voters. voters certainly want to cut the deficit. they re worried about the debt. but they don t want you to mess with the programs that they really like. that s always the difficulty. and, you know, ryan has said that one of the strengths that he has, why he s been reelected in a more democratic district, is that, you know, folks he talks to like the fact that he tells it to them straight and he levels with them about what the choices are and some of the pain that they have to experience. well, we ll see how that plays on a national scale. look, he was somebody who was a proponent of privatizing partially social security, went even farther that the bush team thought they were willing to go and that became a losing effort for them. medicare is such a tough issue to win in a presidential campaign. republicans even before the ryan pick were worried about what team obama would do to romney on this particular issue. and to your point about style, you know, i ve been around congressman ryan
we tax normal earned income. that would go away under ryan s plan. it want to go away under romney s plan, but ryan s plan. which way are they going towards, getting awayam capital gains? to be fair, romney opposes that. but it is worth saying, that ryan, the that tax, it costs about $4 trillion to $5 trillion over 10 years that by the way after you pay for extending the bush taxes which nobody explained how you pay for in the first place. now you are dealing with 5 trillion to $9 trillion on tax breaks. ryan doesn t do as much on medicaid. he softened it in the second iteration of his budget and he increases defense spending so really this money is coming out of the hide of the poor. he does enormous cuts to medicaid in the first ten years his budget cuts about $750 billion off medicaid. would you tell your grandmother to vote for this guy? i don t tell my grand mother
everything you said is obviously true and i believe in it. but here s one tricky part, we have the proudest point i think in the wall street journal /nbc poll, the question, do you think the country s going in the right direction, wrong direction, and what these two guys are offering today is a different direction. how can you sell if you re obama and biden the same direction we re on right now when only about 30 some% of people think it s the right direction? how do you do that? first of all first of all, i think the american people are fair. i think they understand that the president inherited an economy that was in total free fall, and i think they also recognize that we ve seen dramatic improvement. after all, we ve gone from losing 800,000 jobs per month to more than 25 consecutive months of positive private sector job growth. now, are we where we want to be? no. but i don t think the american people want to go back to the set of policies that tanked the economy to begin with
souped up version of the bush trickle-down theory. if you look at their plan, chris, they don t ask one penny more from folks making a million dollars a year to help reduce our deaf set. how do they reduce the deficit in they sock it to everybody else. they sock it to seniors on medicare and medicaid. they cut education. they cut investments in our infrastructure and things needed to help the economy grow and be competitive. again, ask nothing of the folks like mitt romney, but ask everything of the rest of the country. you have a unique perspective, not only are you a leading democrat in this country, you sit next to this guy with a totally different philosophy. what does he say when he comes out with the budget, he gives a break to the richest people in the country and really screws people who desperately need programs like that. when you ask him, how can you do this and reward rich people with all the breaks in this country and hurt the people with no breaks, what does he say? wha
well, look chris, i get along very well with paul ryan personally. we work on the budget committee together, but i strongly disagree with his vision for the country. and i think this is sharpened the debate in a way that will help the president, because at the end of the day what mitt romney is demonstrating through this choice is that he wants to follow an economic agenda that s good for people like mitt romney. at the expense of the rest of the country. and if you look at the ryan/romney plan, that s what it does. and i don t think people want to go back to a souped up version of trickle-down bush economic policy. we tried that, it didn t work. the economy crashed. millions of people lost their jobs. why in the world would we want to go back to something like that? let s talk about the reality in life. you have constituent services on one of your constituents obviously, i live in the district, but older people when they get past 65, not just young retirees but old retirees come t