Posted on 04/05/2009 7:29:29 AM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
He's young, charismatic and conservative.
The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank in Washington, has anointed this rising GOP star "the leader of the future of the conservative movement."
No, it's not Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty or House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia.
The man supposedly tasked with carrying the hopes and ambitions of an entire political party is Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I really like him — he is very articulate and tells it like it is.
he was really smart on Mark Levin’s show
but he says a lot of bone-headed things and voted for something that didn’t seem conservative ( i think it was auto-bailout or AIG 90% bonus tax or both)
Ping - any thoughts?
He is cute but he needs to study the constitution. He admitted later he did not know it was wrong to retro-super-tax AIG when he voted with the dems for it.
We need a generation ‘Coup d’RINOs’.
Anyone under fifty, throw darts and put them in there.
Lincoln did this with his generals. So to Eisenhower. Political battle field promotions. Command, fight, or get dumped, like a loser under Stalin. When you have a war, you need fighters, not perfume princes.
This is the first time I’ve heard a lot about him. I sure like what I read.
“The future of our party” voted for the first bailout.
We must never forget.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/32437144.html
Ryan’s vote for bailout went against his principles
By Diana Marrero of the Journal Sentinel
Posted: Oct. 9, 2008
Paul Ryan had a tough choice to make. For days, the fiscal conservative expressed skepticism about the $700 billion financial rescue package that many in his district viewed as a bailout for Wall Street.
At one point, he joined a group of House Republicans whose alternate rescue plan briefly threatened to derail agreement on the package being cobbled together on Capitol Hill. But after spending a weekend studying numbers showing the nation’s credit markets drying up, Ryan was ready to support the package.
“This bill offends my principles,” the Janesville Republican said in an impassioned speech Sept. 29, before Congress’ first attempt to pass the measure. “But I am going to vote for this bill in order to preserve my principles, in order to preserve this free-enterprise system.”
Few Republicans were swayed by arguments that a rescue was necessary to avoid financial catastrophe and the bill failed, contributing to the largest drop in the stock market in a single day. Even when the measure finally passed the House on Friday, a majority of Republicans voted against it. President Bush signed it into law.
The Bush administration’s rescue plan put conservatives like Ryan in a bind: support what could become the costliest government intervention in financial markets in history or stick to their free-market principles and take the chance that doing nothing could plunge the country into a deep recession. With weeks before the election, it was a politically risky decision.
Now back in the district, Ryan admits that he is fielding endless questions from people who don’t understand why Congress had to take the steps it did last week to buoy up the country’s financial system.
“I have definitely run into people who are upset and confused,” he said, noting that he also is getting “a lot more signs of support than I expected.”
First elected at age 28, Ryan has developed a reputation as a fiscal hawk over his decade in Congress. He has pressed for the line-item veto, changes in the federal budget process to promote spending discipline, a variety of tax cuts, health savings accounts and private retirement accounts.
When the government made its first steps during this financial crisis to take over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and American International Group, the world’s largest insurance firm, Ryan balked.
“Obviously, I don’t like this. What’s disturbing about these bailouts is the moral hazard it produces.”
The $700 billion rescue plan, however, posed an even larger problem and exposed deep divisions among free-market conservatives, who expressed different opinions about whether and how the government should intervene in the face of economic troubles.
“How can we have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down?” said House Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), who opposed the plan. “If we lose our ability to fail, will we not soon lose our ability to succeed?”
Outside Congress, free-market thinkers remain divided about the rescue. Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, called the plan “a massive overreaction” in an op-ed column in the Washington Times. J.D. Foster, an economist at the foundation, wrote a memo on the group’s Web site saying the plan could be justified if the U.S. financial system is at risk and the economy is under the threat of a deep recession.
Ryan says he hasn’t lost his zeal for the free-market system and, despite the losses in the stock market, continues to back a plan that would allow workers to invest part of their Social Security funds in private accounts. Under Ryan’s proposal, the government would guarantee those workers a certain return even if their investments lost value, meaning the government would have to make up the cost.
“Over a person’s working period, the market will outperform Social Security,” he said, adding that it will take some time for the markets to respond to the rescue provisions now being put in place.
George Meyers, a member of the Racine Taxpayers Association, remains unconvinced about the rescue.
