How Rep. Paul Ryan Is Just Like Sen. Ted Cruz

Here in The Wall Street Journal on October 8th, Rep. Paul Ryan says he is willing to swap sequester cuts for cuts to mandatory spending:

If Mr. Obama decides to talk, he'll find that we actually agree on some things. For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there's a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs.

And the reason is there's more to be gained over the long haul from cuts to the mandatory side, which is 60% of annual outlays anyway:

These reforms are vital. Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office predicts discretionary spending—that is, everything except entitlement programs and debt payments—will grow by $202 billion, or roughly 17%. Meanwhile, mandatory spending—which mostly consists of funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will grow by $1.6 trillion, or roughly 79%. The 2011 Budget Control Act largely ignored entitlement spending. But that is the nation's biggest challenge.

But just why Republicans like Paul Ryan expect us to believe they can negotiate cuts to mandatory programs from Democrats who have just rammed a new one called ObamaCare down our throats is quite beyond me. It's as unrealistic as Senator Ted Cruz thinking libertarian Republicans could get Obama to defund that program without unity in the party on the subject in the first place. Cynics quickly decided Cruz was just fundraising for 2016. And Rep. Ryan could just as plausibly be trying to re-establish some street cred with conservatives after his involvement with the Facebook-financed immigration amnesty debacle.

There's plenty of unrealism to go around in the Republican Party, which still hasn't figured out that Obama and the Democrats are the enemy, which is surprising since that's how he views them. But that seems to be a particularly libertarian penchant, expressed as it is in interminable losing electoral challenges throughout the country which do nothing but help elect Democrats. Maybe Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz are just libertarian spoilers on the national stage, for whom success is keeping Republicans from succeeding.

Figuring out how to proceed when your country has been taken over by a hostile foreign power without having fired a shot remains the central problem for an opposition which doesn't realize it is one, especially when your own ranks have been infiltrated by an enemy.

Where are the non-libertarian economic conservatives? 

Face It, The Heritage Foundation Has Been And Remains Confused (By Liberalism)

As the photo at left demonstrates but conservatives want to ignore, including Erick Erickson here at Red State, a Heritage Foundation representative was present for the signing of RomneyCare in 2006 because Heritage invented the damn idea way back before HillaryCare raised its ugly head and Heritage was happy to see it made into law (so was Senator Ted Kennedy). That was just seven years ago, but now Heritage would just rather have you ignore all that.

Forcing people to sign up for health insurance at the point of a gun has its analog, of course, in forcing people in distant lands to adopt Western-style democracy, something we heard the heir of Republican conservatism, George Bush, incessantly preach: "The long-term solution is to promote a better ideology, which is freedom. Freedom is universal." (Whether they want it or not). To this day, as Molly Ball's article in The Atlantic points out here, "universal coverage" is still Heritage's position:

In my interviews with them, Heritage officials could recite chapter and verse on why Heritage turned against the individual mandate -- a turn, they claim, that occurred before Romney or Obama adopted the idea. “We still believe universal coverage is a good idea,” [Phillip] Truluck [VP and COO] said. But none of the four Heritage officials I interviewed could tell me offhand how the foundation proposes to reform health care and cover the uninsured if Obamacare is scrapped. (Later, an assistant followed up by emailing me links to Heritage papers on “putting patients first,” regulating the health-insurance market, and Medicare reform.)

The place is universally incoherent, and always has been. It has been against Drugs for Seniors as an expansion of big government, but supported the line-item veto, thus expanding the authority of the executive part of government, even as it once used to warn about the imperial presidency. Today it is famously against the current immigration amnesty plan but was pro-immigration for the longest time. It had a founder who has moved notably left liberal, but now it has a libertarian-friendly leader in Jim DeMint. It was for ObamaCare before it was against it. Something about the Heritage Foundation is really off for it to be the home of so many contradictory currents. If conservatism is the negation of ideology, as Russell Kirk taught us, Heritage knows nothing about it.

Maybe they should just rename the place The John F. Kerry Foundation and be done with it.

Even In September 2009 Obama Showed He Didn't Understand The Size Of The Country

From his speech to Congress, here:

"First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have."

Well, what if you are not among those "hundreds of millions", eh? Then you are out of luck in his mind, evidently. Who could he possibly be referring to?

It is customary to speak of tens of millions when speaking of up to 100 million.

It is customary to speak of a couple hundred million when speaking of up to 200 million.

