Obamacare repeal is stuck between a rock and a hard place

Carimah Townes/Think Progress

The Obamacare repeal crusade is falling apart thanks to GOP infighting, just four weeks into townhalls, mailboxes, and phone lines to demand the preservation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), impatient conservatives are pressuring House Speaker Paul Ryan ((R-WI) to scrap the law without a replacement strategy — leaving the future of repeal stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Donald Trump’s presidency. As constituents across the country flood GOP

On Monday, 35 out of 40 members of the House Freedom Caucus, a hardline conservative body with Tea Party leanings, voted in favor of rapid repeal. But the GOP has yet to come up with an ACA replacement, which means the caucus prefers to risk millions of Americans’ access to health insurance as opposed to waiting until a new health insurance plan is developed and implemented.

The hardliners reportedly want to eviscerate individual and employer mandates, as well as Medicaid expansion — much like the repeal bill that made its way through the House in 2015 — with no replacement option.

“What the Senate passed in October 2015 is the best starting place…,” Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC), chairman of the hard-right Republican Study Committee, said on Monday night. “Let’s get that on that on the books; then we can move quickly after that to put in replacement components.”

With the Freedom Caucus vote, GOP lawmakers revealed that they’re officially at odds with Ryan, who favors a more cautious repeal effort that involves a simultaneous replacement plan. On Tuesday, Ryan reiterated his intention to take it “step-by-step.”

The vote also signals a critical breakdown within the GOP leadership at a time when constituents are pushing hard against Republican lawmakers in favor of gutting affordable health care.

Voters are showing up to town halls en masse to demand that Obamacare stay intact. Representatives are so inundated with calls, visitors, and mail that they’re literally in hiding.

Last week, Jason Chaffetz cut a Utah town hall meeting short after he was confronted by angry protesters, hundreds of whom criticized his adversarial stance on Obamacare and yelled “Do your job!” The next day, a crowd of protesters at a Florida town hall shouted down Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), who brought up “death panels” in his criticism of the ACA.

Similar actions are anticipated across the country, and there’s still no sign that Republicans have a viable replacement option.

As Congress dukes it out, there’s no indication that Trump is closer to having a comprehensive plan.

Last February, he promised Americans that they’d have “great health care for a fraction of the price,” “immediately, fast, quick.” But he broke that promise in Week 3 of his presidency, when he told Bill O’Reilly that a new health care plan wouldn’t surface “until some time into next year.”

Trump And Paul Ryan Are Lying: ACA Repeal Will Take Health Care Away From 24.5 Million

By Jason Easley/Politcusa

Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and other Republicans are lying about the impact of Obamacare repeal. According to an analysis by ACA expert Charles Gaba, repeal will result in 24.5 million Americans losing their health insurance.

First, Speaker Ryan (R-WI) made a dubious claim in a local Wisconsin interview, “Clearly there will be a transition and a bridge so that no one is left out in the cold, so that no one is worse off. The purpose here is to bring relief to people who are suffering from Obamacare so that they can get something better.”

His claim was one-upped by Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway who claimed that no one who has health insurance would lose it after Obamacare is repealed.

However, the guru of ACA math Charles Gaba analyzed the post-repeal situation and found, “My estimate of the number of highly-subsidized exchange enrollees losing coverage is down a few hundred thousand…but the number of Medicaid enrollees who’d lose coverage is dramatically higher due to yesterday’s revelation that 1.6 million+ additional New Yorkers enrolled in Medicaid would lose their coverage under an ACA repeal than I had previously thought. These folks are listed in the “Young Adults/Other” column due to the unique circumstances at hand. As a result, the grand total at risk now stands at up to 24.5 million people under my scenario (still around 30 million under the Urban Institute’s).”

Gaba’s model is a bit different than how the Urban Institute calculated that 29.8 million people will lose their health insurance after the ACA is repealed.

The conclusion is the same in both studies. Tens of millions of Americans are going to lose their access to healthcare after the ACA is repealed because the Republicans are targeting putting an end to funding for the Medicaid expansion and ACA subsidies. Without a replacement plan, which Republicans don’t have, 20-30 million Americans will lose their health insurance.

Republicans are lying to the American people. ACA repeal is not going to painless. It is going to harm the quality of life of millions. Trump and the GOP will pay a steep price for their ideological folly.

