Ryan lets his inner wonk flag fly

Republican vice presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., speaks during a rally at Piedmont Precision Machine Company in Danville, Va., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012. / AP Photo/Steve Helber

(CBS News) ORLANDO, Fla. - Let Paul be Paul.

The phrase, common among staffers on Paul Ryan's campaign, is parlance for permitting the seven-term Wisconsin congressman to embrace his inner wonk, the side of his personality that led him to become the youngest House Budget Committee chairman in a decade as well as an intellectual force in his party.

And in recent days, as the GOP vice presidential candidate has settled into his role on the Republican ticket, he has delved distinctly more often into policy details. This is from a politician who told Fox News' Brit Hume, "I don't want to get wonky on you," not long after his selection was announced.

It came to a head on Saturday, when he stepped to the podium for a town hall at the University of Central Florida. In addition to a debt clock -- now a must-have prop at Republican political rallies -- Ryan was flanked by two large screens that projected a favorite tool of academics and businessmen: a PowerPoint presentation.

"I'm kind of a PowerPoint guy, so I hope you'll bear with me," Ryan told the audience as he began clicking through four slides, which showed graphs depicting U.S. debt held by the public from 1940 to present, debt per person in the United States, percentage of debt held by foreign countries and a breakdown of federal spending. He then launched into a 10-minute monologue on the federal debt, throwing around terms such as "Congressional Budget Office" and "Treasury bills" to illustrate his point.

"It's simply another tool to highlight President Obama's failed leadership," said his spokesman, Michael Steel, of the new addition to Ryan's stump speech.

Talking more about the debt will almost certainly invite further criticism from Democrats, who often point out that Ryan helped vote for policies that exploded the debt during the last decade, including the Bush-era tax cuts and the war in Iraq.

"Congressman Ryan said that politicians in Washington are responsible for the nation's debt. And he should know - he's one of them," said Obama spokesman Danny Kanner after one of Ryan's town halls in Dover, N.H., last week. "But Mitt Romney and Congressman Ryan refuse to ask for a dime from the wealthiest Americans to reduce the deficit."

Dealing in harder facts and figures also may help Ryan rebut the charges of inaccuracy that have plagued some of his more vague rhetoric, such as his suggestion in his convention speech that Obama was responsible for the closure of a GM plant in Janesville that fact-checkers found was effectively shut down in December 2008 while George W. Bush was still president.

There are other signs of Ryan's penchant for policy discussion bubbling to the surface after his weeks on the campaign trail, where attack-dog rhetoric is perceived as packing more of a punch than a discussion of CBO baselines.

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[USSAmerikan]

So what we are saying here is that we're OK with the 16% poverty rate, 14% Black unemployment, 11% Latino unemployment and 25% under and unemployment rates, all the while blowing almost twice as much money in four years as Bush did in eight. 4 more years!!!

[marychgo]

C'mon, CBS, why repeat the false meme that Ryan is a "policy wonk"? His "Path to Prosperity" is so full of holes that the Congressional Budget Office could only "score" it by adopting a whole raft of assumptions that Ryan himself dictated! Clinton was right; the math doesn't work! And the "vision" is simply traditional GOP "voodoo economics" with a veneer of Ayn Rand objectivism on the edges. What a total waste of American voters' time!

[nohater]

ryan overlooks the fact that voters already know what the problems are facing the nation. like romney, ryan criticizes but neither have any details on how they would solve the nation's problems. both seem to be running on the mutual platform of, trust me i know what i'm doing because i'm more intelligent than you.

[KPeters_from_UK]

If Ryan pulls out his powerpoint he better be prepared to be compare to Ross Pero and his damn flip charts.

[alphaa10000]

ROMNEY-RYAN MEDICARE WOULD HAVE IMMEDIATE COST TO SENIORS, Part 2

(Some remarks of Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D, MD), top Democrat on the US House Budget Committee)

"The Republican approach has been to shift rising health care costs onto the backs of seniors. Seniors would get a voucher that declines over time relative to rising health care costs. Seniors get stuck with the bill.

"And so the president's approach did not cut any benefits to Medicare beneficiaries. In fact, it strengthened the benefit to individuals with high drug costs, strengthened the preventative benefit under Medicare. In the Ryan budget, they adopted those savings but did not recycle a penny of the savings into benefits...