It is customary to speak of a few hundred million when speaking of up to 300 million.

But "hundreds of millions" refers to far more than 300 million, especially if you are not lucky enough to be among them. By analogy with 100 million, you could be speaking of up to 1,000 million. That's 1 billion for those of you in Rio Linda.

Anyway, all those extra people in the "hundreds of millions" category must be those people you didn't know about from the 57 states Obama says he visited during the campaign "with one left to go", not counting Alaska and Hawaii! Densely populated states, those in excess of the 50 states, they must have been, too, which begs the question why he hadn't visited them yet!

The US population at the time of the speech was about 307 million. So by September of 2009, seven months after having been sworn in, Obama had had plenty of time to figure out the size of the country, but he hadn't.

The guy's a moron, and you know it. He wasn't even "learning on the job". Toking on the job is more like it.

Rich Radio Talkers To Make Bazillions Off AMT Fix And Don't Know It!

The New York Times reported the cost to the federal government of the permanent AMT fix over the next decade at $1.8 trillion, here, based on the findings of the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Do you know what that means?

If something costs the federal government something, it means it saves someone something, namely, the (mostly) rich taxpayers who pay the damn thing, who now get to bear the blame in the liberal media for increasing the deficit over the next decade because of it. That's a good thing to a conservative, last time I checked (keeping the money, not getting the blame), unless you are a conservative radio talk show host whose stupidity is exceeded only by the size of his paycheck. (Sean Hannity is so stupid he's actually criticizing the fiscal cliff deal because it does just that, increase the deficit. Someone should tell him he's just adopted the liberal argument that tax cuts increase the deficit, not that it would do any good). Teams Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham and Beck really ought to call their CPAs before they continue shooting their mouths off about what a massive victory Obama just achieved on the backs of the rich. The irony here is that while Obama thinks he just won a free Cadillac, it turned out to be a Pontiac from Rent-A-Heap, delivered by Rush, Sean and Glenn. They made Laura drive.

When are you stupid people out there in radio land going to get it? Like this guy does:

"The AMT fix, like the Medicare 'doc fix' was an end of year ritual that couldn’t be resolved permanently.  Why you may ask?  Because any permanent fix would reflect in the CBO’s deficit and debt estimates for the years going forward.  Fixing the AMT for any one year was considered a cost for that particular year, but the CBO would base their estimates by current law, which would have the AMT not being fixed for the next year and every year afterwards.  Fixing the AMT for one year is a cost of 92 billion dollars.  A permanent fix it for the next ten years costs almost a trillion dollars.  From a purely crass, political position, having the costs of a permanent fix to the AMT and Bush income tax cuts accrued under the Obama administration ( two items that Republicans wanted to do but could never find the money for):

Priceless.

However all is not well in conservative talk radio land.  I made it a point to listen to what I think was a fair cross section of conservative radio for their take on all things fiscal cliffdom, and I must say, it was a muddled mess of incoherence."

Perhaps The Most Important Argument Against Consumption Taxes

Perhaps the most important argument against consumption taxes is Murray Rothbard's critique of them here, noting their time-preference prejudice:

"The major argument for replacing an income by a consumption tax is that savings would no longer be taxed. A consumption tax, its advocates assert, would tax consumption and not savings. The fact that this argument is generally advanced by free-market economists, in our day mainly by the supply-siders, strikes one immediately as rather peculiar. For individuals on the free market, after all, each decide their own allocation of income to consumption or to savings. This proportion of consumption to savings, as Austrian economics teaches us, is determined by each individual's rate of time preference, the degree by which he prefers present to future goods. For each person is continually allocating his income between consumption now, as against saving to invest in goods that will bring an income in the future. And each person decides the allocation on the basis of his time preference. To say, therefore, that only consumption should be taxed and not savings is to challenge the voluntary preferences and choices of individuals on the free market, and to say that they are saving far too little and consuming too much, and therefore that taxes on savings should be removed and all the burdens placed on present as compared to future consumption. But to do that is to challenge free-market expressions of time preference, and to advocate government coercion to forcibly alter the expression of those preferences, so as to coerce a higher saving-to-consumption ratio than desired by free individuals."

Rothbard goes on to ascribe this prejudice to "Calvinism", which may be entertaining to the libertarian who is interested in wine, women and song now and has a devil may care attitude about present frugality as a defense against want later. But this assumes there is no moral difference between savings and consumption, which there certainly is when the penniless old man turns up on your doorstep, hat in hand. The libertarian has his own time preference prejudice, were he to admit it, which life teaches us has serious consequences, more often than not.

