A Quick Blurb that Says So Much

I’ve got to give Scott Garrett credit.  He’ll meet with any group no matter how much damage he’s done to the issues they care about and try to convince them that he’s worthy of their votes in November.

I saw the following blurb while scanning through The Paramus Post:

Residents, staff and guests of The Atrium Assisted Living at The Allendale Community for Mature Living recently voiced their questions to U.S. Congressman Scott Garrett during a Town Hall-style meeting at the senior living residence. Congressman Garrett described his role in Congress and answered attendees’ questions about social security, Medicare and the upcoming presidential election. Pictured with Congressman Garrett (second from left) at the event are (L-R) Allendale Mayor Vince Barra and The Allendale Community’s Jolanta Giancarlo, Vice President, and Dr. Hector Giancarlo, President and Founder.

The senior residence regularly hosts cultural, educational and social events, as well as interactive discussions with elected officials to encourage its senior residents and older adults to address matters that are of concern to them. For more information on upcoming events open to the public, call (201) 818-7979.

In just the current session of Congress alone, Scott Garrett has cast at least three votes which demonstrate he has no concern for senior citizens.

On May 10th, Scott Garrett voted in favor of legislation to replace automatic cuts in defense spending that would begin next year (as a result of the deal reached between Congressional Republicans and the Administration to raise the debt ceiling) with cutting $83 billion in federal retirement benefits, capping medical malpractice lawsuits to save $49 billion, slashing about $48 billion from Medicaid programs and reducing food aid by more than $36 billion.  This wasn’t some meaningless vote in committee.  This legislation actually passed the Republican controlled House of Representatives.

In March of this year Scott Garrett not only voted in favor of the Ryan Budget, but he proposed and got Congress to vote on his own budget which slashed even more spending from social safety net programs.  Remember that as part of the Ryan Plan, Medicare would be replaced with a voucher system.  The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that even in the first year of enactment, the legislation would cost seniors an additional $6,000 over the existing Medicare program and would become more expensive over time as the value of the voucher would not keep up with the increasing cost of buying private health insurance.  Scott Garrett supports cutting governmental costs and passing them on to America’s senior citizens.

Not a single senior citizen should be voting for Scott Garrett.  However I fear many will.  Democrats in the 5th Congressional District are allowing Scott Garrett to shape the narrative.  I implore the Democrats vying to challenge Scott Garrett in the fall to use the phone number above and schedule a Town Hall meeting of their own at The Allendale Community for Mature Living before June 5th.  These are the people the Democratic Party has always fought to protect.  These are the people who vote in higher percentages than any other demographic in the country.  These are the people who are being visited by Scott Garrett.  These are the people Democrats cannot afford to ignore.

Paul Ryan is the Best Friend of Democrats Everywhere

For the third time in recent memory, Congressman Paul Ryan has given Members on both sides of the aisle campaign material on which to run.  The first two times, Congress voted on Ryan-constructed Republican budgets that called for massive cuts to social safety-net programs, replacing Medicare with a voucher program and providing tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

The third Ryan budget proposal is the Republican solution for replacing automatic cuts in defense spending that would begin next year as a result of the deal reached between Congressional Republicans and the Administration to raise the debt ceiling.  Republicans demanded hundreds of billions be cut from the budget as their price for going along with raising the debt ceiling and thus preventing the Federal government from defaulting on its obligations.

The problem is that Republicans do not want any of the cuts they agreed to last year to come from defense spending.  In reality, even with these cuts, defense spending will still increase by 20 percent, but apparently that’s not good enough for Congressional Republicans.   Never fear, Americans; Paul Ryan has the solution.  Instead of trimming back a military budget which is larger than the next 15 countries on the list combined, Paul Ryan proposes cutting $83 billion in federal retirement benefits, capping medical malpractice lawsuits to save $49 billion, slashing about $48 billion from Medicaid programs and reducing food aid by more than $36 billion.