Paul Ryan Gets An Earful From Constituent Who Will Save Hundreds Under Obamacare

BY SCOTT KEYES/Think Progress
RACINE, Wisconsin — Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has been one of the primary architects of the GOP’s ongoing crusade to repeal and replace Obamacare. Most recently, the Budget Chairman has indicated that Republicans will attempt to pass individual reforms to roll back the health law’s provisions piece by piece.

But not all of Ryan’s constituents agree with his position. On Wednesday, the Republican congressman was confronted by one such voter at a town hall in southeast Wisconsin.

“ACA subsidies are a good thing,” Michael Martincic, 64, of Oak Creek told Ryan, criticizing his Party’s repeated attempts to get rid of the health reform law.

Martincic works as a roofer and is currently paying $700 for his health insurance through his union. However, upon browsing Healthcare.gov — “it was so easy to get on the site; the whole thing only took 15 minutes,” Martincic told ThinkProgress afterward — he found that he qualified for subsidies and could be paying as little as $200 for coverage.

Martincic also told Ryan about others who had been helped by Obamacare as well, including a friend with leukemia whose out-of-pocket expenses had been cut in half. At several points, the crowd clapped and cheered for him.

Nonetheless, Ryan defended his party’s repeal votes — 51 in total — noting that some of them only aimed to chip away at particular parts of Obamacare. “We didn’t have 51 votes to repeal it altogether 51 times,” Ryan said. “That’s sort of this urban legend…there are many pieces of this law that we went after.”

Watch it:

Ryan’s own plan to replace Obamacare, the Patients’ Choice Act, was unveiled back in 2009. Although that plan lacks some of the consumer protections in Obamacare, it also incorporates some of the same provisions that made it into the health law. Ryan admitted last year that Obamacare does include some ideas that Republicans “have always been talking about.” But that hasn’t stopped him from repeatedly introducing budget proposals to repeal the law.

Martincic said he and his wife are still deciding whether to go through with the insurance switch, but he’s grateful to have the option. When ThinkProgress asked him whether he thinks Ryan sees the people like himself, who could benefit from Obamacare, Martincic shook his head. “He misses it.”

TRANSCRIPT:

MARTINCIC: What Obama did was get this law passed. Whether it’s good, bad, or not, it got passed. It’s actually helping some people grow, helped this other guy [with] medication. The Republicans….By myself…I could actually…get some kind of subsidy, which would help me…

RYAN: With the ACA, one thing I want to say is we didn’t have 51 votes to repeal it altogether 51 times. I think that’s sort of like this urban legend that we said, ‘let’s repeal it.’ It’s like we did a repeal vote on the whole law. There are many pieces of this law that we’ve gone after—several of them that were made into law, so please know—I think even Democrats would acknowledge that there are a lot of problems with this law. And so we passed a lot of things changing this law—several of which were made into law—but I really do believe there’s a better way to do it than with this health care law.

My argument is that I think there are better ways at dealing with these extremely important and legitimate problems, like people with preexisting conditions—this is why I’m a big fan of risk pools. We had the [??] system in Wisconsin—it worked well, and then it had the federal government attached to it, so it was even more affordable for people with preexisting conditions. That was one of our proposals. So I do think that there are better ways of fixing this problem—affordable coverage for everybody, including people with preexisting conditions that’s a lot better than [this law]. It’s going to hurt our hospitals, it’s going to hurt Medicare, it’s going to make people buy things they don’t want to buy.

VIDEO: Paul Ryan Concedes He’ll Help His Constituents Enroll In Obamacare

BY SCOTT KEYES/Think Progress

RACINE, Wisconsin — Some Republicans have indicated they will use any means necessary to sabotage Obamacare’s implementation, even if that means ignoring constituents who come to their office with questions about how the new law can help them. But Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) won’t be one of them.

For years, Republicans have tried every possible method they could think of to undermine Obamacare. Now, after failing to stop the law from passing, failing in an attempt to get the Supreme Court to strike it down, and failing in nearly 40 tries to repeal the law, some conservative House Republicans are simply going to try to sabotage the law. The leaders of this new effort are Reps. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who have said they will try to undermine Obamacare by purposefully not helping constituents who come to them with questions about navigating Obamacare.

However, Ryan, the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate in 2012, isn’t going along with this strategy. ThinkProgress spoke to the Wisconsin congressman after a town hall on Friday and asked whether his office would be helping constituents who had questions about the program. “We always help any constituent with any problem they have with the federal government,” Ryan declared.

