Ryan a good choice
posted Friday, August 17th, 2012 @ 3:56 pm

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a wise choice in choosing Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his vice presidential running mate.

It was a smart move if Romney's decision was based upon giving voters a crystal clear distinction between the positions advocated by Romney and Ryan and those championed by President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

Known as a budget hawk, Ryan was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998. Trained at the feet of conservative icons William Bennett and Jack Kemp, Ryan, 42, is a conservative's conservative. Simply put, he's a firm believer in a limited federal government and lower taxes for all Americans.

Over the years, Ryan made his mark in the Congress as a critic of out-of-control government spending. He's been roundly criticized for a budget he unveiled in the recent past because it called for reforms in Social Security and Medicare. He was described as a radical by the radical Left, including Obama and his allies in the national media.

We should expect to hear more personal attacks leveled at Romney and Ryan as the presidential campaign unfolds. After all, election day is less than 90 days from now, meaning the Obama campaign does not have an abundance of opportunities at its disposal to paint Romney and Ryan as a couple of slash-and-burn, uncaring conservative Republicans.

We encourage voters to look past the rhetoric. Instead, the voters should become familiar with the facts.

When Obama took office in January 2009, some 11.6 million Americans were unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Twenty-three percent of the unemployed had been out of a job for more than six months, according to the BLS.

Today, nearly 24 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. The true unemployment rate in the U.S. – not the 8.3 percent the government tells us – stands at roughly 15 percent. That figure includes the unemployed who are actively looking for a job, those who have a job that they are overqualified for, and individuals who have given up looking for work.

Let us not forget that Obama rammed a roughly $800-billion stimulus package through the Congress some three years ago. He promised all along that the unemployment rate would drop far below 8 percent thanks to the jolt the stimulus package would deliver to the economy.

To surmise, it is not a pretty picture on the economic front, and it's certainly not an accomplishment that Obama cares to tout on the campaign trail.

Knowing it does not have a leg to stand on, the Obama campaign will do its best to shift the debate in the presidential race away from the economy to matters that could be described as wedge issues. Social Security and Medicare come to mind.

Let's hope so.

The American people need to be exposed to an open debate about entitlement programs. They need to hear that it was Obama who decided to rip $700 billion out of Medicare to help finance his signature legislative achievement – Obamacare.

That's a fact.

Yet, we suspect the American people will never Obama admit it, and they'll certainly never hear of the national media reporting it. It will be treated as if it never occurred.

That's why it is incumbent upon the American people to pay close attention to what Romney and Ryan say. Compare their remarks to the facts about Obama and his failed administration.