly or profoundly disabled people in nursing homes, and the idea of making Medicaid a block grant that states could use to deliver healthcare as they saw fit would only make matters worse. States have already mucked up their end of the joint federal-state program,  and block grants would make matters far worse.

The CBO estimates that Republicans’ proposed plan to block-grant Medicaid would reduce federal program expenditures by 35 percent by 2022 and by 49 percent in 2030 relative to current law. In return, states would have greater flexibility to restructure Medicaid benefits.

How governors would actually use this flexibility is another matter. Medicaid is flexible right now. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that about 60 percent of state Medicaid spending consists of expenditures to cover people or to reimburse services that are not required under federal law.

Given Medicaid’s low per-person cost and its relatively restrained projected cost growth, there’s little room to comfortably cut. Safety-net services are already shoestring operations. Under-funded and stressed, they have many shortcomings. There is no way to meet the above spending reduction targets without shifting costs and risks onto the states, covering markedly fewer people and services, or further underpaying Medicaid providers.

No one can firmly say how states would respond to the reduced federal support. I fear that’s precisely the point. Block grants provide both states and the federal government with useful political cover to cut important benefits. If a particular state eliminates Medicaid home care services or by dropping the working poor from coverage, Congressional Republicans can say: “Don’t blame us. That’s what this state chose to do.” Meanwhile governors can say, with equal justification: “Don’t blame us. We’re doing the best we can, given limited federal resources.”

Do you wonder to whom the care of those elderly and disabled people would fall if Medicaid went away?

I can tell you who it would fall to — it would fall to women, mostly in their forties and fifties, women would have to leave the workplace to care for their elderly parents or disabled siblings or children, high-need individuals whose nursing home care would no longer be paid for.

This in turn would reduce the amount of Social Security benefits those women would receive upon retirement, to the point that these women would end up paying every single penny of their retirement benefits, for which women worked all their adult lives to private companies because Medicare is gone.

And so it goes.

Yes, there is a war on women, and it isn’t just being waged against those in their childbearing years.

They really are out to get us all. And no, I’m not paranoid. It’s only paranoia when the threat is imaginary, and this one is not; it is quite real.

Today Senator Roy Blunt (r) voted for the House budget plan to end Medicare, probably because he doesn’t have to face reelection until 2016 and he thinks most people will forget.

Question: On the Motion to Proceed (Motion to Proceed to Consider H. Con. Res. 34 )

Vote Number: 77 Vote Date: May 25, 2011, 05:22 PM

Required For Majority: 1/2 Vote Result: Motion to Proceed Rejected

Vote Counts: YEAs 40

NAYs 57

Not Voting 3

Blunt (R-MO), Yea

McCaskill (D-MO), Nay

[emphasis in original]

Well, Claire, the House republicans provided you with a convenient club for 2012. Here’s hoping you use it.

Oh, look who else voted against ending Medicare:

Brown (R-MA), Nay

Collins (R-ME), Nay

Murkowski (R-AK), Nay

Paul (R-KY), Nay

Snowe (R-ME), Nay

Okay, Rand Paul shouldn’t count. He voted against it because it didn’t go far enough. That’s just insane.

And this, via Twitter:

@NancyPelosi Nancy Pelosi

Day after voters sent an unmistakable message they reject House #GOP bill to end Medicare & cut benefits, Senate GOP voted for it. 19 minutes ago

Do we sense a little Twitter spin here?:

@RoyBlunt Senator Roy Blunt

Voted today to continue debate on the plans introduced by @SenToomey & House GOP b/c they represented good starting pts in this debate. 1 hour ago

A “good starting point”? That’ll make a great campaign commercial don’t you think?

Take a look at the video above – and then think about the fact that every member of Missouri’s GOP House delegation voted for Paul “Medicare Slayer” Ryan’s budget. Think back a little further, and you should be able to remember most of them campaigning last November on a barefaced lie – that they needed you to send them to Wasington to defend Medicare from the Democrats and Obamacare.

