Joe Conason: Paul Ryan's Plan For American Decline

[babylonsister]

http://www.nationalmemo.com/article/paul-ryans-plan-american-decline

Paul Ryan's Plan For American Decline
Tue, 03/20/2012 - 10:25pm —
Joe Conason


If the foreign adversaries and competitors of the United States imagined a future that would fufill their most ambitious objectives, it might begin with a government crippled by the House Republican leadership’s “Ryan budget” released on Tuesday. Followed to its absurd conclusion, this document would lead America toward a withered state, approaching the point where Marxian dreams and Randian dogma converge.

Or at least that’s the view suggested by the sober analysts at the Congressional Budget Office, whose report on the Ryan budget shows that nearly every department of government today, from law enforcement and border patrols to scientific research, food safety, environmental protection, federal highways, national parks, weather monitoring, education, and all the other essential functions of a great country. There would not be much left for Medicare and Medicaid, either. Social Security would continue in some form, and defense – of course – would increase.

But in a nation stripped of science and infrastructure, with a people demoralized by insecurity, unemployment and inequity, exactly what would be left to defend?

snip//


Is all this starting to sound slightly weird? That is certainly one way to describe the Ryan budget, which evokes the utopian fantasies of both Karl Marx, who predicted the “withering away of the state” after communism, and Ayn Rand, whose hatred of modern government inspired anarchist (or "minarchist&quot fantasies among many of her admirers. What is truly bizarre is to watch a major political party produce such a document not once but twice – and then to hear this absurd exercise hailed by venerable Washington commentators as “bold” and “patriotic.”

[freshwest]

1. Nailed it!

[orpupilofnature57]

2. Poppy said it with pride " a new world order "

and for the children of theives and oppurtunists who show total sycophancy to the 1% ,it will be a bright promising future ,and they'll never see what their parents wrought.

[Bill USA]

3. recommended!