Paul Ryan "OMG"

[BridgeTroll]

Social Security and Medicare don't need "fixing".  They have just had their funding drained by Congressional spending on four unnecessary wars in the past fifty years.  Absent the spending on them SS and Medicare would be doing just fine.

Fix the cause of the problem, not the symptom.

Lol... well we certainly cannot work together on solutions if we cannot even agree that a problem even exists.

Is this wrong?

With favorable demographics, contradictions were bearable. Early Social Security beneficiaries received huge windfalls. A one-earner couple with average wages retiring at 65 in 1960 received lifetime benefits equal to nearly 14 times their payroll taxes, even if those taxes had been saved and invested (which they weren’t), calculate Eugene Steuerle and Stephanie Rennane of the Urban Institute.

But now, demographics are unfriendly. In 1960, there were five workers per recipient; today, there are three, and by 2025 the ratio will approach two. Roosevelt’s fear has materialized. Paying all benefits requires higher taxes, cuts in other programs or large deficits. Indeed, the burden has increased, because it now includes Medicare, which is also viewed as an entitlement.

[finehoe]

...we can simply look across the pond to Europe right now at France, Spain, Greece, Italy, etc., and see that it doesn't work.

We know that the supporters of austerity simultaneously urge us to reject “European socialism” while adopting the key European strategies that drove Europe into recession â€" twice.  American conservatives assume that Europe must epitomize stringent financial regulation.  The opposite is true.  Europe adopted “light touch” financial regulation pursuant to neo-liberal economic theory.  Its embrace of the three “de’s” â€" deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization was far more extreme than the United States.  The City of London “won” the regulatory race to the bottom with the U.S.  European’s adopted the full Basel II reduction in capital requirements without the minimum gearing ratio that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insisted upon.  The FDIC prevailed over the intense, but fortunately unsuccessful opposition of the Federal Reserve economists who were the principal architects of Basel II’s disastrous reduction in capital requirements.  The result was that European Union banks had roughly twice the leverage of U.S. banks and faced no meaningful regulatory restraints.  The result was far larger real estate bubbles in several European nations (as a percentage of GDP) than in the U.S., multiple financial crises, and a Great Recession that reached depression levels in several nations.
Most of Europe was in a weak recovery from that Great Recession when Berlin’s insistence on austerity (a pro-cyclical policy that causes recessions to become more severe) threw most of the Eurozone back into recession and much of the periphery into severe depressions.  We have run a “natural experiment.”  The U.S. adopted a modest counter-cyclical fiscal policy while Berlin forced Eurozone nations to adopt pro-cyclical fiscal policies.  The result has been a modest recovery in the U.S. and a second, gratuitous recession in the Eurozone with depression-level disasters in much of the EU periphery.  Their problems have little to nothing to do with their welfare state.

[Jameson]

The older I get, the more it becomes clear to me that the majority of people in this world fall into two categories in regards to Gov't.:

Those who want limited Gov't. intrusion into their lives and more emphasis on personal responsibility.
-OR-
Those who have a feeling of entitlement as though the Gov't. "owes" them something for merely being born and believe that Gov't. is the answer to every problem.

This is just standard teabag boilerplate.  Few people look on the role of government is such a simplistic, bifurcated way.

Typical liberal rhetoric of name-calling and stereotyping. *yawn

Continue to weakly stereotype me if it makes you feel better.

[Jameson]

Obama’s Medicare reform plan isn’t that hard to find. It’s largely in Title III of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The basic strategy has three components: First, figure out what “quality” in health care is. Second, figure out how to pay for quality rather than paying for volume. Third, make it easier for Medicare to quickly update itself to reflect both advances in knowledge about what quality is and how to pay for it.

