"Will Paul Ryan’s past threaten his future?" Posted by Ezra Klein at WP

[applegrove]

Will Paul Ryan’s past threaten his future?

Posted by Ezra Klein at WP


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/12/will-paul-ryans-past-threaten-his-future/

"SNIP......................................................

You can break Paul Ryan’s career — and his policies — into three separate periods.

There were the Bush years, in which Ryan cared about conservatism but not about deficits. These are the years when he authored a Social Security privatization plan that was so costly the Bush administration dismissed it as “irresponsible.” These were the years in which Ryan voted for trillions of dollars in tax cuts and wars and Medicare drug benefits without demanding any way to pay for any of them. If a policy even arguably pointed in a conservative direction, he was an “aye” vote, no matter how extreme, or how fiscally irresponsible.

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Then came the Obama years, in which Ryan remade himself as a conservative who cared only about deficits. The general thrust of his policies didn’t much change, but now he promised to pay for everything, and condemned his party for its profligate past. It’s during this period that Ryan began moving his suite of conservative reforms — privatizing Social Security, block granting Medicaid, voucherizing Medicare, individualizing health care, investor-friendly tax reform — into the broader framework of “Roadmap” budgets, which allowed them to be analyzed not so much as individual policies, but as contributors to deficit reduction.

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And now we’re in the third Ryan era, which is his vice presidential campaign. That’s come with sacrifices so deep that they’re more like contradictions. Where his budget keeps Obama’s $716 billion in Medicare cuts, he’s now attacking the very idea that you would cut Medicare for current seniors. Where his health-care reforms ended the tax break for employer-based insurance, he’s now hammering Obamacare because the Congressional Budget Office says, in a worst-case scenario, that 20 million Americans might move from employer-based insurance to exchange-based insurance — a small fraction of the transition Ryan was looking to trigger. Where he made his name being unusually specific about what and where to cut, he’s now defending Romney for being unusually vague on those topics.

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[Cha]

1. Let's hope the hell so! Indies might want to check out

Paul Ryan's resume along with mitt's.

Thanks applegrove!