Be that as it may, it is important to recognize that standard measurements of economic activity in the United States have for some time shown, in something like the following formulation, that "70% of GDP consists in consumer spending", and were it not for schemes like Social Security and Medicare there would be far more ringing of the bell going on at the front. This is quite a remarkable fact in a supposedly Calvinist civilization, a fact which argues for the moral superiority of savings over consumption because despite our better natures we in reality live otherwise. This suggests that we still ought to do everything we can to encourage the former and punish the latter, for the simple reason which the observation of human nature teaches. We are mixtures of good and evil, but unfortunately too often it turns out to be a bad mixture.

The ancient Greeks, among other things, notably taught us "nothing too much", by which we may infer that the preponderance of present spendthrifts demonstrates individual and social excess which ought to be remedied by tax policy encouraging the increase of savers. To right the ship would mean achieving a better balance between the two, and to Rothbard's main point, which is that under a consumption tax savings would inevitably be taxed in the long run anyway just as consumption is in the present because that is what savings becomes, we therefore ought to have no compunction about taxing savings in the end. That is what the death tax accomplishes, the final message to an excess of savings.

In the present context this recommends taxation of consumption in some form to encourage marginally less of it, better mechanisms of rewarding savings of which we have too little, and a death tax which approximates the same level as a consumption tax would operate at. This means that draconian schemes of estate confiscation by the government at death are in principle unjust because as consumption taxes we would never think of imposing similar levies on the living.

Unless, of course, we subscribe to The New Republic.

Total Votes Cast In Presidential Elections Since 1968

Figures rounded to the nearest million:

1968.....73 million

1972.....78

1976.....81

1980.....87

1984.....93

1988.....92

1992...104

1996.....96

2000...105

2004...122

2008...131

2012...123.

The biggest "shrug" was in 1996 when Republicans ran me-too liberals Bob Dole and Jack Kemp against the real liberals, Billy Clinton and the Div. School Dropout, AlGore.

The second biggest shrug just occurred, when Republicans again ran me-too liberals, tax collectors for the welfare state who promised to preserve Medicare and keep certain parts of ObamaCare, against the real deal in Obama, who just expanded the welfare state with ObamaCare.

Republicans. They don't call them the stupid party for nothing.

If they had at least run conservatives who lost we could say conservatism lost. But they didn't, and we can't.

Republicans Lose Again Because They Offered No Conservative Alternative

Andrew McCarthy for National Review here gets it, even if I would quibble about the precision of his election results:

In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. ...

Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. ...

[T]he Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? ...

Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it ... They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.” ...

Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. ... No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.

That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. ... Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.

McCarthy thinks about 2 million fewer voters showed up in 2012 than in 2004, which is "staggering", except that his election math already looks just a little off. Today I'm showing 122.5 million total votes in 2012, and 122.3 million in 2004, eight years and two elections ago. Still, that is a staggering comparison when you realize that the population has grown by a net 21 million over the period.

Clearly, as McCarthy says, the voters in 2012 "shrugged", but the shrug was actually bigger in 1996 when Republicans again characteristically picked two other moderate losers in Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Fully 8% fewer ended up voting in 1996 than in 1992 (1% fewer voted in 1988 than in 1984).

Starting with 1968 and ending with 2008, the average increase in total votes cast in the presidential from election to election has been 6%. 2012 compared to 2008 shows 6% fewer votes cast. The slightly smaller shrug over moderate Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan may reflect the distance in time and understanding from the debates over conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s.

The single biggest gains in total votes cast, incidentally, occurred in 2004 in Bush 43 v. Kerry (16% more votes cast than in 2000) when war in Iraq put patriotism center stage (just barely 51% voted for that despite buying off seniors with Medicare Part D in 2003), followed by 1992 in Bush 41 v. Clinton (13% more votes cast than in 1988) when the issues were breaking the no new taxes pledge (43% voted against that) and "that giant sucking sound" (19% voted against that).

Republicans still haven't learned how to put conservatism all together and wrap it in a bow.

Neal Gabler Can't Face It That Democrats Have Betrayed Social Security

Here, for Reuters:

"There is no gainsaying that the basic purpose of the [Ryan] budget is to dismantle New Deal and Great Society programs that assist the poor and gradually remove the juice from the third rail by privatizing Social Security and essentially voucherizing Medicare. To save the country from the flood of debt, they must save us from FDR and LBJ."

