Mittnomics: comfort for comfortable

   Points to Mitt Romney. Paul Ryan, unlike the last Republican nominee for vice president, is not a toy surprise from the bottom of a cereal box.

    What we have in Ryan is the box — the package — for the flakes Romney sells. Now to see if America is buying.

    Unlike his heartbeat-away predecessor, Ryan is a serious player. The seriousness of his plays should cause voters discomfort unless they are in the upper echelons of the tax strata. In the latter case, they now know they truly have a horse in the race, not just the standard-bearer many tea party types beheld as a show pony.

     We'll not focus here on concerns about Medicare — Ryan's call to chop it into vouchers and put fixed-income seniors on a starvation diet. Everyone knows that somehow Medicare must be reined in, as with Social Security. (The question: How dramatically? Ryan's is the stuff of Hitchcock.)

     No, let's focus on taxes, which is what Ryan's designs are really about.

     As Matt Miller of the Washington Post points out, to call Paul Ryan a deficit hawk is to call Lindsey Lohan a police cadet.

     Ryan is a spawn of decades of Republican deficit-by-design dogma and trickle-down brew. He is Grover Norquist's every wish — a guy who talks fiscal responsibility while acting irresponsibly.

     If Ryan — and Romney, who has embraced Ryan's plan in Congress — truly were concerned about the deficitt, they would not propose tax cuts that would decrease taxes by an average of $250,000 on those making $1 million or more, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice.

   If Ryan and Romney really cared about the debt being left in the laps of today's children and grandchildren they would make sure that billionaires and millionaires felt the pains associated with what needs to be done.

    As an Associated Press analysis explains, the Ryan-authored budget cuts, while going easy on the Pentagon, would dramatically impede virtually every form of domestic spending: "highways, farm programs, NASA, weather forecasts, medical research and college aid."

     Factor in tax policy, and what Ryan proposes regarding discretionary spending is the fiscal sorcery that got us in the very mess in which we find ourselves.

    I second Matt Miller's swipe that Ryan is no fiscal conservative: "A fiscal conservative pays for the government he wants." Ryan's House-approved spending bill "wouldn't reach balance until the 2030s while adding $14 trillion in debt."

   Why? One, because he would take defense off the table. Two: Of course, he would cut taxes.

   Ryan wants to lower tax rates by compressing the current six brackets into two: 10 percent and 25 percent. The current top rate for the Mitt set is 35 percent. Ryan's plan also would cut the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent.

     Yes, it's that old voodoo. With Ryan aboard, Romney shows his desire for a redo.

     Did we say deficit by design? Indeed, for three decades, when in power, while talking "fiscal conservatism," his party applied massive doses of rationalization about the deficit as it grew, first under Reagan, then under H. Bush, then under H.W. Bush. The deficit was no problem when considered as a percentage of GNP, said Ryan's party. Whoopee. Let's wage war. Let's cut taxes.

    What these Republicans were doing, of course, was looking forward to the day when the deficit would be so untenable that they could thrash the domestic programs they detested.

    So, let's award points to Mitt Romney for informing voters exactly where he wishes the nation to head from here.

    One other significant thing about Romney's choosing Ryan, mega-darling of tea party obstructionists. This comes with points for our president:

    Now Obama gets to run against the institution that polls find in lower public repute than any other public institution this century: the 113th Congress.

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Stunning feats in false economy

   Don't you hate freeloaders?

   Those who won't carry their weight?

   Those who cost others because they don't use common sense and available resources to best possible uses?

    Me, too. That's why I was bothered recently to hear from people incensed by the prospect of having to have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

    Stinking freeloaders. They think it's a horrific affront to have to pay for cut-rate health insurance. But when they have a bad break  — a broken arm, a splinter that festers — they think it's fine that others pay for their health care. That's the way it's been for generations, of course. For, as then-President George W. Bush pointed out, uninsured have access to health care. "They just go to an emergency room."

    Recently an analysis showed that hospital care for the uninsured cost an average privately insured family in Bush's home state $1,800 per year in higher premiums.

    The sad thing: Texas policy makers, as with others in this nation's red-state resistance bloc, are just fine with that.

    Texas leads the developed world in uninsured people, and wants to expand its margin. It is refusing — no way, no how, can't make me — to expand Medicaid as is incentivized by the Affordable Care Act. It is refusing to create health-care exchanges under the act to make health insurance affordable.

    The fact is that the federal government can't make Texas, or Florida, or Arizona, or Georgia, or any of the Republican-controlled states expand Medicaid, pursuant to Chief Justice John Roberts' decision upholding the act's individual mandates.

    They don't have to, even if doing so is in their best interests, which it is.

