He may think so but he’s delusional.
It’s my understanding that that’s not up to Ryan now. It’s too late by Wisconsin law to withdraw his name from the ballot. It’s not like he’s going to be able to campaign for THAT seat in addition to the vice-presidency.
And it has been done before, most recently by Joe Lieberman in 2000.
One thing that I think is being overlooked, is that Ryan is a leading member of Congress, which everyone hates with a passion. I don’t think Ryan is a game changer one way or the other, I still think Romney gets his ass handed to him (the electoral road for Romney is very very hard). But I do think that for many Americans when they hear “Congressman Paul Ryan” they will immediately go into dislike mode.
The Progressive movement empowers everyone; collectively and individually. The Progressive movement is calling for thriving wages for work so individuals can once again build their own nest eggs for retirement and their own safety nets for emergencies. Radical right wing tax and pay policies have stolen rightful wages from workers since at least 1965-1970 when 1) wages stagnated and workers are still working for what they did over 40 years ago, and 2) when pay and productivity diverged from the parallel path they’d followed for decades, and productivity continued to rise while wages … wait for it … stagnated.
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would not only continue on this path to poverty for the majority of Americans, but they’d pass legislation that would make it worse!
Well, you’re entirely wrong.
- The rich in this country are highly subsidized with government handouts; even deeply conservative Senator Tom Coburn acknowledges as much.
- A large number of super wealthy individuals also pay ZERO federal income taxes because of their tax breaks, subsidies and write-offs … except they don’t need those tax breaks in order to keep enough of their paltry income to, you know, survive.
- We aren’t calling for the wealthy to pay a fair share because “they can afford it”; we’re calling for them to pay their fair share because they aren’t doing so at the moment.
We contend, as did Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, that labor is the superior of capital and should be treated with more respect in the tax code, not less, which is the scheme the right wing have set up for themselves. There’s no excuse whatsoever for capital gains to be treated “special” somehow and taxed at half the rate as income from labor is taxed. You guys can sell it as an incentive to invest in the lie of creating more jobs, but the reality is that it’s nothing more than rewarding people for not working, which I thought you guys supposedly hated the idea of. :dubious:
We also contend that when the super rich stopped paying workers their share of corporate profits, stealing it for themselves and hoarding it in banks and offshore accounts so they could avoid paying their fair share of taxes on it, they weakened the tax base and shorted the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars that would have been collected had that money gone into workers’ pockets where it was earned, and not into vehicles that prevented it from being taxed.
Here’s a simple example of how stealing workers’ wages steals funding from the Social Security pool, for instance:
Company A has 1 CEO, 50 senior executives and 1,500 worker bees with a payroll expense of $99,000,000. Under right wing schemes the distribution looks like this:
Average worker pay is $41,673.83.
Execs make 20x that @ $833,476.60
CEO makes 325 that @ $13,543,994.75
Because of the cap on taxable Social Security income, the Social Security pool only gets $6,101,335.87
Now let’s use the same $99,000,000 payroll, but give workers their fair share that represents a reasonable increase in wages based on their increased productivity over the decades, and pay them, say, $76,263.11, which is just under 2x as much as current and would restore them to a wage that more closely represents their decades of increased productivity.
Let’s let the executives still reap in big bucks at $305,052.44, and let’s make the poor, put-upon CEO try to survive on a measly $3,813,155.45, which is still fifty times the average workers’ wage.
NOW the Social Security fund takes in $10,604,859.98; a difference of ($4,503,524.11).
Extrapolate that out over 40+ years and over tens of thousands of corporations and it’s easy to see on just this one aspect of the right wings’ policies, how the wealthy have prevented us from keeping just that one program solvent to the tune of billions of dollars.
And that’s to say nothing of the lost tax revenue workers would have paid at their higher tax rate than the rich pay at their special super low tax rate, not to mention how many fewer individuals would have been forced onto taxpayer subsidized programs which could have redirected our higher tax revenues to rebuilding our infrastructure and paying down our debt because working families would no longer need it to put food on their tables and roofs over their heads.
It’s a matter of simple mathematics. The wealthy are cheating us with their tax avoidance schemes and their decades-long fight to hold wages (especially the minimum wage) down to 1965 levels.
We want our money back from them.
That he is, but he may be right about this. The GOP has a penchant for nominating the person who finished 2nd in the primaries last time.
“next in line” is an amorphous concept, but generally we know it when we see it. Santorum, unlike say, George Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee, is just not electable. Republicans as a rule don’t elect people that are likely to get blown out, at least not since Goldwater.
Don’t you remember how two and three years ago we heard all these cries of doom from your side, how the evil deficit was going to destroy the credit-worthiness of the country and we’d have rampant inflation? Gee, our rampant inflation today is almost unnoticeable, and government bonds have historically low interest rates, showing that the markets disagree with you. On the other hand the austerity program in Spain has led to massive unemployment and very high interest rates on government debt.
How many times does reality have to slap you in the face for you to get the message?
The way to cut the deficit is through taxes on unproductive income and by investing that money in programs to improve infrastructure, educate our kids, and stimulate the economy while doing so. It is a great opportunity, especially since we can finance this with very cheap money.
I’m aware of it. I’m also aware that Democrats went over the caps. And the final compromise made just last week kept spending slightly over the caps.
If the government borrowed long term, that would be true. The government doesn’t do that though. It borrows short term like every other government does, which makes it very vulnerable to interest rate changes. As we’re seeing in Europe, where some countries have to roll over a ton of debt at interest rates they can’t afford.
That should be 1,050 worker bees, should anyone try to check my math. Didn’t notice the typo to fix it before the 5 minute edit window had expired.
Evidently George Bush was the only electable one in that list.
In almost any other year, John mcCain would have won easily. Put him up against John Kerry or Al Gore, it’s a GOP landslide.
You also realize that playing politics with the caps in the first place was a bullshit move? Wait, you probably don’t, nevermind.
Yeah, it’s a damn shame that Karl Rove happened to him in 2000.
I’m not so sure. He was a pitiful candidate. I think Gore would have cleaned his clock.
He could always lie and say that he’s not an incumbent.
What an asinine amendment.
Well said. Amendments are about the most serious thing you can propose, and it sure looks like Romney was all too casual about proposing an amendment. One wonders if Saint Ronald Of Reagan would have qualified.
Not if Gore couldn’t beat Bush. Er, by more than he did.