When I first saw this proposal I thought no one would ever go along with such a plan. Who would be heartless or craven enough to blatantly prioritize defense spending over retirees and the poor?  Well, Paul Ryan’s “Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act of 2012” – or as I like to call it “Preserve Bloated Military Spending at the Expense of the Poor and the Elderly Act of 2012” passed the House by a vote of 218 to 199.  Everyone of those 218 votes came from Republicans.  Not a single Democrat – not even the Blue Dogs, voted in favor of passing the bill.  It goes without saying that Scott Garrett voted in favor of the bill.  Fortunately, the Senate is not likely to even consider this bill, so this was a symbolic vote for House Republicans.  It was a symbolic vote signalling to the Republican base  “we believe as you that military spending is of the highest importance.”

It’s ironic that the Republicans who fall on their swords to see the appropriations faucet open full-throttle at the Pentagon are the same Republicans who consistently vote against things like improving health benefits for returning veterans, giving employers incentives to hire returning members of the military and making it easier for veterans to obtain additional education.

What do we make of the gulf that exists between the two parties for how we prioritize spending in this country?  By casting such votes, Scott Garrett is telling his constituents that he prioritizes military spending (except money directed at returning soldiers) over protecting seniors and the poor.  He can make any arguments he likes to try to make it appear differently, but the boiled-down facts are obvious and unavoidable.

I say to the candidates running against Scott Garrett this is a campaign issue.  It’s an issue that positioned properly cuts across all people regardless of their political affiliation.  It’s an issue that will not fade with time if the candidates refuse to allow it to disappear from our collective memory.  I urge them all to pick up this burning-flame of an issue and give Scott Garrett a metaphorical hot-foot every chance they get from now until November.

Scott Garrett’s Vision for Our Economic Demise

I wrote a tounge-in-cheek article last Tuesday entitled It’s Time for Another symbolic Vote, Mr. Speaker in which I urged Scott Garrett to convince his Republican colleagues to hold a vote on Paul Ryan’s revamped economic roadmap.  

Ryan’s’ new plan still replaces Medicare with a voucher system that would shift the costs of senior health care from the government to the elderly.  In addition, Ryan would replace the current multi-tiered income tax rates with only two rates, 10% and 25%.  The plan would eliminate most personal deductions including the home mortgage deduction and likely the deduction for state and local taxes.  I say “likely” because the Ryan Plan is quite vague on details.     

The Ryan Plan: More Fantasy than Reality, written in The Fiscal Times by Bruce Bartlett, takes the plan to task.  The salient point to me was this paragraph:

“There are virtually no details. For example, we have no idea what income level the new tax brackets would apply to. Consequently, it is impossible to score the Ryan plan accurately. The Tax Policy Center took a stab at it by assuming that the current 10 percent bracket would stay the same and the 15 percent bracket would be abolished, as well as all rates above the current 25 percent bracket. It estimates that this provision would reduce revenues by $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years. The total revenue loss of all provisions would be $4.6 trillion. “

So in the upside down world of Paul Ryan, we’re going to balance the budget by taking in less revenue.  To make the numbers add up, we would have to eliminate virtually all discretionary spending.  Ryan’s plan wouldn’t impact military spending and would effectively lower taxes on the wealthy while at the same time eliminating funding for the FDA (the people tasked with keeping our food safe), AIDS research, food stamps, the earned income tax credit, funding for NIH research, etc.

This is the plan all but 10 House Republicans vote for on Wednesday of this week.  So I thank you Republicans for once again voting to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, the middle class and the elderly while at the same time finding a way to give tax breaks to the top 1 percent.

I thought this was the best possible way to draw a clear distinction between the different direction the two parties have for this country.  I was wrong.  Scott Garrett wasn’t satisfied with simply supporting this “more fantasy than reality” legislation.  In his opinion, Ryan’s plan did not go far enough.  Scott Garrett proudly acknowledged being the architect of an alternative budget the Republican Study Committee (RSC) brought up as a substitute to the Ryan proposal. 

Scott Garrett’s proposal is the Ryan plan on steroids.  In addition to keeping Ryan’s replacement of Medicare with a voucher system, Garrett  proposed two far-reaching cuts.  One would cut discretionary spending by nearly $100 billion more in 2013.  He would then cap spending at that reduced level for 5 years.  Like the Ryan proposal, Garrett’s plan requires us to take him at his word because neither Representative wants to actually tell the American people what specifically will be removed from the current budget.  In theory, Garrett’s plan cuts $2.2 trillion more than Ryan’s plan, and supposedly balances the budget 20 years earlier than would Ryan’s proposal.  Again, with so little of either proposal detailed, we’re forced to guess at most of the substance.