The Ryan Budget isn't even the law of the land because Democrats have stopped it in the Senate. But for two years, two years!, Democrats have enthusiastically advocated and voted for reductions in the payroll tax, removing the juice from Social Security, in order to put cash into people's hands and stimulate the economy. Democrats did this in the lame duck session in December 2010, when they still had complete control of the US government: House, Senate, White House:

"In December 2010, as part of the legislation that extended the Bush tax cuts (called the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, the government negotiated a temporary, one-year reduction in the FICA payroll tax. In February 2012, the tax cut was extended for another year."

Looks to me like Democrats represent the biggest threat to the sacrosanctity of Social Security.

This Is Not Conservatism: Romney Will Move The Country Leftward

When liberals win, they make conservatives come in their direction. But so-called conservatives have never made liberals compromise to the right. This is why liberals detest them, because they are weak.

Ronald Reagan, former Democrat, didn't do it, and neither has anyone else since. The result has been a constant shift of politics in America to the left. It has never shifted to the right on any social, economic or foreign policy issue. Today's Republican Party is indistinguishable from the Democrat Party of 1960, except on paper, while the Democrat Party struggles mightily to remain American as more and more Democrats openly support self-consciously socialist and even communist ideas.

The country moves inexorably leftward, relaxing moral absolutes from divorce to abortion to homosexuality; growing government and government interference in our lives through mandates while defending old progressive achievements like the income tax, Social Security and Medicare; and ideologizing "democracy" and using it like a cudgel to nation-build abroad.

Mitt Romney will only contribute to this process if he is elected because he has stated explicitly, once again just two days ago in Ohio, that it will be his policy to compromise, to "get things done" as the feeble-minded everywhere like to say:

"We're going to have to do something that has been done in the past in this country and that is we're going to have to reach across the aisle we're going to have to find good Democrats, by the way Democrats love America too, we've got to reach across the aisle find ways to bring in people from the other party work together, collaborate, meet regularly and fight for the American people and we will!," Romney said.

Why conservatives will vote for this I can only answer with the example of Esau, who was so hungry that he sold his birthright for a bowl of stew.

It would be far better to elect the intransigent radical Obama and a principled Republican US House to maintain the status quo than to risk "progress", because that is what you are going to get with Mitt Romney, progress . . . to the left.

Conservatives don't have to vote for Obama to vote for gridlock. Virgil Goode will do. 

Obama Believes Winning Will Be Mandate To Raise Taxes, "Reform" Immigration

Obama has stated explicitly his intent is, if he wins, to raise taxes and "reform" immigration, which is code for amnesty, as reported here:

"If we won, then I believe that's a mandate for doing it in a balanced way."

"We can do some more cuts, we could look at how we deal with the health care costs in particular under Medicaid and Medicare in a serious way, but we are also going to need some revenue."

"If we get [the debt and deficit] done, then immigration reform, I think, is there to get done."

"And I think [the Republican Party] is going to need to get it done because you can't continue to alienate the fastest-growing segment of the country. And it's the right thing to do."

Of course, there are mandates and there are mandates. Obama likes mandates. He likes telling people how things will be, which is why we have ObamaCare shoved down our throats.

In 2008 Obama interpreted his victory as a mandate when his margin of victory in the formerly Red States which went for Bush was merely 1.4 million votes. He lost that "mandate" such as it was in 2010, and if the Republicans keep the US House in 2012 that will still be the conclusion whether or not Romney wins the presidency.

Conservatives Have Become Wrong-Headed About Taxes

Conservatives have become wrong-headed about the tax code.

Steven Malanga provides an exasperating take on "tax reform", here, which was really a liberal Democrat conceit from the beginning but became a so-called conservative one under Ronald Reagan, who was, need we remind everyone, a "former" Democrat:

Most conservatives (though certainly not most Republicans) have come to see the range of incentives and exemptions in the tax code as wrongheaded, including those for businesses which smack of little more than corporate cronyism. This is in sharp contrast to 1986, when many Republicans in Congress resisted reform until a popular GOP president came along willing to take on the business community.

Sacre bleu. The liberal Democrats are nothing if they are not great simplifiers, and if conservatives join them in that enthusiasm, it doesn't mean they are right. Little ideologues all, regardless of party.

