Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) on the Most Irresponsible, Dishonest and Malevolent Congress in U.S. History

Interviewed on The Mark Levin Show, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) described the Democrats' cynical attempts to game the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate for their brand new entitlement program. As a reminder, our existing entitlement programs -- Social Security and Medicare -- are only $100 trillion in the hole right now.

Ryan: I've got CBO working on a letter for me to hopefully get tonight or tomorrow to just re-verify the facts.

Number one: they're taking $522 billion out of Medicare -- but not to get to Medicare solvency -- but to pay for this new government takeover of healthcare. This new entitlement. You can't count those dollars twice, yet they're claiming it twice. So we call that 'double-counting': either the $522 billion goes into the Medicare trust fund to make it more solvent or to this new program; not both. And they're claiming both...

They are taking ten years of tax increases and Medicare cuts to pay for six years of spending.

They're taking the 'Cadillac Tax' and shoving it outside the [ten-year, CBO] window.

They added a brand new tax on investment income [Ed: well, that should help the economy!] that's must higher... that's $210 billion of new taxes that we just got an hour or two ago.

And they're moving money out of this ten-year [CBO] window so much to manipulate this score to try and make it look like this thing comes in under a trillion dollars and actually reduces the deficit.

They don't count the 'Doc Fix', that's $371 billion right there... Medicare physicians are slated to get a 21% cut in their payments next month and everyone is proposing to prevent that from happening. Congress, for the last seven years, has prevented these Medicare cuts from occurring... and all of these bills said, "We're going to prevent these Medicare cuts from hitting the doctors" because we know about 25% of doctors will just drop taking Medicare patients if this cut occurs. And so... they took this spending provision out of the bill and left it as a separate piece of legislation. So they took $371 billion of spending and took it out of this legislation!

[There's] $72 billion in Social Security taxes that they're counting twice; that's supposed to go to Social Security, but is a raid on the Social Security trust fund.

There's $50 billion in premium for a new entitlement for long-term care insurance; these premiums, like any insurance, should go to insurance, but they're taking them to go to this new entitlement!

Levin: So they're taking money out of Social Security; they're taking money out of Medicare; new [LTC] premiums, they're taking that money; ...so we're at a trillion dollars of Madoff-style fiscal fraud!

Ryan: That's right. And the Congressional Budget Office can't tell you this. Because their statute is that they estimate whatever you put in front of them. And if you put in front of them garbage in, you'll get garbage out.

If you put in front of them a manipulated bill and all of the smoke and mirrors, they have no choice but to score the bill as you wrote it. And if you write it intentionally to disguise all of this, then you'll get a disguised estimate, and that's what we have here.

Precisely the reason I'm organizing the Impeach & Convict Tour 2011. Because you can't be too careful with Democrats: they're like cockroaches.


Update: Reps. Stupak and Cantor: Democrats Still Don’t Have the Votes.

Keep calling!