I’m all for reforming medicare to make it viable, something like 80% of our 100 trillion unfunded liability comes down to health care (medicare, medicaid, etc).
However Ryan wants to eliminate the guaranteed benefit plan and replace it with vouchers. Private health insurance is more expensive than single payer medicare. Ryans plan will make medicare more expensive and less reliable. Is that surprising? No, it isn’t. Paul Ryan’s plan, like the plans of virtually all front running republicans today isn’t to solve the problems of the country. It is to use the countries problems as a leninist strategy to push anti-statist solutions that usually make the problems worse. Medical care will continue to become unsustainably expensive under Paul Ryan’s plan.
Do you have any extremely religious friends, and no matter what problem you have they think the solution is to convert you to their religion? Paul Ryan is no different. His medicare plan will make medicare more expensive and less reliable. But it converts it to his ‘religion’ (which is an anti-statist Ayn Rand philosophy). The fact that it makes the problem worse is irrelevant.
Or take communists. Give them a problem and the solution is always to weaken the private sector and give the state control. Do communists care if their solutions make everything worse? Nope. Their only goal is to force the world to fit their ideology, even if it screws everything up. Paul Ryan is no different, just on the different side of the spectrum.
Social security can be fixed with easy fixes. Raise the tax rate from 12.4% to 13.2-14%, or lift the cap, or raise the age 1-3 years of full SS retirement and the system is solvent until the 22nd century.
When Obama passed the affordable care act one provision was starting around 2014 a committee had to limit medicares growth rate to the rate of economic growth, plus 1%. Medicare is still a guaranteed benefit program under his plan. Obama’s plan was a legitimate attempt to keep medicare solvent and functional, it wasn’t an attempt to remake medicare into his social and political philosophy. Which is yet another reason why I love the ACA.
Plus a good deal of the savings from Paul Ryan’s plan to reduce the social safety net is spent on supply side tax cuts, not on reducing the deficit. Again, solving problems doesn’t matter.
The current deficit does not offset the surplus that it ran for several years (up to 2.5 trillion), which was borrowed to pay for other programs.
Your linked report claimed that healthcare costs in Europe could rise to 14% of GDP from 8% due to the ageing of the population by 2030. It’s claimed that further rises are “no longer possible or politically viable”. Except that the OECD puts US health expediture at 17.4% of the GDP in 2009 and WHO puts expenditure at 15.2% in 2008, with their relatively youthful populations.
You can go back to 1935 if you want. But it’s just going to make the comparison look worse for you.
In 1935, the national debt was $33,778,000,000 - a total barely worth mentioning by modern standards. It went up during WWII - it was $258,286,000,000 by 1945. But politicians back then were more sensible - they raised the tax rate. They actually had five years with budget surpluses between 1945 and 1957.
Kennedy and Johnson cut the tax rate (over Republican opposition - times have changed) and the budget went up to $317,273,000,000 in 1965.
The national debt kept creeping up through the seventies. It was $997,855,000,000 when Reagan was elected. And that’s when it began to really go up. Reagan cut the top tax rate but increased spending (Republicans are in denial over Reagan - the facts are he increased both government spending and the number of government employees). By the end of his eight years, the national debt had tripled to $2,857,430,000,000. Bush I kept Reagan’s policies going and got the national debt up to $4,411,488,000,000 in his four years.
Here, go look up the numbers. These go all the way back to 1911.
Actually, the program of forced austerity is only making the situation in these countries worse. Furthermore,
(1) The “welfare states” in Scandinavia are weathering the current bad economic climate quite well, thank you.
(2) The problems with Greece are just utter fiscal responsibility on both the spending and tax side. I.e., they had not only out-of-control spending but also severely misrepresented their budget situation and they had a tax system where cheating was rampant and unpunished.
gamerunknown hit the nail on the head, but let me also give you an analogy to help you understand why this claim is very deceptive. Let’s say that I mooch off my uncle, borrowing money from him for 30 years. Then one day, my uncle tells me that his financial situation is such that I can no longer mooch off him and in fact I have to start paying him back. Would it be justified for me to say my uncle “is in the hole” and imply that the fact that I now have to start paying him back is a problem with his finances and not mine?
Not true. Those of us who recognize that ending the useless Bush tax cuts would, over a few years, restore balance to the budget, while recognizing that the current crop of Republicans cannot act responsibly and consider anything else, are willing to do nothing about it. The major downfall is the abrupt, ill-considered approach to cutting military spending that the Republican refusal to cooperate in the “Supercongress” led to - while we do need to eliminate the useless, antiquated strategy of preparing to fight World War III against the Soviets and the Red Chinese simultaneously, we also need to phase that in over a course of years to avoid a return to recession. And we know who would be responsible for that state of affairs, even if they can never admit it.
Where did that last bit come from? Not an actual understanding of what exactly is being “cut”, of course. :dubious:
Moonshot: thanks for providing the citation. But jshore has captured the problem: the great bulk of Ryan’s future spending cuts are unspecified. And if you can’t say what you’re going to cut, it’s unlikely that you will be willing to take the political heat later and go through with them.
