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Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Foxx's Secret Plan to Privatize Social Security
Among the several small nuggets embedded in Congresswoman Virginia Foxx's performance yesterday at the Statesville town hall event was her sweeping endorsement of privatization: "I don't know anything the government can do better than the private sector."
"I don't know anything" covers a lot of real estate. Blackwater-style mercenaries are to be preferred to U.S. soldiers? Certainly, we now realize her preference that poor school children should eat chalk dust rather than government-sponsored free lunches. Poor sick people, heal yourselves! And then there's the biggest prize of all for Foxx and her fellow travelers ... Social Security.
Foxx's main squeeze, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, published his "Roadmap for America" recently, which called for the phasing out of Social Security and the further shift of wealth upward. We note that Ryan and the rest of the Republican Caucus have dropped the word "privatization" from their vocabulary, preferring now the word "choice" in its place, but Foxx yesterday in Statesville was pretty naked in her advocacy for throwing all Americans onto the tender mercies of the corporations.
Why would Foxx go through the motions of pretending to "listen" to her constituents when she's already signed on to the most radical of political philosophies? Oh, right. She's running for reelection against three different competitors and needs to pretend that she actually cares what voters think. And that she's not a radical extremist with political views that would seem perfectly at home in the court of King Louis XIV.
Paul Krugman's column today details the dishonest motives behind Ryan's attempt to hide "privatization" from public view. Yesterday in Statesville, Foxx let that door swing open a crack.
"I don't know anything" covers a lot of real estate. Blackwater-style mercenaries are to be preferred to U.S. soldiers? Certainly, we now realize her preference that poor school children should eat chalk dust rather than government-sponsored free lunches. Poor sick people, heal yourselves! And then there's the biggest prize of all for Foxx and her fellow travelers ... Social Security.
Foxx's main squeeze, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, published his "Roadmap for America" recently, which called for the phasing out of Social Security and the further shift of wealth upward. We note that Ryan and the rest of the Republican Caucus have dropped the word "privatization" from their vocabulary, preferring now the word "choice" in its place, but Foxx yesterday in Statesville was pretty naked in her advocacy for throwing all Americans onto the tender mercies of the corporations.
Why would Foxx go through the motions of pretending to "listen" to her constituents when she's already signed on to the most radical of political philosophies? Oh, right. She's running for reelection against three different competitors and needs to pretend that she actually cares what voters think. And that she's not a radical extremist with political views that would seem perfectly at home in the court of King Louis XIV.
Paul Krugman's column today details the dishonest motives behind Ryan's attempt to hide "privatization" from public view. Yesterday in Statesville, Foxx let that door swing open a crack.
Labels: Paul Ryan, Virginia Foxx
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Virginia Foxx & Paul Ryan: A Love Story
Congresswoman Virginia Foxx has made a spectacle of herself slobbering all over certain men in Washington. There was the famous lip assault on George W. Bush, the fawning failure to detect any illegal drug use from a perusal of Roger Clemens' blown-up photographs, and now it's Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan that Foxx has fixated on with unhealthy affection.Why?
Because Ryan has written a Republican "budget plan," "A Roadmap for America's Future Act of 2010," that aims to zero out Social Security and Medicare. The Madam, like most of her fellow conservatives, hates Social Security and Medicare and itches with an itch she can't quite scratch to get rid of all such safety nets.
Congressman Ryan allows her and her fellow Republicans in Congress to scratch that itch.
The non-partisan Tax Policy Center, in a detailed analysis of Mr. Ryan's numbers, sez that Congressman Ryan's budget numbers would actually continue and accelerate the disastrous economic policies that got us into this current mess ... policies that ensure that the rich get richer. According to the Tax Policy Center, "The Roadmap's tax provisions would be highly regressive compared with the current tax system," benefiting the people who don't need social safety nets and resent like all holy hell having to pay any taxes whatsoever for the "undeserving poor."
Talk like that just makes Madam Foxx feel sexy all over.
Labels: Paul Ryan, Virginia Foxx
