House Speaker Paul Ryan is getting a lot of pushback from his caucus and from the media on just how big the spending bill he’s going to bring the floor is. Particularly the big hike in defense spending.
You’ll not be at all surprised by his response.
“The military is not the reason we’ve got fiscal problems. It is entitlements.”
He says “entitlement reform” is necessary to deal with the debt.
We all knew that the minute the tax cuts—the $1.8 trillion deficit buster Ryan championed—passed that he would immediately start screaming for cuts to the social safety net. Because he told us so even before the bill passed.
Now he’s telling his deficit peacock caucus—all of whom giddily voted for the tax cuts—that they’ll have even more reasons to get to cutting Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. Because that’s his whole fucking reason for being.