along very well with paul ryan personally, as you say. we work on the budget committee together, but i strongly disagree with his vision for the country, and i think this has sharpened a 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. yeah. 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, i m one of your constituents obvious-but i live in the district but, you know, older people when they get past 65, not just young retirees, but older reti
rich? romney says he opposes that. in one of the debates herman cain suggested something similar, but he opposes that. ryan s tax is going to cost about 4 to 5 trillion over ten years, that s after you pay for extending the bush tax cuts which nobody explained how you pay for in the first place. now you re dealing with 5 to 10 trillion or 5 to 9 trillion in tax breaks. ryan doesn t do as much on medicare at this point as people think he does. he softened that in the second it ration of his budget and decreases defense spending. so this money is coming out of the hide of the poor. he does domestic cuts in the first ten years. his budget cuts about $750 billion off medicaid. would you tell your grandma to vote for this guy? i don t tell my grandma how to vote, she s a strong woman. if she asks for advice? i m a journalist, i don t tell people how to vote. if you tell a senior in their early 70s, they ask your advice what would the candidates hurt them with, what would you say
very tough thing to bring to voters. voters certainly want to cut the deficit. they are 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 he has, why he s been reelected in a more democratic district, is that 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 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 privatetizing partially social security. went even farther than 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 congr