Prior to the income tax, a president had to be a pretty smart cookie to figure out all the ins and outs of the tariff system if he wanted his federal government to have enough revenue to continue operations. By 1909, however, the whole country seemed to have wound down so far intellectually that it was just too tired to carry on any longer with that rigorous enterprise and bowed instead to the simplicity of an income tax. Tax reformers today, take note. It doesn't speak well of you that you admit the code is too much for you.

Actually real conservatism opposed the income tax way back when not because it would grow too complex but because it was wrong. When amending the constitution is necessary in order to make something legal, conservatives' first instinct is always to question the advisability of the idea before they conclude there is a defect in the constitution requiring a remedy. The income tax was one such idea. It took four years to gain ratification in the states. As an invention of progressivism the income tax eventually worked a revolution in government by allowing government to grow to gargantuan size with a ready pool of available cash, stolen by force from the population's income. And it is no coincidence that the first major expenditure financed by the income tax was US entry into The Great War. Not long after which came The Great Depression. If progressive ideas were good ones, no one seems to have paid much heed to the early evidence to the contrary.

Every effort by the people since the introduction of the income tax to obtain deductions, exemptions, credits and other incentives in the tax code should be understood by conservatives as wholesome reactionary, counter-revolutionary, rear-guard opposition to what the income tax represents, but today you can hardly find a conservative who will even entertain the idea of overthrowing the income tax, let alone any other of the so-called "achievements" of the progressive era. In fact, some so-called conservatives have become veritable cheerleaders for the income tax. Rush Limbaugh, for one, can't seem even to imagine an America without one for the first 137 years of its existence. An originalist in name only is he.

The problem with so-called Reagan conservatism, then and now, is that it makes peace with the tax code, just as it does with the social welfare state, including Social Security and especially Medicare. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan actually campaign on just such a platform of preserving Medicare for future generations. As Reagan compromised in the direction of liberalism in the 1986 tax reform, so will they.

These people wouldn't know conservatism if it ran up and bit them in the ass.

Tax reform is a fool's errand. You can't "reform" something which is fundamentally wrong in the first place.

ObamaCare Raises Taxes On Middle Class By $200 Billion A Year By 2020

So say James Capretta and Tom Miller, here:

The president wants Americans to believe that ObamaCare is painless and without cost for the middle class, but most Americans, using their common sense, don’t believe him. They are right to be skeptical. It is certainly true that ObamaCare expands the entitlement rolls to some 30 million additional people, and thereby reduces — at least on paper — the numbers of uninsured Americans. But there is a massive cost to doing this, running more than $200 billion annually by the end of the decade. Who will pay for this? The middle class, of course. They will pay higher taxes and higher premiums for health insurance and get less back from the Medicare program in retirement. An honest debate would acknowledge these facts.

Top Tax Loss Expenditures Projected For 2011-2015

From the Joint Committee on Taxation's January 2012 projection, here are the top individual categories of lost tax revenue, commonly referred to as tax loss expenditures (the revenue value of tax deductions, tax exclusions, and tax credits), for the five year period from 2011, annualized:

1. Healthcare, healthcare insurance, long term care insurance = $ 145 billion

2. Mortgage interest = $ 93 billion

3. Dividends, long term capital gains = $ 91 billion

4. 401k plans = $ 75 billion

5. Earned income credit = $ 59 billion

6. Pension plans = $ 53 billion

7. State, local income, sales, personal property taxes = $ 46 billion

7. Capital gains at death = $ 46 billion

8. Cafeteria plan benefits = $ 40 billion

9. Untaxed Social Security and Railroad Retirement = $ 38 billion

10. Charitable giving = $ 37 billion

11. State and local government bonds = $ 36 billion

12. Medicare Part A = $ 35 billion

13. Child tax credit = $ 34 billion

14. Life insurance and annuities = $ 30 billion

15. Medicare Part B = $ 27 billion

16. Capital gains on sale of primary residence = $ 25 billion

17. Property taxes on real property = $ 23 billion

Red = housing related ($ 118 billion)

Green = health related ($ 247 billion)

Blue = investment related ($ 137 billion)

Yellow = retirement related ($ 196 billion)

Purple = social welfare related ($ 130 billion)

Black = state and local government related ($ 105 billion)                                    

Rep. Paul Ryan's So-Called Conservatism Won't Roll Back Anything

He's about preserving Medicare, not ending it.

He's for abortion in certain circumstances.

And now he's about preserving the status quo on DADT, too.

Conservative in name only.