Now, they claim that reforming Medicare out of existence is necessary to get Medicare spending under control. But remember how they fought Obamacare, which attempts to preserve Medicare by addressing the reason Medicare spending is growing out control instead of cutting benefits?

Wonder if anyone will try to get our Missouri GOPers to explain their two-faced, logic-be-dammed approach to the welfare of our seniors? The video shows how it’s done.

Today’s big news (via FiredUp!) is that Ann Wagner is leaving her will-she/won’t-she phase and is coming clean about her plans to run for the House seat from the 2nd district. Her willingness to come out of the closet about her political aspirations intensifies speculation that Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP incumbent representing the 2nd, is finally, after weeks of flirting, ready to commit to a run for the Senate.

Akin is considered by many to have secured his initial term in the House by stealthily down-playing his radical, Christian-nation proclivities – large numbers of his West County constituents, long-time moderate Republicans, still have no idea that he espouses radical religious intolerance of the sort associated with David Barton, whose views he has endorsed. However, he has allowed some potentially damming statements about his social policy positions to go on the record, indicating his opposition to Medicare and Social Security, for instance. In the interest of Rep. Akin’s political future, I am going to suggest that he take a few lessons from the almost always bland and cautious Roy Blunt. (Although even ol’ Roy has had a few unguarded moments when he thinks he’s alone with his homies.)  

One need look no further for an example of Blunt weasel-speak than this press release, titled “Senator Roy Blunt: Government is not the answer.” It offers a classic example of the way that Blunt (or the relevant staffers) can manage to pack right-wing, red-meat into mundane-seeming, conservative boilerplate – while still providing wiggle-room should future developments demand that Senator Blunt be able to back away. The topic is the budgetary face-down of early April, and while the rhetoric is seemingly straightforward, note the crafty evasions and vital omissions in the three short paragraphs analyzed below:

A government shutdown is not the answer. Senate Democrats’ unwillingness to come to the table to make real budget cuts is not a responsible solution.

These seemingly straightforward two sentences exemplify one of the most salient characteristics of Blunt-speak, which is to simultaneously seek to occupy both the high and the low ground. The first sentence implies that Blunt, like the GOP, is above low politics. The second sentence, however, lands a very low blow indeed. Asserting that the culprits threatening a government shutdown were Democrats – who had the temerity to insist that the concept of a deal means concessions from both sides – conveniently ignores the rabid GOP Tea Partiers who were at that very time cheering on just such a shutdown. Here we have two simple-seeming sentences packed so full of posturing and characterized by the omission of so many relevant facts that they almost, but don’t quite become bare-faced lies.

Having signaled his strategy, Blunt then escalates and immediately crosses over into blatant dishonesty, albeit, it is important to note, dishonesty sanctioned by prevalent GOP spin – Blunt almost never sets foot on virgin ground, fib-wise:

Make no mistake – we’re in this predicament because Senate Democrats abdicated their duties and failed to pass a budget last year.

It is true that the Senate Democrats failed to pass a budget in 2010, but only because Senate Republicans, wielding their favorite weapon, the filibuster, insured that it could not pass with less than 60 votes. But since everyone in the Republican party seems to have forgotten this tiny fact, Daddy Blunt can get away with pushing the blame onto those darned Democrats.

Congressman Ryan’s plan puts solutions above politics and takes on the crippling debt that threatens America’s jobs creation and future prosperity.

This simple statement exemplifies the true beauty of Blunt-speak. If you don’t listen carefully, it sounds like Blunt, who, in his senatorial campaign, did his best to scare seniors about what he misrepresented as Democratic plans to cut Medicare, is endorsing Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. And let us be clear, Ryan’s proposal will effectively dismantle Medicare under the guise of addressing the deficit – while, incidentally,  adding an estimated five trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade according to a CBO estimate.

But before you assume that you caught Blunt in an honest moment, look again – he doesn’t talk about what the Ryan budget actually does,nor does he explicitly endorse its proposals, but rather he  praises Ryan for the process he has initiated, for “putting solutions over politics,” and “taking on” the burden of “crippling” debt. Plenty of room to weasel out later if the blowback threatens to get too nasty – which judging by the response at Ryan’s recent town halls, just might be the case.

