Paul Ryan who was chosen by Mitt Romney to be his running
mate as they seek the post of president and vice president of the United States of America , will soon give a
speech at the Republican National Convention that is held in Florida . You know these two have very little
to say because they have accused their opponents -- the incumbent president
Barack Obama and his vice president Joe Biden -- of having run out of ideas. In
fact, it has been the habit of these two to accuse their opponents of what they
are themselves.
Romney and Ryan have been on the campaign trail for a while
now, have said what sounds like a broken record and have repeated it several
times -- plagued as they are by a dearth of ideas to fill the void in their
message. Like the arsonist who claims he knows how to extinguish the fire he
started, Romney has been running around saying he knows how to bring back to America the
jobs he helped send abroad. Well, it may take a thief to catch a thief thus
bring matters back to their original state, but it is impossible for an
arsonist to bring back to normal what he has damaged.
It is for this reason that Paul Ryan is running around
laying the blame of unemployment in America on the fire brigade that is
now working to extinguish the Romney fire, rather than tell the truth and admit
that the fire was set by the arsonist who is a jobs pyromaniac. No, Ryan is not
saying the current administration was responsible for setting the fire, he is
only blaming it for not putting out the fire fast enough. And so, he claims
that he and his boss will do a better job in this regard. But the trouble is
that Ryan does not say how they plan to do so except to repeat the old ideas
about closing the loopholes which, presumably, have allowed the arsonist to add
fuel to the fires that he set himself.
But Ryan does not come right out and admit the last part of
the argument. Instead, he claims that closing the loopholes will lower the tax
rates for everyone, including the creators of jobs who will take advantage of
the new tax regime to hire more people and thus help lower the unemployment
rate. But who are the people who take advantage of the loopholes right now? you
ask. And he answers that they are the rich people. But are these not the same
people who are supposed to create jobs and hire people to fill them? If you
close the loopholes and deprive them of their traditional source of revenue,
how will they take advantage of that and hire more people? Can you explain
this, Paul Ryan?
Well, you shouldn't have embarrassed the challengers to the
top posts in America
with this question because neither Ryan nor Romney have answered it, and never
will they because there is no answer to be given considering the fact that the
premise of the argument is nothing less than a fantasy. And what is worse is
that the fantasy does not stand alone because there is another fantasy standing
alongside it to from the two legs of a narrative so contorted, it makes the
pretzel look like a line as straight as the beam of a laser.
What Romney and Ryan are pushing on the public is the notion
that they will eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the programs which are
administered by the federal government. They promise that such elimination will
have the same effect on the economy as the closing of loopholes. But you ask:
Is this not what the Obama program is doing in Medicare, for example, where the
approach taken will help save 716 billion dollars over ten years? No, they say,
this should be called a cut in the program for the elders.
They don't explain that last part well, but when you listen
to the gobbledygook that Ryan utters when you ask a question on the subject,
you get an earful that makes very little sense. To make it easy on yourself,
you take into your own mind all that he says, and you put it in the form of a
simple analogy that ends up sounding like this: You don't make the pig look
good by putting lipstick on its lips. But if you call the pig a Bambi, you have
a dandy on your hand that does not need lipstick. This is why we call the
approach taken by the other guys a cut in Medicare, and call our approach a
saving that is achieved by giving the seniors a voucher they will spend anyway
they choose. You see, the cut which is a pig becomes a saving which is a dandy
of a Bambi. Get it?
No, you don't get it but you keep asking question after
question trying to understand how this will work in actual life. But all you
get is that the President will cut 716 billion dollars from Medicare. Competing
against this is the Romney-Ryan voucher program that will rely on the seniors
achieving the same goal of cutting (now called saving) the same 716 billion
dollars from the same Medicare program. The difference will be that instead of
the government battling the giant insurance companies, the elderly will be
asked to go into battle alone against those same giant companies.
Thus, all that the government will do is hand the elderly
the promised voucher and wash its hands. As to those who will fail to wrestle
the insurance companies to the ground and win the fight, they will be condemned
to pay out of pocket what they did not win – and added to this will be the
legal expenses they will have incurred when they dared to take on the insurance
companies and fight them.
The dandy Bambi here will be the Romney-Ryan understanding
of the capitalist notion which says that people ought to have the freedom to
choose. In this case, the elderly will be given the freedom to chose fighting
the giant insurance companies and lose everything they have including their
false teeth and their walking canes, or chose to bow their heads and capitulate
the moment they receive a letter from their insurance company telling them what
they will get and no more. But there will be no government standing beside them
to protect them or do as little as hold their hand. Freedom will have triumphed
and brought back to America ,
will say Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
Thus, what is expected to be in the Ryan speech is the kind
of vague gobbledegook that will mask all those realities, attempting to make
the pig look like something it is not by calling it something else.