Như ứng cử viên phó tổng thống Đảng Cộng Hòa Paul Ryan, tôi cũng muốn cắt bỏ Medicare và tiền trợ cấp khi thấy tiền đóng thuế của mình bị lạm dụng bởi những kẻ không cần đến sự giúp đở của chính phủ. Không những họ giàu, không đóng thuế mà còn được tiền food stamp luôn cả bảo hiểm miễn phí.

Đương nhiên hệ thống nào cũng có sơ hở cả. Nếu như cắt bỏ hết thì thật sự quá dả mang với những người nghèo khó thật sự cần giúp đở. Như ông Ryan đã từng ăn tiền trợ cấp lúc 16 tuổi khi cha ông qua đời, tôi và mẹ tôi cũng nhờ tiền trợ cấp lúc thuở ban đầu đặc chân đến đất Mỹ. Như ông Ryan đã được cơ hội đi học thành tài, dỉ nhiên là tôi không tài bằng ông ta, tôi cũng nhờ đến sự giúp đở của chính phủ. Cho nên giời đây tôi không ngần ngại giúp đỡ những người cần sự giúp đỡ để có cơ hội vương lên. Còn những kẻ lạm dụng thì để họ tự trả lời với chính lương tâm của họ.

Gần đây tôi có xem một số tin tức trong cộng đồng người Việt nói rằng tổng thống Obama lấy $716 tỉ đô của Medicare để bỏ vào Obamacare. Tin này thật quá sai lầm. Cả hai Obama và Ryan đều giảm tiền Medicare. Tuy nhiên bên Ryan thì lấy số tiền đó để giảm nợ còn Obama thì lấy số tiền đó để giúm đỡ những người không mua nổi bảo hiểm sức khoẻ.

Trong khi Obama cắt cả trăm tỷ tiền quốc phòng và nâng thuế dân giàu và công ty lớn để bỏ vào tiền nợ, Ryan cộng thêm một ngàn tỷ vào quốc phòng và giảm thuế cho 2% dân giàu lại không có giải thích nào chính đáng là lấy tiền ở đâu ra để chi cho quốc phòng.

Nhưng đều tôi quan tâm nhất là trông khi ông Ryan bỏ cả tỷ tỷ vào quốc phòng mà ông lại cắt $170 tỷ tiền học bỏng (Pell Grants) cho học sinh nghèo. Chẳng khác gì ổng đẩy những đứa trẻ nghèo (con em chúng ta) ra khỏi trường học và đưa họ vào chiến trường.

Ezra Klein:

Obama’s cuts to Medicare are different because Ryan “keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency” while Obama uses it “to pay for a new risky program of his own that we call Obamacare.”

Here’s the big different in the two plans:

But Romney/Ryan also add a trillion dollars to the defense budget. And they have trillions of dollars in tax cuts they haven’t explained how they’re going to pay for. So those decisions make future cuts to Medicare more likely. Meanwhile, Obama cuts defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, raises about $1.5 trillion in new taxes, and puts all that money into deficit reduction. So that makes future Medicare cuts less likely.

As his favorable slipping, even in the Republican party, Mitt Romney needs to do something to galvanize his base and that something is his selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate. Romney knows that he has to make this bold move to get a shot at the general election. He needs to adopt Ryan’s proposals as his own because he doesn’t really have one. And anyone who has been following up with Ryan’s plan knows how ideological it is.

To reduce the government’s deficit, Ryan’s budget would cut federal spending on Social Safety programs including Medicare, Medicaid and Pell grants. But then his proposal would increase spending on defense. Furthermore, Ryan believes in Ayn Rand’s idea of “equal opportunity—not equal outcomes” and looking at “one another’s success with pride, not resentment.” While his proposal would cut aid to the needy, it also would cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. No wonder economist Paul Krugman called Ryan’s plan, “the most fraudulent budget in American history.”

So Romney’s choice of Ryan might be good for the Republican party, but bad for America.

Paul Krugman:

Once you’ve decided to hide your beliefs and say whatever you think will get you the nomination, to pretend to agree with people you privately believe are fools, why worry at all about truth?

The truth is that Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.

It seems like yesterday that Obama won his historic election, and yet here we are again for 2012. So what the President had accomplished so far? On foreign policies, he had intelligently gotten rid of Osama bin Laden and he’s bringing our troops home. The bailouts weren’t a popular decision, but they stabilized the economy. He lowered taxes on the majority of Americans and passed universal healthcare.

Sure, Obama couldn’t make the change he has promised in 2008 because Washington is not easy to transform. As Ryan Lizza pointed out in “The Obama Memos“:

Obama was learning the same lesson of many previous occupants of the Oval Office: he didn’t have the power that one might think he had. Harry Truman, one in a long line of Commanders-in-Chief frustrated by the limits of the office, once complained that the President “has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues…. The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.”

But he has definitely learned how to work with the system to get things done rather than changing it. He is more confidence and the experience he has gained over the past few years would be an advantage for American.

Up to this point, I am still in favor of Obama, but I am also keeping an ear out for other candidates. So far I am enjoy seeing GOP candidates ripping each other to pieces, but I have not yet convinced. I am not envy of Millionaire Mitt’s success of earning about $57,000 a day, which is most average American makes in a year, but I am deeply concerned that Mitt doesn’t see anything wrong with paying less taxes than average American. In fact, his firm Bain Capital hired lobbyists in 2007 to killed a bill that would increase tax on private equity firms. As for Grandiose Gringrich, can you trust a guy who cheated not once but twice? I rest my case.

In his New Yorker‘s “The Obama Memos,” Ryan Lizza concludes:

Obama didn’t remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street. Along the way, Obama may have changed his mind about his 2008 critique of Hillary Clinton. “Working the system, not changing it” and being “consumed with beating” Republicans “rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done” do not seem like such bad strategies for success after all.

Andrew Sullivan:

What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for… Not for the first time, I realized that to understand Obama, you have to take the long view. Because he does.

Worth reading.