Mitt Romney Makes His Vice President Selection

Paul Ryan selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate not only has energized the Republican base it also has energized the Democratic Party. Paul Ryan has become the spokesman for the Tea Party and their extreme right-wing ideology and his budget has become the blue print of where the Republican Party wants to take the country. Unlike Romney he has a long voting record in Washington. It is a record which drips with hypocrisy and belies his fiscal hawk reputation. It is a record that demonstrates his being nothing more than a crass politician captured by special interests. It is a record that is now part of the Romney campaign.

With his Republican colleagues, he voted for both Bush tax cuts, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and for Medicare Part D, all which were unfunded. He voted for TARP and Bush’s auto-bailout, for porkbarrel legislation such as the "Bridge to nowhere" bill and needless subsidies and tax breaks for corporations. He is as responsible as anyone in Congress for the turning of a $200 billion dollar budget surplus Bush inherited from Clinton into the first trillion dollar budget deficit in the country’s history; the genesis of a deficit he now claims will be the death knell of our republic.

While railing against Obama’s economic stimulus package claiming government spending doesn’t create jobs, he was writing letters to the Labor and Energy Departments requesting $21 million in stimulus money professing the money would create 9,000 jobs but magically only in his district. In 2002 he argued passionately for his colleagues to pass the third Bush stimulus package, asserting additional government spending was needed to get the country out of recession.

His budget, which is his signature achievement, purports to set our fiscal house in order. It fails so miserably in that respect that David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former director of office and Management and Budgetary Administration, calls Ryan’s budget a “Fairy Tale Budget Plan” and wrote it “…will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.”

Ryan incorporates the theory of trickle down economics that George H. W. Bush eloquently labeled as “Voodoo Economics” into his budget by slashing taxes for corporations and the wealthiest among us. His budget never gets balanced despite making massive cuts to the most vulnerable among us. Cuts so draconian the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote several letters calling the Ryan budget immoral, saying it failed “…the shared responsibility of the government and other institutions to protect human life and dignity, especially of the poor and vulnerable…”

By choosing Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, has selected a running mate whose singular accomplishment in Congress provides us with a detailed vision of what the Republican Party’s true values are. It is a social Darwinism vision that rewards the rich and powerful and punishes the poor and defenseless. It is a callous vision arrogantly driven by raw ideology that seeks to tear asunder the social and economic fabric of our society for purely political gain. It is a vision which will not withstand the light of day. And that is why Democrats are delighted to have Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate.

Willie C. Moore

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