Key to the Romney program (or what can be derived from a description of generalities-without-specifics that can't be scored by economists plus Romney's statement earlier that he would sign Ryan's budget proposal into law if passed by Congress plus his Monday statement that "his own plan for Medicare is 'very similar' to Ryan's", per this NBCnews.com story ) and the Ryan so-called "path to prosperity" (see, e.g., the LA Times story) is privatization of, and spending cuts to, Social Security and Medicare, along with spending cuts to everything else that serves the public good (environmental programs, parks, etc.) and vulnerable minorities in this country and isn't part of the military-industrial-financial complex. That is, social welfare programs that have made the difference between poverty and dignity for American seniors will be undone by some level of privatization and benefit cuts, to accomodate unmerited tax cuts for the wealthy and increased spending on the military (notice the echos of Bush's Iraq-war buildup in the talk about being tough on Iran and extraordinarily friendly to Israel coming from the campaign).
Both Romney and Ryan have personally benefited from the kind of government that recognizes the importance of public-private cooperation in institution and infrastructure building, yet pontificate that government is always less efficient than private enterprise. That rhetoric is used to justify stifling innovative programs like supporting experiments in environmentally sound energy development, but it doesn't come into play as far as continuing to ladle out tax-code largesse to the profitable oil and gas extractive industry or coddling financial institutions through deregulation (Romney, for example, supports dismantling Dodd-Frank, an already timid effort to rein in financial speculation; Ryan voted for TARP and against Dodd-Frank, positions that garnered Republicans a haul of financial industry contributions). That approach will continue the George W. Bush trend of the financialization of the economy and likely land us in another, even worse, systemic financial crisis.
Read more: Romryanomics--prosperity for the well-off fueled by austerity for the rest - Business Insider
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