Mr. Ryan’s Cramped Vision
NY Times

Mitt Romney’s safe and squishy campaign just took on a much harder edge.
A candidate of no details — I’ll cut the budget but no need to explain
just how — has named a vice-presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, whose
vision is filled with endless columns of minus signs. Voters will now be
able to see with painful clarity just what the Republican Party has in
store for them.

As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan has drawn a blueprint of a
government that will be absent when people need it the most. It will not
be there when the unemployed need job training, or when a struggling
student needs help to get into college. It will not be there when a
miner needs more than a hardhat for protection, or when a city is unable
to replace a crumbling bridge.

And it will be silent when the elderly cannot keep up with the costs of
M.R.I.’s or prescription medicines, or when the poor and uninsured
become increasingly sick through lack of preventive care.

More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan, and eagerly
accepted by the Tea Party-driven House, come from programs for
low-income Americans. That means billions of dollars lost for job
training for the displaced, Pell grants for students and food stamps for
the hungry. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops
raised their voices in protest at the shredding of the nation’s moral
obligations.

Mr. Ryan’s budget “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable
seniors and workers who cannot find employment,” the bishops wrote in an
April letter to the House. “These cuts are unjustified and wrong.”

Mr. Ryan responded that he was helping the poor by eliminating their
dependence on the government. And yet he has failed to explain how he
would make them self-sufficient — how, in fact, a radical transformation
of government would magically turn around an economy that is starving
for assistance. At a time when state and local government layoffs are
the principal factor in unemployment, the Ryan budget would cut aid to
desperate governments by at least 20 percent, far below historical
levels, on top of other cuts to mass transit and highway spending.

Those are the kinds of reductions voters of all income levels would
actually feel. People might nod their heads at Mr. Romney’s nostrums of
smaller government, but they are likely to feel quite different when
they realize Mr. Ryan plans to take away their new sewage treatment
plant, the asphalt for their streets, and the replacements for retiring
police officers and firefighters.

All of this will be accompanied, of course, by even greater tax
giveaways to the rich, and extravagant benefits to powerful military
contractors. Business leaders will be granted their wish for severely
diminished watchdogs over the environment, mine safety and food quality.

Mr. Romney had already praised the Ryan budget as “excellent work,” but
until Saturday the deliberate ambiguity of his own plans gave him a
little room for distance, an opportunity to sketch out a more humane
vision of government’s role. By putting Mr. Ryan’s callousness on his
ticket, he may have lost that chance.

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I'm a liberal because the militant fundamentalist ignorant
science-denying religious xenophobic corporate oligarchy of modern
Republican conservatism just doesn't work for me or my country.