KEYES: Are you going to be helping constituent services, much in the way with Social Security and Medicare?

RYAN: We always help any constituent with any problem they have with the federal government.

KEYES: Including Obamacare?

RYAN: Anybody has a problem with the federal government we’re going to help them because that’s my job. But the best thing I think I can do to help my constituents with respect to Obamacare is to work to delay the whole law.

Watch it:

Even if Ryan won’t be a part of this latest effort to undermine Obamacare, it could still have a major impact on the law. Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein, who works at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, derided the “unprecedented, contemptible GOP quest to sabotage Obamacare” in an Atlantic article last week. “It is important to emphasize that this set of moves is simply unprecedented,” Ornstein notes, drawing a parallel with similar recent legislation that Democrats opposed during debate but didn’t try to undercut once it was law.

Economists Disagree With Paul Ryan’s Claim That ‘Debt Is Crushing Our Economy’

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

Over the past three years, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has repeatedly introduced budget resolutions that contain draconian spending cuts in an effort to stave off the debt crisis he says is right around the corner if it isn’t addressed immediately. Ryan’s plans, all three of which have passed the House of Representatives, would almost surely add to the debt instead of decreasing it, but his main view is that America’s current level of debt is weighing down the economy, a claim he repeatedto Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Thursday night.

“The debt is crushing our economy, it’s slowing us down, and it’s guaranteeing the next generation has a diminished future,” Ryan said. “And we believe we have a moral obligation to balance this budget to get a healthier economy and create jobs.”

The source of those claims is a paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that shows that economies grow more slowly when their debt-to-GDP ratios are in excess of 90 percent. But as Bloomberg reports, there is no economic consensus around those findings, especially when it comes to large economies like the United States:

“The argument that heavy debt loads slow economic growth doesn’t hold a lot of water,” says Guy LeBas, chief fixed- income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia who oversees $12 billion. “It suffers from a mix-up of cause and effect: When weak economic conditions arise, it tends to encourage deficit spending, which is what has led to more U.S. debt being issued, and not the other way around.” [...]

“The Rogoff-Reinhart 90 percent is really quite a fragile number,” says Joseph Gagnon, a former economist in the Fed’s monetary affairs division. “There is no threshold like that for countries that have control of the currency they borrow in.”

Moreover, there is no evidence that the debt is threatening the United States in the short-term. Borrowing costs are at historic lows — as Bloomberg notes, the cost of paying off the debt is lower today than it was when Ronald Reagan was president and financial markets are “begging” the U.S. to borrow. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that the focus on debt and deficit reduction has slowed the economic recovery. Government spending has plateaued since the 2009 stimulus effort that kickstarted the recovery, so while government spending traditionally pulls the economy out of recessions, spending cuts hampered efforts to boost the economy this time.

Investments to help the economic recovery now would fuel growth that reduces deficits and, thus, improve America’s long-term debt outlook as well. The current crisis facing the U.S. isn’t a debt crisis, but rather an unemployment crisis that is being exacerbated by lawmakers who focus too much on the debt.

Even Paul Ryan Opposes The GOP’s Election-Rigging Plan

By Ian Millhiser/Think Progress

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate and author of a 2011 plan to phase out Medicare, was a leader of the Republican Party’s right-wing long before Gov. Mitt Romney tapped him as his running mate. Yet even he opposes a Republican plan to rig future presidential races for Republicans by changing the way electoral votes are counted:

Wisconsin’s U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the unsuccessful 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee, is the latest Republican to throw cold water on the notion of switching the way Wisconsin apportions its Electoral College votes — a shift that would have benefited his running mate, Mitt Romney. . . . Ryan, R-Janesville, said he would prefer that Wisconsin stay a winner-take-all state.

“I’ve always kind of liked the idea of being targeted as a state,” Ryan told the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board on Tuesday. “I’d hate to be a flyover state. I’d like to be in the hunt for being a targeted state. I think it’s good for us.”

Notably, Ryan’s argument — that allocating all of Wisconsin’s votes to the winner of the state as a whole ensures that presidential candidates pay more attention to the state — is an argument against both versions of the GOP election-rigging plan.

