every two weeks they worked. sweet. tons of time home in the district, which for a member of congress must be awesome. unless, of course, the last thing you did before heading home to your district for your spring recess was voting to end medicare. voting for the paul ryan budget plan. a budget which is making for lots of very uncomfortable encounters between republican members of congress and their now very angry constituents. paul ryan himself who represented the district in wisconsin, you ll recall him getting booed by his constituents last week. when he tried to defend the parts of this plan that call for really big tax cuts for the rich and an end to medicare. well, today congressman ryan held more town hall events in wisconsin. we got a heads up from one of our wisconsin viewers that some of the paul line events this week were being moved to large venues in order to accommodate the number of people who wanted to tell paul ryan what they thought of his plan. and i asked our produc
challenge starting with the man who authors the budget. what is the best way to do this? is it to is it to redistribute? it does not trickle down. we do tax the top. [ booing ] that s right. before somebody in the audience starts going paul, paul, paul. i love it. that was republican congressman paul ryan getting heckled as he tried to defend more tax cuts for the richest people in the country. he s not alone about how constituents feel about him. here is a sampling that republican congressmen are getting back home after they tried to defend voting for this plan. did you not vote for paul ryan s bill? yes, i did. well that is to abolish medicare. it will not be the medicare that
the country, are, again, lighting up with anger and frustration. this time it s about the republican party budget plan. the paul ryan budget plan that cuts taxes for the richest americans back to what they were in the 1930s. it drastically cuts taxes for corporations, gives billions of dollars to oil companies, the poor, orphaned hard-luck oil companies and ends medicare. it repeals it and turns it into a coupon system. it makes senior citizens buy private health insurance. that is really unpopular. it s clear in lots of different polling done over the last few weeks. what s different this week is that republicans who just voted for the kill medicare, cut taxes for the rich plan, last week, republicans who voted, now it s the republicans who have to go back to their districts and defend what they did. it s turned out to be a mighty
code. the beltway, because they are not the official spokesperson like the president is, they tend to get ignored. they have to be more creative to get attention for their ideas. i will say that we get lobbied all the time and stuff to cover. you would think a show like mine would get lobbied all the time to cover things. uncovering the progressive budget has been liberal tweeting about it. it s sort of been it. i hear you about the publicity. in your latest column, you said, you played with the idea that what you should write for the column over and over again is the house republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt yet gop is balking and playing with the debt limit. why is it that the fiscal conservatism of the paul ryan plan isn t been quantified.
not only did we extend those tax cuts, we added $300 billion in debt, but we didn t cut any spending. that s why i voted against it. that s why i thought it was wrong. a consequence of those tax cuts and the enormous recession that lowered revenue so much. but let s switch gears just a moment here. the paul ryan budget plan, which you re basically in favor of. you said if we embrace that, congress would embrace that, you d be happy to vote for the debt limit increase, am i right about that? well, if that creates the systemic change that puts us on a trajectory to actually balance the budget and eventually pay off the debt. if we re going to move in that trajectory, of course i would support that. but if we re going to go with what the president suggests which doubles and triples the debt, no congressman, let me deal with what i think is an agreed upon fact because it comes right out of paul ryan s budget proposal itself. you know, page s-1. he adds over the next decade $5