Story here:

One year after the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that barred openly gay and lesbian service members from serving in the military, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said in an interview with WPTV NewsChannel 5 that the controversial policy should not be reinstated.

"Now that it's done, we should not reverse it," Ryan told WPTV NewsChannel 5 during a visit to Miami. "I think that would be a step in the wrong direction because people have already disclosed themselves."

What The Greatest Generation Has Done: Eaten Their Own Children, Modeling Abortion

The old impoverish us all with high taxes in the form of Social Security and Medicare. Last time I checked, the average senior citizen in the good ole USA gets a transfer payment of $30,000 annually.

If you made $100K a year for 40 years in a working life, WHICH YOU DIDN'T!, and if you paid 6.25 percent per year in said taxes, WHICH YOU DIDN'T, you would have contributed $250K, BUT YOU DIDN'T, it would take just 8 years in retirement at $30K per year to eat it all up. WHICH YOU WILL, AND A WHOLE LOT MORE. This is why Gov. Rick Perry of Texas called Social Security a giant Ponzi scheme. WHICH ANY IDIOT FROM A FREAKING COW COLLEGE COULD FIGURE OUT, EVEN WITH A FREAKING C AVERAGE.

They take all this money and go golfing, traveling to exotic locales, vacationing in lavish time shares on which they lose a bundle, getting knee replacements, hip replacements, coronary bypass surgery, cataract surgery, yada yada yada, generally enriching themselves at our expense all the while promoting the notion that they're the greatest while we can't afford even to have children of our own, whom we abort with their encouragement.

Consider this story:

In August, according to the Social Security Administration, there were a record 8,767,941 American workers collecting federal disability payments, and also 2,018,569 spouses and children of disabled workers collecting benefits. Additionally, in August, there were a record 45,505,287 retired workers, their spouses and dependents receiving Social Security benefits.

That made for a record 56,291,797 people in the United States in August taking Social Security or disability benefits. That was up from the previous record of 56,188,736 set in July.

Can We All Agree Now That Both Sides Intend To Cut The Growth Of Medicare Spending?

We once hoped Paul Ryan was a real spending cutter instead of a spending growth cutter, but is now just a defender of Medicare spending growth, or something.

In other words, you are either going to vote for a Republican Welfare State in Romney/Ryan sans ObamaCare, or a Democratic Welfare State in Obama/Biden with it, but not for a Fiscally Conservative State, and certainly not for a Limited State. 

The Investor's Business Daily doesn't seem to care that failing to cut the overall size of a program over time, adjusted for inflation, means you are not a fiscal conservative, here:

Media fact-checkers also complained about Ryan's charge that Obama is cutting $716 billion from Medicare to fund ObamaCare. Not true, they said. Medicare's growth is just being slowed.

But Obama achieves that slower growth by making real cuts in provider payments. And in any case, the media always and everywhere call a reduction in the rate of federal spending growth a "cut." So why suddenly charge Ryan with being misleading for using that same term?

In any case, Obama himself admitted that he's doing what Ryan says. In a November 2009 interview with ABC News, reporter Jake Tapper said to Obama that "one-third of the funding comes from cuts to Medicare," to which Obama's response was: "Right."

Reducing the size of government is different than reducing how much it grows.

Plans like the Penny Plan -- if they threw out the ever-rising baseline which makes government bigger every year because spending on programs must rise to accommodate increased population -- would work in a fiscally conservative sense because they essentially freeze programs in time and lop-off 1 percent annually until revenues grow enough to balance the budget.

But in no sense can even such a plan be construed as a limited government plan because such plans do not commit to paying off the debt, which by my calculations would take $850 billion annually or so for 30 years at 3.5 percent on top of balanced budgets each and every year over the period. This is how households used to work and no longer do, which is why government no longer does.

A country is only as good as its people. If Americans will not control their own spending, the government which represents them never will.

It begins with us, not with Barack Obama or Paul Ryan.