Republicans originally proposed rigging the Electoral College by allocating electoral votes in key blue states one-by-one to the winner of each congressional district, rather than to the winner of the state as a whole. This month, however, Pennsylvania Republicans are expected to introduce a modified election-rigging plan in that state which would allocate electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote — so that a Republican candidate who receives 40 percent of the vote would also receive a little less than 40 percent of the state’s electoral votes, even if the Democratic candidate wins the state as a whole. Significantly, the Pennsylvania plan would not apply in red states, so those states would continue to award 100 percent of their electors to the Republican.

How Paul Ryan Pretended To Volunteer At A Soup Kitchen

By Annie-Rose Strasser/Think Progress

Between Mitt Romney’s claim that 47 percent of the country “believe they are entitled to” government assistance to afford food and Paul Ryan’s assertion that people on food stamps are “takers, the entire Romney campaign has cemented the impression that they are “not concerned about the very poor.”

Ryan might have topped any previous callousness though, when he and his staff apparently “ramrodded their way” into a soup kitchen last week for a photo opportunity without even actually volunteering.

President of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, Brian J. Antal, told the Washington Post that he had no interest in making his organization a political talking point: “we are apolitical because the majority of our funding is from private donations… It’s strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors… The photo-op they did wasn’t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”

Biden dismantles Ryan during debates

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No, six studies did not debunk the Tax Policy Center’s finding on the Romney tax plan

Dylan Matthews/The Washington Post

Paul Ryan repeated his campaign’s talking point that six studies have debunked the Tax Policy Center’s claim that it is “mathematically impossible” 

Paul Ryan repeated his campaign’s talking point that six studies have debunked the Tax Policy Center’s claim that it is “mathematically impossible” for Romney to implement all his tax cuts, achieve revenue neutrality, not raise taxes on the middle class, and not raise taxes on investments.

I can’t believe we have to keep saying this, but no, six studies did not say that. One study, from Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, only found that the Romney plan is possible by fiddling with the definition of “middle class”, and confirmed TPC’s finding under the definition TPC used. Another, from AEI’s Matt Jensen, found that if you subject some investment income, namely interest on state and local bonds, to taxes, the plan need not raise middle class taxes. But that leaves TPC’s claim untouched. Another, from Princeton’s Harvey Rosen, relied on implausibly high estimates of the growth effects of the Romney tax plan, and even then confirmed the TPC finding when comparing the plan to a baseline where the Bush tax cuts expire. And another, from the Heritage Foundation’s Charles Dubay, is based on a misestimation of the cost of an obscure estate tax provision.

What’s more, not all of these are actual studies. Jensen’s critique, for example, came in the form of a blog post. That says nothing about its quality, just that the Romney campaign’s characterization is a bit odd. Only three working papers or studies – one from Rosen, one from Dubay, and one from Feldstein – attempt to rebut the TPC study, and none succeed in rebutting TPC’s actual points.

In short, the Romney plan is mathematically impossible. Biden is right. Ryan is wrong.

At The Vice Presidential Debate: Ryan Told 24 Myths In 40 Minutes

By Igor Volsky/Think Progress

Paul Ryan spoke for 40 of the 90 minutes during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate and managed to tell at least 24 myths during that time:

1) “It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that [the Libya attack] was a terrorist attack.” Obama used the word “terrorism” to describe the killing of Americans the very next day at the Rose Garden. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said in a Rose Garden statement on September 12.

2) “The administration was blocking us every step of the way. Only because we had strong bipartisan support for these tough [Iran] sanctions were we able to overrule their objections and put them in spite of the administration.” Even the Israeli President has effusively praisedPresident Obama’s leadership on getting American and international sanctions on Iran, which have significantly slowed Iran’s progress.

3) “Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.” [T]he possibility of Medicare going bankrupt is — and historically has been — greatly exaggerated. In fact, if no changes are made, Medicare would still be able to meet 88 percent of its obligations in 2085. Social Security is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter. There is also an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits.

4) “The vice president was in charge of overseeing this. $90 billion in green pork to campaign contributors and special interest groups.” Multiple reviews, including an independent review of all Department Of Energy loan programs by Herb Allison –- finance chair for McCain for President 2008 –- have found no “pork” in the stimulus’ funding of green projects, concluding that the loans were not steered to friends or family, as Ryan claims.

5) “Was it a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland, or on windmills in China?” As PolitiFact has pointed out, the money for electric cars in Finland did not come from the stimulus. Rather, it originated with the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, which predated the Obama administration. The claim about “windmills in China” is also inaccurate.

