Paul Ryan's RNC speech full of assertions that can be easily punctured by truth: Analyst

Washington, Aug. 31 (ANI): Republican vice president pick Paul Ryan is known as a bold fiscal conservative, but showed how bold he is by giving a speech that was full of lie, distortions and omission during the Republican National Convention, a leading columnist has said.

A columnist with the New York Daily News, Joshua Greenman, said that Ryan's blame-Obama approach ignored several key points in his own legislative record, particularly on his Medicare plan.

Greenman argued that Ryan, who called himself as the protector of Medicare, lambasted Obama for taking away 716 billion dollars from the program to pay for Obamacare, but twice Ryan's own budget called for taking the same amount of money from Medicare.

And rather than using that cash to fund health care programs that expand health insurance and preventive care for millions more Americans, Ryan would have used it in part to pay for a huge tax cut that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, Greenman said.

According to the report, nor did Ryan mention that, on top of these cuts, he has plans to reduce Medicare spending much more deeply than Obama, by restructuring the program into a voucher plan in 10 years.

Ryan's claim that Obama is uniquely to be blamed for the debt because as President, he created a bipartisan commission then "sent them on their way" without acting on their recommendations, the report said.

That bipartisan commission failed because one of its key members, Ryan himself, voted against what would have been its final report because it dared contemplate higher taxes along with spending cuts, Greenman wrote in the analysis.

Again and again, Ryan sought to blame Obama alone for the record debt. But when George W. Bush was President, Ryan voted for the expensive, and totally unfunded, Medicare prescription drug benefit. He supported huge tax cuts. He authorized wars. All without batting an eye about how it would look on the nation's credit card bill, the report said.

Estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities using data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that it's the wars and Bush tax cuts, not any Obama spending binge, that are overwhelmingly driving future deficits, the report added.

Greenman argued that Ryan's dishonesty is also proved the fact that he embraced of compassionate conservative language to say that "the greatest of all responsibilities is that of the strong to protect the weak."

Ryan's budget would give a huge new tax cut, most of whose benefits would go to the wealthy. And almost two-thirds of the spending cuts would fall on programs like Medicaid that help the poor, Greenman said.

Greenam concluded that today, you might call him equally bold for delivering a speech full of assertions that can be so easily punctured by the truth. (ANI)