As an aside, I should note that I was speaking of Ryan’s 2010 proposal, while you linked to a more recent one. I’m just saying that to keep the issues clear. Looking at your table, I see that Ryan says that discretionary spending and military will sum to 3.8% of GDP in 40 years hence. That’s laughable: Heritage reported that figure was 7.9% in 2005, of which 4.1% was defense spending. Even in 2000, defense spending hit a low of 3.0%. Ryan’s budget proposal was silly. In practice, the unspecified magical cuts wouldn’t materialize and (pivoting back to the 2010 proposal) we would be left with higher taxes for 95%, halved taxes for the top 1%, and a phasing out of medicare. And remember: the great bulk of the Republican caucus voted against Medicare in 2011: these aren’t just white papers I’m talking about. There are serious efforts at work to gut the middle class.
ETA: Pete Peterson’s group receives accolades by the mainstream press. Caveat Lector: they really provided a poor treatment of Ryan’s proposal. And their adventures with Americans Elect in 2012 leads me to seriously question their competence or grasp of politics.
Getting back to the OP: I first heard this story when I read about Ryan apologizing for the mistake. I interpreted it as being similar to Obama “claiming” that there were 57 states: They both just got the most significant digit wrong by 1. But that was just my interpretation based on his own retraction/apology.
Y’know, finishing a marathon at all is respectable. Most people have never done it, and a lot of people wish they could (just not strongly enough to actually get off the couch and do something about it). If he wanted to say that the fact that he ran a marathon is evidence that he’s healthy and capable, and has enough drive and determination to get the job done, well, that’d be political puffery, but it’d still be truthful. But lying about his time? Why? I mean, even if he genuinely didn’t remember, he could just say “Well, I stayed the course, and I finished what I started, and that’s what’s important”, or something of the sort.
Well, the problem is, he phrased it as “2 hour and fifty something” rather than just under 3 hours. Which is hard to get to from the actual “just over four hours” by messing up a significant digit. And I think there are a lot of people who have run marathons who know that you just don’t forget your time. At best, it’s a pretty ugly unforced error. At worst, it reinforces the Lyin’ Ryan meme from his speech at the RNC.
Claiming Obama is stealing $714 billion from Medicare to finance Obamcare, claiming that Obama eliminated work requirements for welfare, claiming that an auto plant closed during Obama’s administration.
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Obama “claiming” that there were 57 states: They both just got the most significant digit wrong by 1.
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How the hell is the 7 in “57” the most significant digit? It’s not as though you have a hell of a lot of digits to choose among. Are you really saying that if Obama “claimed” that there were only 17 states, or 27, or maybe 7 states, you wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of his “error”? Ryan sliced a friggen HOUR off his marathon time, so you bet that was the most significant digit, but Obama made a minor slip, almost patently a mental blip, entirely meaningless in terms of potential political gain (what, he was hoping to get the votes of the citizens living in the states he made up?), while Ryan told a self-aggrandizing LIE about his achievements, a lie I’m sure he’s passed many a time without being called out for it in the naive provinces he comes from, and he got caught.
Chalk up another “GOP false equivalance” here, please.
I run marathons and I’ve inadvertently misstated my times, in just the way this appears to have occurred. I’m a plodding Clydesdale, never ran under 4 hours (I’ve run a half in under 2). I also know that every race I’ve ever run, I ran more than the stated distances (everyone does) and recalculated it just for giggles. I also read runners’ magazines and sometimes in conversation jumble thresholds for elite, very good and middle-of-the-packers like me.
So, yes, I remember my times, but I’ve misstated them. On those rare occasions, I generally recognize my brain fart real time, and correct it–“Wait, I mean four hours and X minutes.” I’m not saying that’s what Ryan did, but it doesn’t seem crazy to me. especially 20 years after the fact.
Who’s to say that he didn’t get the number in an “unofficial capacity” - say, he ran the marathon distance on his treadmill in 3 hours during a workout - and mentally convinced himself that he could totally run a real marathon in 2 hours 50 if he ever got a chance to enter one again.
If you say something like that to yourself enough times, the small kernel of truth behind it CAN start to seem real.
All politicians exaggerate and tell lies to get votes and influence. He admitted his mistake instead of trying to justify it.
I can’t wait for this guy to attempt another marathon because you KNOW he’s gonna. After he and Romney lose, he’ll have more training time.
Obama said “57” when he clearly meant “47”. He got the number in the 10’s spot off by one. (He was saying that he had been to 47 states, one more to go to, since they weren’t going to Hawai’i or Alaska. The republican lie was that he claimed that there were 57 states in the USA.) Ryan got the hour’s spot off by one.
I’m just saying that I read his apology and didn’t see what the big deal was.
I’m really looking for the kind of lies that would make one a “compulsive liar”, and not just someone trying to get elected by misrepresenting his opponent’s points. [By this criteria, most Republicans are compulsive liars]. Has he claimed to have been a Navy SEAL? Claimed to have killed a bear with his bear hands?