(* My Note-- Ryan "savings", estimated at over $4 trillion over ten years, are not devoted principally to raising benefits, or even paying down the national debt, but increasing the size of tax breaks for One Percent of taxpayers)

"One sensible part of the Ryan budget was it incorporated the savings achieved in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). That extends the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by eight years. If you decide to eliminate those Medicare savings, as Romney has proposed to do, you accelerate the insolvency of the Medicare trust fund by eight years. In fact, under that proposal, the Medicare trust fund would be insolvent by the end of the Romney-Ryan administration should they be elected.

"It's got another bad consequence, too. It will begin to immediately increase costs to seniors, and here's why: When we eliminated the overpayments to the private insurance companies and changed the incentives to reduce costs overall, we allowed each Medicare dollar to go further. Now Romney says he wants to restore those overpayments to private insurance companies in Medicare Advantage. That increases the costs of Medicare, and Medicare beneficiaries pay a share of the overall program. So what Mitt Romney is proposing is to reinstate huge overpayments to private insurance companies in Medicare by increasing premiums and co-pays on seniors."

[alphaa10000]

ROMNEY-RYAN MEDICARE WOULD HAVE IMMEDIATE COST TO SENIORS

As an economist points out, the GOP plan for Medicare is not to end it abruptly, but starve it to death, budget after budget.

Romney-Ryan's budget chops $4 trillion in a decade of cuts to domestic spending. Because of the political cost of angering seniors, Ryan has declined to answer specifics about his cuts to Medicare.

However, this has not saved Ryan from fiery criticism from stakeholders. Seniors intuitively understand, after $4 trillion in cuts to domestic spending, the Medicare we know today will not be left standing.

Today's Medicare coverage is based on the proposition that a qualified Medicare recipient cannot be turned away, even if he cannot afford treatment.

Today's Medicare coverage is based on the proposition that a qualified Medicare recipient cannot be turned away, even if treatment costs too much for a private insurer to handle.

Under a future, privatized (Romney-Ryan) version of what is left of Medicare, coverage will be decided by the private insurers-- the same corporate group whose premium rates and/or risk policies kept 35 million Americans without coverage, before Obamacare was passed.

And without Obamacare-- which Romney-Ryan want to repeal-- those "too old" and/or "too risky" are simply out of luck. Their fate is entirely in the hands of the private insurers-- there is no Obamacare mandated coverage to protect them.

Washingon Post interview with Rep. Chris van Hollen (D, MD) on Medicare--

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/18/rep-chris-van-hollen-the-romney-ryan-medicare-plan-would-have-immediate-cost-increases-for-seniors/

[Ben37221]

I guess this is another "Obama close GM plant moment". This man cannot tell the truth, which of course make him a republican.

[alphaa10000]

The problem is that you do not believe every press release the GOP issues.

[ThomasSense]

The only way I can figure that the Tea Party got anywhere was they kept repeating over and over again to cut taxes. They ignored history of Republican tax cuts and Republican wars without tax support. Obama is right to end the tax breaks for the wealthy. In 1944, the top tax rate was 94%. In 1961, it was 91%. In 1980, it was 70%. I think it quite fair not just to end the tax breaks but to return the wealthy to the pre-Reagan rate. Middle class wages have fallen but our cost of living has increased. Ryan is also wrong that government shouldn't have a part in putting people back to work. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=213

[magic414]

he runs all of his numbers thru his "ryan marathon time shaving calculator" and comes up with.....0

what a waste of republican campaign contributions.

romney/ryan running hard for second place

[alphaa10000]

But Romney-Ryan (and PAC friends) spend more than twice what the Democrats spend on campaign media.

Could the issue be more than "good production values"?

As for wasted GOP campaign contributions, is there any way not to waste the money?

[tepeterso]

Ryan is not a wonk he just throws around ideologically driven numbers which are not necessarily accurate. The most dangerous thing about Ryan is that he is a devotee of Ayn Rand who believed in plutocratic oligarchy. All modern nations are bult on pubic money not private-the last time we really had nation states built on private money was medeval feudalism. The Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century strove in that same direction but it began to be dismantled by a progressive Republican named Theodore Roosevelt and established as a norm by Franklin Roosevelt. All modern nations accept that private commerce in colloboration with public expenditure is the most effective way to maintain a balanced society where the economy benefits are distributed progressively (not absolutely equally-we are not talking utopianism here).