Rep. Ryan Falls In Line: Frames Obama's Reduced Rate Of Medicare Growth As Big Cut

William Saletan for Slate mocks Paul Ryan, here:

Since Mitt Romney tapped you as his running mate, you haven’t stood for fiscal restraint. You’ve attacked it. You warned voters in North Carolina and Virginia that cuts in the defense budget would take away their tax-supported jobs. ... Four days after Romney put you on the ticket, you began parroting his Medicare shtick. You protested that Obama’s $700 billion savings in the future growth of Medicare payments to providers—a spending reduction that any sensible conservative president would have sought, and that you had previously included in your budget plan—would “lead to fewer services for seniors.” You depicted a horror scenario: “a $3,600 cut in benefits for current seniors. Nearly one out of six hospitals and nursing homes are going to go out of business.” You assured seniors that the Romney-Ryan agenda for Medicare “does not affect your benefits.” And you promised future retirees “guaranteed affordability” of health care. In short, you adopted every tactic in the liberal playbook. You framed a reduced rate of growth as a draconian cut. You inflated the likely impact of the reduction. You denounced any loss of services as unacceptable. You promised not to touch seniors’ benefits. And you reaffirmed a fiscally unsustainable guarantee. By my count, you’ve now done this in at least six speeches and rallies. Every day, you’re reinforcing the culture of entitlement and making it harder to rein in retirement programs.

This isn't quite right. There was no fiscal restraint in the Ryan budget to begin with. It simply returned the trajectory of the growth in spending to the status quo ante Obama, which was bad enough. This is why Ryan's budget doesn't achieve balance for decades: it supports the continued growth in spending in programs like Medicare, sans ObamaCare. Obama cuts that growth to help pay for ObamaCare. In other words, it's just business as usual with the Republicans, made to look like fiscal conservatism because it wipes away the really insane spending trajectory threatened under more of Obama.

Bait the conservatives, and switch.

Yea, shame on you, Paul Ryan.

Thomas Sowell Tells A Truth Rep. Paul Ryan Remains Afraid To Tell You

Here:

Neither Social Security nor Medicare has ever had enough assets to cover its liabilities. Very simply, there has never been enough money put aside to do what the government promised to do.

These systems operate on what their advocates like to call a "pay as you go" basis. That is, the younger generation pays in money that is used to cover the cost of benefits for the older generation. This is the kind of financial pyramid scheme that got Charles Ponzi put in prison in the 1920s and got Bernie Madoff put in prison in our times.

Luigi Zingales Fingers George Bush As A Crony Capitalist

There's a great interview with Luigi Zingales in The Economist here:

Companies with a lot of money abroad sponsored a bill in 2004/5 that allowed them to repatriate their profits at a low tax rate. Thus $1 produced $220 of tax savings. The Bush-approved drug and Medicare act was a huge bonanza for the drug industry. Their market value increased by several billion dollars when this was announced. I could continue.

Rasmussen Polling Also Shows Florida As A Must-Win For Romney

Based on Rasmussen's electoral college map tonight, Gov. Mitt Romney must win Florida to prevail against Obama.

Rasmussen shows Obama presently with 247 and Romney with 206 electoral college votes, and just six states in toss-up status (unlike RCP's ten in toss-up status): Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Wisconsin (10), Ohio (18), Virginia (13) and Florida (29).

My hunch is Obama figures Iowa is key to himself because he's counting on heavily union-dominated Ohio going his way, but Obama is so far making an effort not to telegraph this fact. Together those two toss-ups put him at 271, just enough to win. That's why he's spending so much time in Iowa after the pick of the 42 year old Rep. Paul Ryan by Romney, and why Byron York is fixated on Iowa in a recent column, but for the wrong reason. Iowa is more winnable for Obama than it is for Romney. In other words, Obama is theoretically right now conceding in a worst case scenario Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin and Colorado to Romney, which together give Romney only 267, not enough to win, because he believes he can win in Iowa and Ohio.

A Romney loss in Florida and an unlikely sweep of all the rest of these Rasmussen toss-ups means Romney still loses with 262.

Romney must prevail in Florida to win, if Rasmussen's map is correct. That's why Romney has focused on Florida right out of the box in sending Rep. Paul Ryan to Florida to appear there with his mother, reassuring the seniors on Medicare.

This election is going to be about the economy in general, but spending for Medicare is the tip of the Republican spear, while the president parries with appeals to the youth vote, which in Iowa turns out second only to Minnesota. For a state Romney at one time early decided not to contest in the primaries, Sen. Rick Santorum's narrow victory there identified Iowa to Obama as a state vulnerable for a candidate Romney.

The Des Moines Register reports here on five visits to Iowa by Obama in recent days:

The sitting president of the United States is coming back to Iowa next week to do some more campaigning, on the heels of a super-sized three-day visit to the state last week.

Obama is spending so much time in such an insignificant place because of the electoral math somewhere else, combined with the probability of winning Iowa's youth vote.