When Paul Ryan loved stimulus spending

Filed under IOKIYAR, what a difference a decade makes. I mean, let's just review Congressman Ryan's vigorous defense of stimulus spending in a previous life:

“What we're trying to accomplish here is the recognition of the fact that in recessions, unemployment lags on well after a recovery has taken place,” Ryan said at the time. “We have a lot of laid-off workers, and more layoffs are occurring. And we know, as a historical fact, that even if our economy begins to slowly recover, unemployment is going to linger on and on well after that recovery takes place.”

Ryan’s advocacy of stimulus spending wasn’t limited to Washington, either. When he returned home to face constituents, he used similar language to make the case for the Bush stimulus bill. “You have to spend a little to grow a little,” Ryan told constituents at a town hall in Wisconsin in January 2002, according to the Journal-Times, a local newspaper. “What we're trying to do is stimulate that part of the economy that's on its back." [...]

“We've got to get the engine of economic growth growing again, because we now know because of recession, we don't have the revenues that we wanted to, we don't have the revenues we need, to fix Medicare, to fix Social Security. To fix these issues we've got to get Americans back to work,” Ryan said. “Then the surpluses come back, then the jobs come back. That is the constructive answer we're trying to accomplish here on, yes, a bipartisan basis.”

Back then Congressman Ryan was all about creating jobs and helping the unemployed. Fast forward to the present day and now the same policy is simply dangerous and unacceptable socialism that creates a culture of dependency.

I've already done a longer post at Detroit News on this one, so I won't repeat my commentary here. I'll just add, if overdosing on hypocrisy was fatal, these guys would all be dead.

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