Ryan denounced the criticism in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago Monday, and Gingrich was attacked by Rush Limbaugh and a myriad of other right-wing talk radio hosts, as well as by all of the other announced Republican presidential candidates. Less than 48 hours after his appearance on "Meet the Press," the former speaker abjectly apologized to Ryan and declared his full support for the destruction of Medicare.
Gingrich himself is an extremely reactionary figure who spearheaded the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998 and engineered multiple federal government shutdowns in 1995-96 in an effort to force through major cuts in Medicare. It is a remarkable demonstration of the shift to the right in US bourgeois politics that Gingrich, once the personification of right-wing intransigence, is now cast as too "moderate" for the Republican Party.
Similar ultra-right criticism has been directed against another top Republican presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, who backed a health-care reform program as governor of Massachusetts that provided much of the framework for the Obama health care plan, now demonized by the Tea Party wing of the Republicans.
Romney was compelled to devote the first major speech of his own presidential campaign, last Thursday in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a labored explanation of the supposed differences between his Massachusetts plan -- which included an individual mandate and a statewide health insurance exchange -- and the Obama plan.
The dominance of the ultra-right in both congressional and presidential politics in no way reflects actual popular support. Poll after poll demonstrates the opposite: more than two-thirds of voters oppose cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and believe that the best way to cut the federal deficit is to sharply increase taxes on the rich.
At the same time, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) refutes the claims that excessive spending on social programs is the cause of the federal deficit. The CBO found three main contributors to the $12 trillion increase in the deficit over the past decade: $2.8 trillion from the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; $2.9 trillion in new discretionary spending, mainly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on homeland security; and a $3.4 trillion drop in revenues because of the economic slump triggered by the 2008 financial collapse.
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