Ryan has been in the House of Representatives for 13 years and is the chair of the House Budget Committee.
He scored major points with the tea-party folks, when rejected the Bowles/Simpson financial proposition because it did not do effectively address entitlement spending, Social Security issues and the Medicaid disaster . Ryan is very popular with conservatives within the GOP and, for what it is worth, he is/was one of my "top three" choices for President along with Sarah Palin and Marco Rubio.
He was voted "prom king" and owned the title, "biggest brown nose" in his graduating class (high school).
He was born and raised in Wisconsin. He is an Irish Catholic with 67 cousins living in or near his hometown of Janesville (Wi). He is married and has three children and sleeps in his office during congressional sessions. He is blue collar, all the way.
This pick, on the part of Mitt Romney, proves his seriousness as to governmental reform. This GOP ticket is a tribute to Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, and all of the tea-party nation. His selection is as bold a pick as Romney could have made and recharges the GOP base, as if such were necessary.
As an indication of the excitement that will be generated by Ryan's elevation to "VP candidate," his twitter account took on 7,000 friends in the three minutes following his acceptance of this nomination.
Ryan's plan for fiscal reform will be "center stage," and will be opposed by a man, Barack Obama, who has a proven record of abject failure when it comes to national finances. You can't be more of a failure than to be the first president in history to have governed without an accepted budget statement for four full years. In fact, he is the first president to have failed to get a single vote four of his personal budget proposals.
Can you imagine the national debate with Paul Ryan on board? Someone who knows what he is talking about versus someone who cannot get a single member of his own party to sign on to his budget proposals and has failed to do so over the course of his entire term in office???
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106029/ryan-romney-vp-budget-cuts-medicare-medicaid-voucher-tax-cut
ReplyDeleteThe new Ryan budget is a remarkable document — one that, for most of the past half-century, would have been outside the bounds of mainstream discussion due to its extreme nature. In essence, this budget is Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids. It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history). …
Specifically, the Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured. It would also impose severe cuts in non-defense discretionary programs—much deeper than the across-the-board cuts ("sequestration") that are scheduled to take place starting in January — thereby putting core government functions at still greater risk. Indeed, a new Congressional Budget Office analysis that Chairman Ryan himself requested shows that, after several decades, the Ryan budget would shrink the federal government so dramatically that most of what it does outside of Social Security, health care, and defense would essentially disappear.
Yet alongside these extraordinary budget cuts, with their dismantling of key parts of the safety net, the budget features stunning new tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. These tax cuts would come on top of the average tax cut of more than $125,000 a year that the Tax Policy Center (TPC) estimates that people who make over $1 million a year will receive if — as the Ryan budget also proposes —policymakers make all of President Bush’s tax cuts permanent.