At the risk of repeating myself, it makes no sense to limit – or in this case, stop government spending during a recession.  There are three sectors that inject capital into the economy.  Business, consumers and the government.  Businesses aren’t spending or hiring because there is a reduced demand for goods and services.  Consumers aren’t spending because so many people are either out of work, under-employed or fear being laid off.  Thus government is the only sector capable of infusing the economy with capital.  Scott Garrett would prefer to see this recession turn into a depression.

Mr. Garrett’s proposal failed to pass on the House floor, but not before Mr. Garrett and 135 of his Republican colleagues went on record saying that the Ryan plan didn’t go far enough.  The cuts should be deeper and the burden for these cuts should fall primarily on the elderly and the people just trying to keep their heads above water.

Mr. Garrett has laid this gift at the feet of his Democratic challengers.  If’s time for these challengers to expose this gift for what it is; an economic depression wrapped in faulty assumptions and bad economic policy.

It’s Time for Another Symbolic Vote, Mr. Speaker

On April 15, 2011, the House of Representatives passed the Ryan Plan by a vote of 235-193 along party lines.  As expected, Scott Garrett voted in favor of the measure. As part of the Ryan Plan, Medicare would be replaced with a voucher system.  The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that even in the first year of enactment, the legislation would cost seniors an additional $6,000 over the existing Medicare program and would become more expensive over time as the value of the voucher would not keep up with the increasing cost of buying private health insurance.  Make no mistake about it, this voucher proposal was not about improving health care for seniors, it was about cutting governmental costs and passing them on to America’s senior citizens.

The Ryan Budget vote likely cost Republicans a special election Congressional seat held within days of that vote in Upstate New York. NY-26 contains solid Republican areas that haven’t voted for a Democrat since before Reconstruction.  Yet today a Democrat, Kathy Hochul occupies that seat thanks to thousands of senior citizens who wanted no part of Republican attempts to balance the budget by in part privatizing Medicare.

It’s been almost a year since that vote; a lifetime by political measurements.  While Democrats will bring this issue up in the fall Scott Garrett will do his best spin this as a positive for seniors – despite the fact that they and anyone who’s had a close look at the proposal knows better.

Well if Paul Ryan were a gambler in Atlantic City, he demonstrated yesterday that he’s willing to double-down on a losing hand.  Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee unveiled the Ryan Plan 2.0.  Version 2.0 still includes his wildly unpopular proposal to replace Medicare with a voucher system.  As part of his Republican plan for “fiscal responsibility” the plan also includes a provision to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent.

Well that final bit of news stopped me in my tracks.  Reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent; where have I seen that proposal before?  Then it hit me; it’s the same concept put forth by the Chairman of Budget and Spending Task Force of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), Scott Garrett.  How proud he must be that such a high-profile figure as Paul Ryan would incorporate his legislation into the GOP budget blueprint for America’s future.

See, The Jobs through Growth Act– H.R. 3400 is Scott Garrett’s proposal to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent and lower the tax on foreign-earned profits as a way to incentivize companies to add jobs to our fragile economy.

Our own RSC subcommittee Chairman needs to go to Republican leadership to make sure Paul Ryan 2.0 gets the vote on the House Floor it so richly deserves.  He should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Paul Ryan and metaphorically push all his chips into the center of the table as well.

Democratic leadership in Washington and the American people knew Paul Ryan’s budget was a losing hand last April.  Not only was it wildly unpopular, the math also didn’t add up.  Further, economic experts predicted catastrophic outcomes if this proposal were ever enacted into law. Personally, I believe this proposal is a lead weight that will drag at Scott Garrett as he tries to defend the indefensible to his constituents.  But as Scott Garrett has always insisted, he’s a man with strong conservative principles.  Mr. Garrett we hear at Retire Garrett implore you to stand by your principles and insist that this latest Paul Ryan economic blueprint receive the House vote it and you so richly deserve.