Paul Ryan, Catholic altar boy:
When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan unveiled the GOP blueprint for cutting government spending, he asked Americans to make sacrifices on everything from Medicare to education, while preserving lucrative tax subsidies for the booming oil, mining and energy industries.
It turns out a constituency within his own personal investments stood to benefit from those tax breaks, Newsweek and The Daily Beast have learned.
The financial disclosure report Ryan filed with Congress last month and made public this week shows he and his wife, Janna, own stakes in four family companies that lease land in Texas and Oklahoma to the very energy companies that benefit from the tax subsidies in Ryan’s budget plan.
Ryan’s father-in-law, Daniel Little, who runs the companies, told Newsweek and The Daily Beast that the family companies are currently leasing the land for mining and drilling to energy giants such as Chesapeake Energy, Devon, and XTO Energy, a recently acquired subsidiary of ExxonMobil.
Some of these firms would be eligible for portions of the $45 billion in energy tax breaks and subsidies over 10 years protected in the Wisconsin lawmaker’s proposed budget. “Those (energy developing companies) benefit a lot from these subsidies,” explained Russ Harding, an energy policy analyst with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, when presented with the situation, without reference to Ryan. “Without those, they’re going to be less profitable.”
Is Ryan as much a product of the plutocratic class (1%) as Romney is? Of course. Check out the business that his grandfather owned. That said this election pits the two factions of Capitalism against each other. On one side you have Mr.1%/Ryan representing the Friedrich Hayek/Milton Friedman, Chicago School of Economics austerity theory and Ayn Rand’s ‘every man for himself’ concept. On the other side it’s Obama/Biden representing John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory which states that government should stimulate the economy and build social safty nets. Anybody who votes for Mr.1%/Ryan or a third party candidate is as stupid as a stump.
Well, in light of the fact that Ryan wants to give me a ticket upon retirement for a program I have been paying into since 1975 and calls it an entitlement, this is gonna get real juicy. Since I have been traveling so much I haven’t checked into my social media account since the announcement has been made. I am sure that some of the citizens down here south of the Mason Dixon line that read too much Ayn Rand in college and thought it was “speaking to them” are going to be having some kind “tingly feel goodness” regarding this choice.
Here in the South,in some states, we have already seen the beginnings of the outcomes of some of the policies Ryan pushes.
Fasten your seat belts….