    What these states are doing in resisting Medicaid expansion is, in fact, a stunning piece of false economy, something at which Republican legislatures tend to be masterful.

   The phrase "penny-wise, pound foolish" has never been more apropos.

    How foolish? Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government will pay 100 percent of the costs of the expanded coverage for the first three years, and overall, states will never pay more than 10 percent of the costs for the extra people served.

     How many people? The Center for Public Policy Priorities projects coverage for 1.5 million to 2 million Texans.

     Ann O'Leary of California's Center for the Next Generation writes in the Huffington Post how the nation is about to get a stark demonstration in the false economy of red states holding their breaths in protests while blue states take advantage of this new program.

    As O'Leary points out, California has gone all in on taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act since 2010, already extending coverage to 400,000 individuals.

    The benefits? What might inure with preventive health care for people shy of keeping the lights on at George Bush's friendly ER?

    The obvious result is healthier people who require fewer catastrophic procedures, healthier children who miss less class, healthier parents who miss less work. Not only that, but a study by the Bay Area Council in California projects that full expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act will create jobs and boost the state's gross state output, as was seen in Massachusetts when then-Gov. Mitt Romney did for that state what he says is so bad for America.

    One other thing, says O'Leary: "On every single health-care measure, California outperforms Texas": blood pressure, smoking, better diets, more physical activity, most important, better access to preventive care.

    All of these lower general costs and pressures on the private insurance market we all hold so dear (wink, wink).

    But let's face it. Some states would rather save a penny than bend toward a dime's worth of common sense when it comes to health care.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Louie Gohmert explains it all

   Congressman Louie Gohmert has it figured out. A mass murder in Colorado. Mass suicides by Iraqi and Afghan veterans. Blame them on one thing:

   Godlessness.

   "What really gets me as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs and then a senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place," he told an interviewer when asked about the Aurora midnight massacre.

     Before the interview was over, Gohmert also explained that atheism was a key factor behind a preponderance of suicides for recent war veterans.

     The problem, explains the Texas Republican and tea party favorite: We've told God "we don't want him around."

      That settles it. The Aurora massacre couldn't possibly be because a mentally ill man amassed enough arms and ammo for a SWAT team. The tidal wave of suicides couldn't possibly be because of marathon hitches and stop-loss atrocities, of a mix of monotony interrupted by friends and innocents dying before one's eyes, of policy makers sending men and women to war on calculated lies.

     Godlessness, Gohmert explains. That's what this is about.

     This, he explains, is about graduation-day speakers being told they can't evangelize to a captive audience, of school teachers told they can't be prayer leaders. This, Gohmert says, is evidence of influences "at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country."

     This evil influence might also, since the Engel vs. Vitale case in 1962 and rulings by court after court, be called the Bill of Rights.

      We all know what happened after that ruling, of course: The United States went to hell. That's because the courts "took God out of the classroom."

       Before 1962 America had no violence, except for the lynchings so common in the South, no hatred, except for that which made Jim Crow so invincible and night riders so intimidating. It had no despair except if one's skin were black or brown, or one lived in a clapboard shack without electricity, running water or any way of ever paying the doctor bill. It had no fear, except what the Red Scare could drum up.

      It was all perfect, and it was because teachers could be preachers.

      In his interview post-Aurora, Gohmert quoted John Adams as saying our Constitution was "only for moral and religious people." These are words that certainly soothed those delivered in chains from Africa.

       Gohmert is one to preach brotherhood and unity, except when it comes to forms of diversity he can't hack.

       Speaking of the Red Scare and days when Joe McCarthy ran roughshod over people's rights, in recent days several Republicans including John McCain summoned the specter of McCarthyism to denounce — guess who — Louie Gohmert and a small band including Congresswoman Michele Bachmann for seeking an investigation into Hillary Clinton aide Huma Mahmood Abedin.

     They want to know what her ties are to the Muslim Brotherhood. Actually, all they want to direct extremists' attention to the secretary of state's employing a Muslim. And aren't you concerned?

      By the way, the pesky and destructive U.S. Constitution — the one that continually wages war on Christianity — protects Abedin's right to be Muslim.

      It's worth observing that though they may inveigh the creator's name, and that of Jesus Christ, most of today's politically inspired believers observe lifestyles and promote policies that bear no resemblance to Christ's priorities: forsaking material pursuits, lifting up the poor, being neighborly to strangers, and of course swearing off violence. Mark Twain called man "the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight."

      Therefore, we seek God's guidance in our wars, in stockpiling and venerating our weapons, in rationalizing our fear of people who call the lord by other names. We do all that in Jesus' name.

      Louie Gohmert has it figured out. In November it will yield for him one more term in office, his fifth. Count on it.

      Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.