Of course, Akin is on record for having voted for the Ryan Budget. He has, however, also made well-publicized statements to the effect that the poor and elderly should rely on private charity for their health care, and that Medicare and Social Security are part of the apparatus of a “sniveling” entitlement state. If Brother Todd wants to graduate to the Senate, he could certainly do worse than to study the rhetorical modus operandi of our other Missouri GOP Senator, Roy Blunt, and learn to talk out of both sides of his mouth while distorting inconvenient facts – and do it in such a stunningly vapid style that nobody will remember anything he said in the first place.

* Slightly edited in for clarity and style.

Jonathan Chait calls Paul Ryan’s budget a “War on the Weak” and observes:

Ryan’s plan does do two things in immediate and specific ways: hurt the poor and help the rich. After extending the Bush tax cuts, he would cut the top rate for individuals and corporations from 35 percent to 25 percent. Then Ryan slashes Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and low-income housing. These programs to help the poor, which constitute approximately 21 percent of the federal budget, absorb two thirds of Ryan’s cuts.

Ryan spares anybody over the age of 55 from any Medicare or Social Security cuts, because, he says, they “have organized their lives around these programs.” But the roughly one in seven Americans (and nearly one in four children) on food stamps? Apparently they can have their benefits yanked away because they were only counting on using them to eat.

Ryan casts these cuts as an incentive for the poor to get off their lazy butts. He insists that we “ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”

Question: Is Ryan channeling Sen. Jim Lembke (unemployed workers won’t “get off their backsides”) or vice versa? Or are they both channeling Ben Stein, whose personal survey reveals that:

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work.

[emphasis in original]

Nice of him to qualify his hasty generalization with the word “generally”, but Think Progress disagrees:

The current recession is a global phenomenon caused by the collective bad behavior of the world’s largest financial institutions. Before the recession, the unemployment rate hovered around six percent; it is ludicrious to say that [fifteen million] Americans suddenly got lazier and less able to work within the span of a few months.

But, to return to the subject of Ryan cutting federal revenue by extending the Bush tax cuts, a P-D letter writer pointed out: “There are two parts to a budget. One is revenue. That is not the part you cut.” More specifically, according to WillyK:

if we do nothing about spending, but just let the the Bush tax cuts die a natural death, we would halve the deficit by 2021.

Here at home, that lesson is lost on Lembke et. al., who are slashing state revenue by turning down tens of millions in federal funds already appropriated for us. They claim it’s a protest about federal overspending, though their action does not cut the federal deficit by one cent. But the Lembke loonies aren’t the only Republicans who don’t understand that balancing the budget gets harder if you cut revenue. Both chambers have voted to eliminate our corporate franchise tax, thus costing Missouri $87 million a year.

Does anybody in the state legislature besides Jeanette Mott Oxford speak up for the sanest way to increase Missouri revenue: that is, by raising taxes on the wealthier Missouri families? Our top tax bracket is $9,000. As in $9,000! That was a munificent salary when it was instituted in 1931. It was like making $300,000 in today’s economy. But as a top tax bracket in 2011, it’s ludicrous. August Busch IV is in the same tax bracket as people renting one room apartments in urban ghettos.

Meanwhile, the meanies in Jeff City are doing their best to shove more Missourians out of the top tax bracket. They’ve undone another of our citizen initiatives by ruling that minimum wage workers won’t get automatic Cost of Living Adjustments. They’re making war on unions. Ideally, Republicans would like to pass Right-to-Work-for-Less, but if they can’t get that one through the lege this year, they’ll settle for enfeebling unions by legislating that employees must give their consent before a union can use their dues for political purposes.

We can only wait to see how many of these bad ideas Jay Nixon will veto.

If Missouri workers don’t begin to notice that the GOP views them as parasites and the rich as their rightful rulers, the situation will continue to deteriorate.