VP candidate Paul Ryan fails math

Mathematically challenged Paul Ryan, official portrait.

I studied basic math as an eighth-grader in the public school system decades ago. We were taught how to balance a budget and given other useful training prior to entering high school. So it’s a little shocking to read Paul Krugman’s latest post at the Conscience of a Liberal (NY Times) and discover that House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan, recently appointed VP candidate on the Republican ticket, is worse than mathematically challenged. The man obviously skipped eighth grade math and hasn’t paid much attention since as to how numbers add up – or not. Unfortunately, the beltway media seems to be as oblivious to financial reality as Ryan.

In an effort to wake up our delusional media, Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, responds to Ryan’s “fantasy” budget proposals here:

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

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The real issue in the economic debate: “jobs, not deficit reduction”

An unemployment line. Photo courtesy of 111274.blogspot.com.

The talk coming out of Washington lately from both the GOP and the Administration cannot be reassuring to seniors who rely on Social Security and Medicare, the unemployed, and others among the nation’s poor. But no doubt the five percent of the population in the U.S. that claims 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth are feeling on top of the world.

John Nichols at the Nation calls President Obama to account for allowing the GOP to take control of the debate in fiscal matters.

Nichols writes:

Republicans never cared about deficit reduction when George Bush was president.

And, for the most part, they don’t care now—as evidenced by broad GOP support for House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan’s plan to keep the budget out of balance until 2040 while clearing the way to begin streaming federal Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid dollars into the coffers of Wall Street speculators and insurance-industry profiteers.

But Republican leaders do care about controlling the debate. When the country is focused on an overblown debate about debts and deficits, that forecloses discussion about the serious economic and social challenges facing the nation. It also forecloses discussion about holding bankers and CEOs accountable for irresponssible and illegal practices that have done far more harm to the nation’s fiscal stability than retirees and the children of low-income families who need a little healthcare.

President Obama’s decision to mimic GOP talking points when it comes to fiscal matters has done more damage to his poll numbers—and Democratic political prospects—than anything said or done by an almost hopelessly inept Republican team.

And one Democratic congressman is calling the president out on the issue.

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Obama’s twists and turns on the dance floor as he bows first to the left and then to the right

In Saturday’s column, Washington Post columnist Dan Balz offers a somewhat thoughtful analysis of Obama’s leadership on economic issues since his inauguration and raises a few questions for both parties and the public to consider.

I stayed with Balz for the most part throughout the piece, but he lost me toward the end when he joined most of  the punditry, whether liberal or conservative, by taking the intellectually lazy route and lumping Social Security and Medicare with all other government domestic programs under the derogatory term “entitlements.”

To add insult to injury, he actually credited Paul Ryan for his budgetary assault on the nation’s elderly and the poor.

(One would hope that Balz will eventually glance at the deductions on his payroll check stub and become aware that he’s been paying into the Social Security trust fund over the years. He might want to ask what the government has been doing with that money.)

 In any case, Balz begins by noting Obama’s twists and turns on the dance floor in Washington as he bows first to the left and then to the right:

In his first two years, President Obama pursued an agenda that dramatically increased government spending and ushered in the biggest change in social welfare policy since the Great Society. When he spoke to the country late Friday night, he sounded like a born-again budget cutter.

Americans may ask which is the real Obama, the politician who embraced the biggest stimulus package in the nation’s history, a bailout of the banks and a takeover of the automobile industry, or the one who on Friday hailed the new budget deal as including “the largest annual spending cut in our history.” 

Nervous Democrats fear that Obama gave away too much in the last-minute agreement that averted a government shutdown. They worry even more about the coming fights over raising the debt ceiling and particularly Obama’s response to the budgetary blueprint outlined last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

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Giffords and husband Mark Kelly watch SOTU (photo)

The New York Times' Jim Roberts shared this photo on Twitter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly watching the State of the Union Address.

Both President Obama in his SOTU speech and Rep. Paul Ryan, who gave the Republican response, recognized Gifford at the beginning of their speeches. In her honor, members of  Congress wore black and white ribbons like that worn by Mark Kelly in the above photo. At the SOTU, the Arizona delegation left an empty chair for Giffords.