ConservativeHQ.com Staff
For the better part of the past decade establishment Republicans have promoted the myth that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is the smartest guy in the room, and certainly the smartest guy in Washington, maybe even the smartest guy in the world – and if you question that, then his taxpayer-paid spin machine and his legion of DC establishment sycophants will soon straighten you out.
However, since the election of President Donald Trump the myth of Paul Ryan’s genius has come crashing down to earth because for the first time in his life Ryan has actually had to produce measurable results.
And when the results have been compared to the myth Ryan has failed.
Spectacularly.
Consider that a large part of the Ryan myth was built on the various plans to balance the budget and bring the deficit under control that the Speaker propounded when he was the top Republican on the House Budget Committee.
Ryan’s various budget proposals, such as his 2011 “Path to Prosperity” showed that it is possible to balance the budget, preserve the Social Security and Medicare safety nets and in short do everything liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans claim is impossible without deficit spending.
The problem is that once Ryan was in a position to actually put such a plan into legislation it never even got to the House floor, let alone to President Obama’s desk.
Back in 2012 Wall Street investment guru Porter Stansberry wrote, “while our government has grown at a record pace, our economy hasn’t. It has hardly grown at all. Thus, this [2012] will be the fourth year in a row we set a record for deficit spending. Never before in peacetime has our government borrowed this much money. And now, it’s borrowing record amounts every year.”
And the economy only got worse between 2012 and 2016.
The entire time Ryan was Budget Committee Chairman and then Speaker, tax collections have been at record levels – and so has the deficit.
But you’d never know that from the spin Paul Ryan has put out.
There is no more compelling evidence of just how far the American political system has been corrupted by Washington’s insider culture, than how common and accepted lying has become among the political elite of Capitol Hill and how Paul Ryan has dealt with spending and the budget.
Take for example the lie in April 2011 that when Ryan, who had promised $100 billion in real spending cuts during the 2010 Tea Party wave election, “compromised” with the Democrats for $38.5 billion in future savings in a deal would allegedly result in “the biggest annual spending cut in history,” as President Obama termed it.
Yet, as Senator Jim DeMint later noted, there was no reduction in spending, here’s what really happened when the fiscal year ended on September 30, 2011 – the Congressional Budget Office found that the April deal to avoid a government shutdown resulted in an increase of more than $170 billion in federal spending from 2010 to 2011.
Hailed by Paul Ryan and other leaders of both political parties and the establishment media, as a historic compromise that produced “largest spending cut in history” the deal ended up being a spending increase and the federal government wrapped up its biggest spending year and its second biggest annual budget deficit ever but, as The Wall Street Journal put it, almost nobody noticed.
Perhaps the Journal should have said no one noticed the lie upon which the spending deal was founded, because Paul Ryan and everyone on the inside knew there would be no decrease in spending and the historic or as liberal Democrats falsely termed them, “draconian budget cuts” would actually result in the federal government spending $3.6 trillion – a 4.2 percent increase in outlays that also increased the annual deficit to $1.298 trillion.
Today, there’s nobody else to blame or compromise with – Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House – and suddenly Paul Ryan has to produce.
And now that he’s had to produce Ryan has failed spectacularly, first by failing to pass any of the President’s signature policies and now announcing last night that there would be no repeal of Obamacare during President Trump’s first 100 days.
Our favorite TV commentator and news anchor Lou Dobbs of Fox Business said it best:
“I believe Ryan’s achieved next to nothing since becoming Speaker a year and a half ago. He had achieved next to nothing in his entire career before becoming Speaker! He’s worked against his presidential nominee and he has lost.
He put forward a mantra instead of policies, and lost again. And yes, that’s right…as a Vice Presidential nominee of his party, he and Mitt Romney also lost.
It is time for his party, if not for the Speaker himself to recognize his limitations and decidedly poor judgement and poor prospects for finding a better way.
I believe it’s time for Ryan to vacate the Speaker’s office in the interest of his party..”
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Only a fool goes to ask a fools advice and Paul Ryan and Bob corker are two of the biggest I know when is Potus going to wake up and realize that? If not soon he will have no need to worry about 2020 . Bruce Williams