“It’s not going to help the people it’s purported to help,” he said, adding that he was disappointed by Ryan’s position. “It’s basically a bailout of some wealthy bankers who made some mistakes. . . . We’re going to get shorted on our money.”
The bailout also seemed like a bad idea at first to William McReynolds, the Racine County executive.
“I probably had the natural reaction the constituents in this area had from a layman’s sense,” he said. Now, “I can understand why Congressman Ryan probably had to vote for it. This shows what type of courage he has.”
Robin Vos, a Republican who represents Racine County in the state Assembly, also gave Ryan credit for trying to shape the rescue package, then taking a vote that could hurt his standing among some of his constituents.
“The easy answer would have been to say ‘That’s too hot a potato,’ ” he said.
Despite major opposition to the plan, many Wisconsin residents have been willing to give Ryan “a hearing on the issue,” said Charlie Sykes, a Milwaukee conservative radio talk show host who interviewed Ryan on the show about the rescue.
“He’s someone who has established his credentials as an economic conservative over the years,” he said. “There’s always going to be some folks who don’t like his vote, but I don’t think it’s going to hurt him.”
Ryan won his last election with 63% of the vote, and he is expected to easily win re-election in November, although his Democratic opponent, Marge Krupp, is attempting a serious challenge.
Daniel Mitchell, a supply-side tax policy expert at the right-leaning Cato Institute, takes issue with any conservative who voted for the package.
“They can call themselves conservative all they want, but when push came to shove, they grabbed $700 billion from taxpayers and gave it to the fat cats on Wall Street,” he said. “It’s hard to say any of that is fiscally responsible.”
I think we are into a learning curve as our young Conservative elected officials are climbing the ranks. These are the future leaders who will look back someday and ask why they said that or voted for something.
Unlike the DemocRATs, the media doesn’t give our guys a pass. In the RATs ranks we have a sitting Senator who killed Mary Jo and is treated like a celebrity, a Speaker whose husband is one big conflict of interest, Clinton the rapist and his wife the enabler to name a few. Look how the media covered up anything negative on ZERO before the election and now doesn’t report he bowed before the Muslim Saudi King.
Let a Republican misspeak like Sen George Allen and it is everywhere.
I do too! Good to see young Conservative Republicans stepping forward.
I like Ryan, but I love Rep. Thaddeus McCotter from Michigan!
Yes, we need to wary of RINO’s like Romney is probably one but politicians will make votes that we don’t always agree with. People don’t have to be perfect but as long as the underlying conservative principles are there and will strongly guide them then we should support them and disagree where we should. Everyone on this board’s infatuated with Governor Palin and thinks she does no wrong but didn’t she levy a windfall profits tax on the oil companies in Alaska? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Even Ronald Reagan wasn’t Ronald Reagan befor he was president. A lifelong democrat, actor, divorced governor of California?
Me too!
“This bill offends my principles,” the Janesville Republican said in an impassioned speech Sept. 29, before Congress’ first attempt to pass the measure. “But I am going to vote for this bill in order to preserve my principles, in order to preserve this free-enterprise system.”
Oh no.
What an idiot.
Not buying any of this. Don’t trust any of the current crop. All this crap happening and not a single one of these phonies has stepped up with the appropriate alarm and aggressiveness to answer the concern. Our next leader will be someone none of us even know yet. Someone who is legit, who comes from our ranks. We’ll see how it plays out. But for now, I ain’t buying ANY of the current crop. None of them.
LOL, they can't even mention Palin as a possibility?
If the GOP’s future is a guy who didn’t know that a Bill of Attainder is unconstitutional, the GOP is doomed.
Is the GOP’s future smarter than a 5th grader? We’ll, find out next week after American Idol...
“Our next leader will be someone none of us even know yet.”
That illusion is what feeds the trashing of all the viable options we have.
Palin did not levy a windfall proft tax. Alaska owns the land and they lease the land to oil companies to extract oil. The amount they pay for the lease is based on how much oil they extract and the price of oil. All Palin did was make sure the oil companies paid the people of Alaska a fair amount for the oil. This is a negotiated contract, not a tax. Big difference. Oil companies don't have to agree if they do not like the terms.
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