6) “When they see us putting – when they see us putting daylight between ourselves and our allies in Israel, that gives them encouragement.” The Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, told CNN, “President Obama is doing … more than anything that I can remember in the past [in regard to our security].”

7) “You see, if you reform these programs for my generation, people 54 and below, you can guarantee they don’t change for people in or near retirement.” Here is how the Romney/Ryan Medicare plan will affect current seniors: 1) by repealing Obamacare, the 16 million seniors receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and are saving $3.9 billion on prescription drugs will see a cost increase, 2) “premium support” will increase premiums for existing beneficiaries as private insurers lure healthier seniors out of the traditional Medicare program, 3) Romney/Ryan would also lower Medicaid spending significantly beginning next year, shifting federal spending to states and beneficiaries, and increasing costs for the 9 million Medicare recipients who are dependent on Medicaid.

8) “Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.” Ryan is claiming that Obamacare siphons off $716 billion from Medicare, to the detriment of Medicare beneficiaries. In actuality, that money is saved primarily through reducing over-payments to insurance companies under Medicare Advantage, cutting waste fraud and abuse, and eliminatinginefficiencies in the system. Ryan’s budget plan keeps those same cuts, but directs them toward tax cuts for the rich and deficit reduction.

9) “And then they put this new Obamacare board in charge of cutting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.” The Board, or IPAB is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Congress can accept the savings proposal or implement its own ideas through a super majority. The panel’s plan will modify payments to providers but it cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost-sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria” (Section 3403 of the ACA). Relying on health care experts rather than politicians to control health care costs has previously attracted bipartisan support and even Ryan himselfproposed two IPAB-like structures in a 2009 health plan.

10) “7.4 million seniors are projected to lose their current Medicare Advantage coverage they have. That’s a $3,200 benefit cut.” Enrollment is actually projected to increase by 11 percent in Medicare Advantage (MA) in 2013. Since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, Medicare Advantage premiums have decreased an average of 10 percent and enrollment in these plans has increased 28 percent.

11) “This [Medicare premium support] plan that’s bipartisan. It’s a plan I put together with a prominent Democrat senator from Oregon.” Wyden not only voted against Ryan’s budget, he also called the idea that he supported it “nonsense.”

12) “Eight out of 10 businesses, they file their taxes as individuals, not as corporations.” Far less than half of the people affected by the expiration of the upper income tax cuts get any of their income at all from a small businesses. And those people could very well be receiving speaking fees or book royalties, which qualify as “small business income” but don’t have a direct impact on job creation. It’s actually hard to find a small business who think that they will be hurt if the marginal tax rate on income earned above $250,000 per year is increased.

13) “[Unemployment is rising] all around America.” In August, the unemployment rate dropped from a year before in 325 of 372 metro areas surveyed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

14) “The average tax rate on businesses in the industrialized world is 25 percent, and the president wants the top effective tax rate on successful small businesses to go above 40 percent.” The U.S. is raising historically low amounts of revenue from the corporate income tax, and it already has the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the world. U.S. corporations are taxed less than their foreign rivals, and the U.S. effective corporate tax rate is low compared to other developed economies.

15) “He’ll keep saying this $5 trillion plan, I suppose. It’s been discredited by six other studies.”The studies Ryan cites actually further prove that Romney/Ryan would, in fact, have to raise taxes on the middle class if he were to keep his promise not to lose revenue with his tax rate reduction.

16) “You can – you can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayer. It is mathematically possible. It’s been done before. It’s precisely what we’re proposing.” If Romney/Ryan hope to provide tax relief to the middle class, then their $5 trillion tax cut would add to the deficit. There are not enough deductions in the tax code that primarily benefit rich people to make his math work. As the Tax Policy Centerconcluded, Romney’s plan can’t both exempt middle class families from tax cuts and remain revenue neutral. “He’s promised all these things and he can’t do them all. In order for him to cover the cost of his tax cut without adding to the deficit, he’d have to find a way to raise taxes on middle income people or people making less than $200,000 a year,” the Center found.

17) “So they proposed a $478 billion cut to defense to begin with. Now we have another $500 billion cut to defense that’s lurking on the horizon. They insisted upon that cut being involved in the debt negotiations, and so we have a $1 trillion cut.” Ryan has frequently gotten in hot water for criticizing President Obama for the very same defense cuts that he voted for in 2011.

