Tim Noah:
Paul Ryan Hearts Unemployment: Two days in, we're seeing three main lines of attack against Paul Ryan:
1>. He wants to abolish Medicare "as we know it" and replace it with a voucher system that will shift significant costs onto the elderly.
- He wants to abolish Medicaid and the food stamp program, too, and replace them with block grants that would radically shrink available funds for the indigent.
- As a budget-balancer he's a phony, because his drastic cuts in federal programs are accompanied by irresponsible cuts in taxes for the rich, and because when George W. Bush was president he voted for the unfunded Medicare drug benefit.
So many vulnerabilities, so little time!
All very true. But, says Tim Noah, there is more:
The next line of attack, I predict, will be that Ryan hearts unemployment… his introduction, during the 2007-2009 recession, of a bill to repeal Humphrey-Hawkins['s]… requirement (more like a plea, really) that the Fed take unemployment levels into consideration when it sets monetary policy (something that was part of its original charter but has played a minimal role since the Great Inflation of the 1970s)…. This from a guy who kicked off his vice-presidential campaign attacking Obama for tolerating too much unemployment! Ryan's hometown of Janesville, Wisc., incidentally, was particularly hard-hit by unemployment during the recession when the closing of a General Motors plant in 2009 resulted in the loss of 5,000 jobs (though lately its economy has shown some signs of picking up)…. [H]e's an ideologue who thinks the government shouldn't lift a finger to reduce unemployment.
