Is "Catholic" Congressman Paul Ryan Really A Disciple Of An Atheist?

"Catholic" career politician Paul Ryan is getting a lot of criticism from fellow Catholics, including the Catholic Bishop's Council, for presenting a budget that does not show traditional Catholic concern for the poor. Many are questioning if he is really a disciple of Jesus Christ or of atheist Ayn Rand, who influenced his early thinking. Ryan himself has an estimated net worth of $7 million and is married to a wealthy wife. It seems that Mitt Romney, once thought of as a moderate Republican if there is such a thing, yielded to pressure from the Wall Street Journal and others to select the radical Paul Ryan, whose budget is the most radical of any in 100 years and threatens severe hardship and even starvation and death for millions of Americans in coming years.

'The cuts were so severe that Catholic bishops protested publicly, calling the Ryan budget “unjustified and wrong” and that they “failed as a moral test.” In April the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a stinging public letter to the House warning that Ryan’s budget “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment.”' See http://www.wbur.org/2012/08/15/paul-ryan-tea-party

Republican candidate for president Mitt Romney’s choice of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate marks a greater shift to the right in the 2012 election campaign. Ryan is best known for his role in the drafting of House Republican budgets that would privatize Medicare and devastate federal spending on every other social program. Whatever the outcome of the vote on November 6, the Ryan pick signals that the US ruling elite has decided upon a frontal assault on key social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The Washington Post editorial page put the situation bluntly, criticizing “major flaws and also omissions” in Ryan’s budget plans, then adding: “Yet his choice puts useful pressure on both Mr. Romney and President Obama to get more specific about their own approaches to entitlement spending, tax reform along with budgetary issues about which they would prefer to speak, if at all, in vague generalities. ”

He is, like most congressmen and senators, a multimillionaire, with a personal fortune of approximately $7 million based on his own family’s earthmoving company in Janesville, Wisconsin and his wife’s inheritance of Oklahoma oil wealth.

The congressional budgets that bear Ryan’s name have five major features:

Transformation of Medicare into a voucher plan with the federal contribution capped after 2023 in order that it shifts costs to the elderly, up to an estimated $6, 400 a year.

Conversion of Medicaid, food stamps and other entitlement programs into block grants to the states, with the federal contribution capped to force drastic cuts in spending at the state level, estimated at $700 billion from Medicaid alone over the next ten years. Some 14 to 19 million people will be cut from the food stamps program, according to an estimate by the Kaiser Foundation.

A multitrillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthy on top of the renewal of all of the Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthy, such as Romney and Ryan, now scheduled to expire by the end of this year. Ryan supports a permanent extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, as does Romney. Ryan would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent and make a similar cut in the tax rate for the highest-income people.

Maintaining or increasing spending within the military, intelligence agencies and Homeland Security Department and increasing the size and power of the military apparatus.

Eliminating virtually all other federal domestic spending—on education, the environment, energy, housing, transportation and employment, as well as most regulatory functions.

This would mean, among other socially disastrous effects, the ending of Pell Grants for 1 million college students and the loss of an estimated 4. 1 million jobs over two years.

Ryan was also the author of the most radical of the various Republican legislative proposals to privatize Social Security in 2005, when the Bush administration pushed for such a change. Even the Bush White House was compelled to reject this Ryan plan as “irresponsible” because it funneled so much cash from the Social Security Trust Fund to private investment accounts held by Wall Street financial institutions.
 
Ryan represents the most right wing candidate to be nominated on a major party ticket in at least 100 years. By one rating system, he ties with Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, the failed Republican presidential candidate, in the ranking of the most radical right-wing legislators. See Paul Ryan Budget Plan - Net Worth