And so, in Title III, you’ll find dozens of different efforts to achieve these goals. The most famous of them is Section 3403, which establishes the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). But there’s also Section 3021, which creates the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, and Section 3025, which cuts hospital reimbursements if too many of their patients are readmitted, and Section 3001, which establishes value-based purchasing for hospital services, and Section 3015, which collects data on quality, and Section 3502, which advances the medical home model.

Some of the efforts are outside Title III. The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute is actually in Title VI of the law. And then there are the subsequent reforms the administration has proposed to save more money. Those can be found on pages 33-37 of the president’s 2013 budget proposal. They include expanding IPAB’s mandate such that it can change Medicare’s benefit package and setting a growth cap on Medicare of GDP+0.5 percentage points â€" which is, by the way, the same growth cap that Rep. Paul Ryan imposes in the latest iteration of his budget.

Let's go with the very first component: "Quality".

Obamacare extends healthcare to tens of millions of Americans without adding 1 single Doctor or Nurse or Specialist (it does however pay for 16,000 new IRS Agents). Couple that with the fact that we are facing a doctor shortage ( http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=22205 )

You honestly believe that the "Quality" of health care is going to improve under these conditions?

[finehoe]

You honestly believe that the "Quality" of health care is going to improve under these conditions?

That's not this issue.  Read it again.  The plan that you previously seemed to be unaware of doesn't say it will result in improvements in quality, it's about determining what “quality” in health care actually is so that is what you are paying for, not the volume that your referencing of more doctors and doctor shortages implies.

[finehoe]

Typical liberal rhetoric of name-calling and stereotyping. *yawn

Continue to weakly stereotype me if it makes you feel better.

LOL.  Yeah, you don't know anything about stereotyping:

the majority of people in this world fall into two categories in regards to Gov't.:

Those who want limited Gov't. intrusion into their lives and more emphasis on personal responsibility.
-OR-
Those who have a feeling of entitlement as though the Gov't. "owes" them something for merely being born and believe that Gov't. is the answer to every problem

[Lunican]

The older I get, the more it becomes clear to me that the majority of people in this world fall into two categories in regards to Gov't.:

Those who want limited Gov't. intrusion into their lives and more emphasis on personal responsibility.
-OR-
Those who have a feeling of entitlement as though the Gov't. "owes" them something for merely being born and believe that Gov't. is the answer to every problem.

I actually don't know anyone that falls into either of these categories.

[finehoe]

Which tax loopholes Will Romney-Ryan close?  They refuse to say, but no doubt they will choose the ones that benefit the middle-class.

[mtraininjax]

Some of you folks really kill me, the loopholes and class warfare won't amount to a hill of beans if you do not GROW the country with JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. When the country has more revenue coming in, you can resume the loophole arguments.

[fsquid]

class warfare gets people to the polls though.

[JeffreyS]

When the country has more revenue coming in

During Obama's administration we have added over 800 billion to annual GDP only China and Japan have added more. While 4 of the worlds top 10 ecconomys have lost GDP. What we should say to Obama about the ecconomic management of this global recession is thank you.

[finehoe]

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of he husband and then killed her.

That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.

[carpnter]

When the country has more revenue coming in

During Obama's administration we have added over 800 billion to annual GDP only China and Japan have added more. While 4 of the worlds top 10 ecconomys have lost GDP. What we should say to Obama about the ecconomic management of this global recession is thank you.

Voters don't care about GDP, most are not smart enough or educated enough to understand it.  What they do understand is the unemployment number and that will influence voters much more than any GDP numbers ever will.

[Lunican]

Ryan stated on Fox News that he doesn't know when their plan will balance the budget because they haven't run the numbers...  but Obama is terrible by the way.

[fsquid]

class warfare gets people to the polls though.

hmm class warfare?

What on earth are you talking about, fsquid?

This is one of the more bizarre, over used terms that has ever been deployed by rightwing partisans over the past 20 years.

Please tell us, in your own words, what you think 'class warfare' is?

"Class warfare" to me is the act of demonizing a socio-economic class for political gain; and both sides engage in it.