Chuck Schumer: Paul Ryan's plan is a 'fraud'

[flamingdem]

http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/chuck-schumer-paul-ryans-plan-is-132207.html

Sen. Chuck Schumer will urge Democratic senators to attack Paul Ryan on his signature issue, aiming to cut the legs out from under the idea that the GOP vice presidential candidate is concerned about the nation’s debt.

In a memo Schumer is sending Wednesday afternoon to his caucus that was shared with POLITICO, the Senate Democrats’ messaging czar calls Ryan’s plan “a fraud” when it comes to reducing the deficit. Ryan’s budget plan, Schumer says, is a continuation of GOP efforts to cut Medicare spending as part of a transfer of wealth from poor to rich while doing nothing about deficit reduction.

Titled “Exposing the Myth of Paul Ryan As Deficit Hawk,” Schumer's memo details how Senate Democrats should hit the Wisconsin Republican when speaking with voters and the press. The plan, in short, is to paint Ryan as someone who would explode, not control, the deficit.

“It takes away Ryan's singular credential as Romney's running mate,” the memo says.

“In choosing Ryan as his running mate, Romney has nationalized the debate over Ryan's unpopular Medicare plan,” Schumer wrote. “For this gambit to succeed, Romney will need to defy the laws of political gravity. His bet is that voters will respect a hard-boiled approach to deficit reduction enough to stomach the unraveling of a program as popular as Medicare. But the dirty little secret about the Ryan plan is that it inflicts its damage to Medicare without achieving its stated purpose of reducing the debt. If we can succeed in showing voters how Ryan is not really a deficit hawk at all -- that he prioritizes conservative ideology over balancing the budget -- the rationale for his selection is gone, and Romney's political high-wire act will fail.”

Schumer said Senate Democrats cannot allow Romney to create daylight between his campaign and Ryan’s budget proposals.

“We must do our best to make Romney own the Ryan plan in its entirety,” he wrote.

[flamingdem]

1. Paul Ryan is a fraud. Repeat it. Paul Ryan is a fraud. Sing it. (Daily Kos on Schumer)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/15/1120555/-Chuck-Schumer-calls-Paul-Ryan-out-as-a-deficit-fraud

** Ryan cannot be taken seriously, the talk shows need to frame him as an intellectual zero and a fraud who as we know is fronting for the Koch Bros. etc

Sen. Chuck Schumer has got the fiscal message on Paul Ryan: "[A]t least in terms of deficit reduction, the Ryan plan is a fraud," the New York Democrat wrote in a memo addressed to other Senate Democrats.

Most significantly:

1. He supported the Bush policies that got us into this deep fiscal hole in the first place. From the Bush tax cuts to two unfunded wars to the unpaid-for creation of Medicare Part D, Ryan’s fingerprints are all over the big-spending, Bush policies that turned Bill Clinton’s record surpluses into the record deficits inherited by Barack Obama. [...]

4. Most importantly, as already mentioned, the math does not add up in Ryan’s own budget. Even taking the unrealistically rosy assumptions that Ryan stipulates in his budget (for instance, that revenue levels would be 19 percent of GDP), his plan would not balance the budget until 2040. Independent experts like the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center have challenged these assumptions. Under more realistic assumptions, Ryan’s plan could take far longer to balance the budget and cause the federal debt to rise even higher.

It's not like Schumer's coming from the far left with this, either. He also assails Ryan for having voted against the Simpson-Bowles plan from his seat on the Catfood Commission. While a vote against that atrocity is no bad thing, Ryan, of course, voted against it because it wasn't atrocious enough, so Schumer has a point on that one even if he starts from an obnoxious place. And this is the right message. Paul Ryan's Beltway media-bestowed credentials as a serious policy person have never stood up to scrutiny. It's time for that scrutiny to be applied.

So: Paul Ryan is a fraud. Repeat it. Paul Ryan is a fraud. Sing it. When all someone's deficit talk adds up to is "cut services and raise taxes for people who aren't rich," the term is deficit peacock, not deficit hawk.