18) “If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the smallest – the smallest it has been since before World War I.” PolitiFact rated this claim as “Pants on Fire,” noting that “a wide range of experts told us it’s wrong to assume that a decline in the number of ships or aircraft automatically means a weaker military.”

19) “Look at what they’re doing through Obamacare with respect to assaulting the religious liberties of this country. They’re infringing upon our first freedom, the freedom of religion, by infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals.” Religious institutions haven’t been forced to “violate their conscience” by paying for contraception. Houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt from offering birth control.

20) “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance if Obamacare goes through or the 7-point million – 7.4 million seniors who are going to lose it.” The Affordable Care Act would actually expand health care coverage to 30 million Americans and all seniors will keep their guranteed Medicare benefits, despite Ryan’s fear mongering. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that very few people will have to enroll in new coverage.

21) “We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people.” In March 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintonnoted that “many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” However, she did not endorse their view.

22) “When Barack Obama was elected, they had enough fissile material — nuclear material to make one bomb. Now they have enough for five.” This is misleading and unproven. Iran now has enough fissile material, but has not yet enriched to the necessary level for a weapon. The Institute for Science and International Security says “it would take Iran more than two months to produce that amount if it started with 20%-grade uranium, and ‘several months’ to make enough for a bomb using low-enriched uranium. That would give the world community enough time to detect the operation and organize a response, ISIS noted in June.”

23) “[Iran is] racing toward a nuclear weapon.” Israeli and American intelligence officials aren’t so sure.

24) “We don’t want to do is give our allies reason to trust us less [by announcing a withdrawal timeline for Afghanistan].” It’s unclear how our allies would trust us less since they too agreed to the timeline. As Biden pointed outed, “That’s a bizarre statement. .. Forty-nine of our allies — hear me — 49 of our allies signed on to this position.”

Paul Ryan: Cut taxes first, balance budget later

By Greg Sargent/Washington Post

A number of folks are having fun with Paul Ryan’s Sunday interview on Fox News, in which he declined to explain how the Romney/Ryan tax cuts will be paid for: “I don’t have the time, it would take me too long to go through all the math.” Jon Chait sees this as the latest sign that Ryan will “emerge from the race with his legend punctured.”

But there’s another line from Ryan that is arguably just as revealing: Ryan explicitly admits that he and Romney would cut taxes even if they can’t make the math show that the tax cuts would be paid for.

After Ryan’s remark about not having the time to do the math, Chris Wallace pressed Ryan this way:

WALLACE: If, just suppose, that the doubters are right, President Romney takes office and the math doesn’t add up.

RYAN: First of all, we’ve run the numbers, I’ve run them in Congress, they do. We’ve got about five other studies that show that you can do this.

WALLACE: OK, but let’s assume it doesn’t. The question is, what’s more important to Romney? Would he scale back on the 20 percent tax cut for the wealthy? Would he scale back and say, OK, you know, we’re going to have to raise taxes for the middle class?

I guess the question is what’s most important to him in his tax reform plan?

RYAN: Keeping tax rates down. By lowering tax rates, people keep more of the next dollar that they earn. That matters. That is incentives. That’s pro-growth policy. That creates 7 million jobs. And what should go first...

WALLACE: So that’s more important than...

RYAN: That’s more important than anything. And more importantly, it’s not what deductions are in the tax code but it’s who gets them.

That is as clear a statement of priorities as you could want. Ryan admits that even if the math in their plan can’t work, that even if the tax cuts cannot be paid for by ending loopholes and deductions on the wealthy, he and Ryan would not scale back their planned tax cuts on the rich one penny. And don’t worry, this won’t explode the deficit, because just trust us, the revenues generated by the growth unleashed by the tax cuts will ultimately pay for the plan.

The consensus among many mainstream economists is that this is a “fantasy,” and as Jonathan Bernstein has noted, the same promise by previous GOP presidents has proven it to be magical thinking. Romney himself has admitted under questioning that such thinking is his fallback, too. But yesterday Ryan went considerably further, by explicitly confirming tax cuts are to be prioritized over revenue-neutrality.

The Romney tax plan promises everyone an across the board tax cut, which would be paid for by ending loopholes and deductions, beginning with those enjoyed by the rich. Romney promises that the plan would be revenue neutral. The Tax Policy Center found, however, that it’s mathematically impossible to keep all these promises — the only way to pay for all those tax cuts is to target loopholes enjoyed by the middle class, ultimately hiking their tax burden. Romney sometimes deals with this by insisting the study is wrong and vaguely promising that he will, in fact, make the math work somehow, through negotiations with Congress — after he is elected president, of course.

