Paul Ryan, deficit peacock.
Boy, that Paul Ryan sure is a serious deficit cutter. He "knows more about the debt crisis we’re about to face" than anyone,
says Speaker John Boehner. When it comes to deficit cutting, Ryan's pure as the driven snow.
Except:
JANESVILLE, Wisc.—In 2009, as Rep. Paul D. Ryan was railing against President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package as a “wasteful spending spree,” he wrote at least four letters to Obama’s secretary of energy asking that millions of dollars from the program be granted to a pair of Wisconsin conservation groups, according to documents obtained by the Globe. [...]
The additional letters include his praise for the energy program’s aims, and clash with his own budget priorities, which call for curtailing many of the same Department of Energy investments that are designed to spur the growth of green technologies and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. [...]
[T]he biggest payoff came for the Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation. Ryan predicted the $20 million grant would be able to “create or retain approximately 7,600 new jobs over the three-year grant period and the subsequent three years.”
Yet in an interview with MSNBC two years later, Ryan again bashed the stimulus package.
“All this temporary booster shot stimulus didn’t work in the stimulus package, didn’t work when the last administration tried these things, so we don’t want to go with ideas that have proven to fail, we want ideas that have proven to succeed,” he said in an interview on MSNBC in September 2011. “I think tax reform is the key.”
Wisconsin apparently isn't capable of pulling itself up by its bootstraps. No going Galt in the Badger State. And who knew Paul Ryan is a closeted green energy fan? There's nothing inherently wrong with a member of Congress looking out for constituents and businesses back home. That's one of the things they're elected to do.
But what Ryan would do—did try to do—is secure the funding for his home state and then make sure that no other state could benefit, cutting the same programs that he credited for creating jobs back home. All of which basically makes him just another typical hypocritical Republican deficit peacock, perfect for the Romney team.