But here Ryan allowed that even if the math explicitly indicates that the tax cuts cannot be paid for without raising middle class taxes — the conditional Wallace laid down — the Romney administration would proceed with the tax cuts, anyway. Cutting taxes is a more important short term policy goal in Romney’s plan than having it pay for itself. Indeed, Ryan’s claims, by any reasonable measure, represent a confirmed disavowal of the notion that the plan will be “revenue neutral,” if by “revenue neutral” we mean that the plan can be demonstrated to pay for itself up front.

Good to know. Hopefully the priorities on display here will be exposed during the debates.

Paul Ryan vs. The Stench

By: Roger Simon/Politico

Paul Ryan has gone rogue. He is unleashed, unchained, off the hook.

“I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Romney off of him,” Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa, told The New York Times on Sunday.

Coming from a resident of Iowa, a state where people are polite even to soybeans, this was a powerful condemnation of the Republican nominee.

Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.”

Even before the stench article appeared, there was a strong sign that Ryan was freeing himself from the grips of the Romney campaign. It began after his disastrous appearance on Friday before AARP in New Orleans. Ryan delivered his remarks in the style dictated by his Romney handlers: Stand behind the lectern, read the speech as written and don’t stray from the script.

Ryan brought his 78-year-old mother with him and introduced her to the audience, which is usually a sure crowd pleaser.

But when Ryan began talking about repealing “Obamacare” because he said it would harm seniors, one woman in the crowd shouted, “Lie!” Another shouted “Liar!” and the crowd booed Ryan lustily.

Who boos a guy in front of his 78-year-old mother? Other 78-year-old mothers.

That was Friday, and that was the end of Ryan following the game plan. At a certain point, all running mates on failing campaigns feel they must break free from the manacles placed on them by the top of the ticket. Sarah Palin began pursuing her own path once she learned that John McCain was having strategy sessions with his morning bowl of Farina.

Dan Senor, one of Romney’s closest advisers, has kept a tight grip on Ryan, traveling with him everywhere and making sure he hews to the directions of the Romney “brain trust” in Boston. (A brain trust, rumor has it, that refers to Ryan as “Gilligan.”)

But on Saturday, the day after he was booed, Ryan broke free. Appearing at a town hall meeting at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Ryan showed the glitz, the glamour, the razzle-dazzle that he was supposed to bring to the campaign in the first place.

He did a PowerPoint presentation for the crowd. According to the National Journal, be began thusly: “ ‘I’m kind of a PowerPoint guy, so I hope you’ll bear with me,’ Ryan told the audience as he began clicking through four slides, which showed graphs depicting U.S. debt held by the public from 1940 to present, debt per person in the United States, percentage of debt held by foreign countries and a breakdown of federal spending. He then launched into a 10-minute monologue on the federal debt.”

A word about PowerPoint. PowerPoint was released by Microsoft in 1990 as a way to euthanize cattle using a method less cruel than hitting them over the head with iron mallets. After PETA successfully argued in court that PowerPoint actually was more cruel than iron mallets, the program was adopted by corporations for slide show presentations.

Conducting a PowerPoint presentation is a lot like smoking a cigar. Only the person doing it likes it. The people around him want to hit him with a chair.

PowerPoint is usually restricted to conference rooms where the doors are locked from the outside. It is, therefore, considered unsuited for large rallies, where people have a means of escape and where the purpose is to energize rather than daze.

Ryan’s PowerPoint slides were officially labeled: “Our Unsustainable Debt (U.S. Debt Held by Public as a Share of Economy),” “Your Share of the Debt,” “Who Funds Our Reckless Spending?” and “How the Government Spends Your Money.”

The Romney campaign was furious. But Ryan reportedly said, “Let Ryan be Ryan and let the Stench be the Stench.”

According to Ryan’s official schedule, on Wednesday he “will attend a Victory Town Hall at Walker Manufacturing in Fort Collins, Colorado, and a Victory Rally at America the Beautiful Park in Colorado Springs, Colorado.”

Sources close to the Ryan campaign tell me his two new PowerPoint presentations will be: “How a Bill Becomes Law” and “Canada: Friendly Giant to the North.”

Ryan Fever. Catch it!

Paul Ryan channels Gingrich takes on space funding issues

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