That House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) supports the privatization of Social Security is well known. Ryan proposed $1.2 trillion in cuts and the partial privatization of Social Security upon taking control of the Budget Committee in 2011, and he has constantly warned about the supposed doom facing the program if major reforms aren’t enacted immediately.

But Ryan’s attempts to gut the most popular entitlement program in America go back quite a few years, as Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of the conservative hero makes clear. Ryan’s fight against Social Security has been ongoing since he pushed President George W. Bush to privatize the program in 2005:

Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear. [...]

Two weeks after Bush’s Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct policy issue and live to tell about it.

Bush ultimately went with a slightly less radical proposal that still failed in the Senate and caused Republicans massive losses in the 2006 mid-term elections. But Ryan, undeterred, told Lizza that the failure of privatization was simply due to marketing, not that the plan was unpopular:

What some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted was mostly a communications problem. “The Administration did a bad job of selling it,” he told me. Bush had campaigned on national-security issues, only to pitch Social Security reform after reëlection. “And . . . thud,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to prepare the country for these things. You can’t just spring it on them after you win.” The lesson: “Don’t let the engineers run the marketing department.”

Aided by the mainstream media’s spreading of the lie that Social Security is “going bankrupt,” Ryan has been able to thrust Social Security “reform” back onto the table, and it was embraced during the primary by virtually every Republican candidate.

What Ryan and his Republican colleagues continue to ignore, however, is how easy fixing Social Security would be if they weren’t so insistent on protecting the wealthiest Americans from a single tax increase. By lifting the payroll tax cap that currently limits Social Security contributions to the first $110,100 in income, Congress could ensure the program’s solvency for the next 75 years — longer than the program has been in existence to this point.

That wouldn’t fit Ryan’s belief that the government doesn’t have a role in helping protect the financial security of the American people. But it would prevent millions of Americans from losing the much of their retirement savings, as they would have during the 2008 financial crisis had Ryan’s plan to privatize Social Security become law.

House Republicans have gone to great lengths to block implementation of a new food safety law, while also trying to cut the budgets of agencies that oversee food safety. But new data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows just how foolhardy those moves are, as rates of foodborne illnesses are rising:

The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the rates of infections linked to four out of five key pathogens it tracks – salmonella, vibrio, campylobacter and listeria – remained relatively steady or increased from 2007 through 2011. The exception is a strain of E. coli, which has been tied to fewer illnesses over the same time period.

Foodborne illnesses sicken 48 million and kill roughly 3,000 Americans each year, and recently, a salmonella outbreak forced the recall of 30,000 pounds of Cargill-produced ground beef. Despite these numbers, the GOP budget made drastic cuts to the Food and Drug Administration in an attempt to prevent the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act, a law signed by President Obama last year that marked the first significant update to food safety law in a generation. The House farm bill, meanwhile, contains an amendment proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) that would prevent states from regulating agricultural products.

Republicans, however, aren’t necessarily alone in their fight. Obama also sought cuts to the Food Safety Inspection Service in his budget plan, and his administration has thus far failed to meet required deadlines to implement new regulations. “Everyone was hoping that this new food safety law would be in place and we’d start seeing improvements by now,” Erik Olson, a director at the Pew Health Group, told the Washington Post. “What these CDC numbers show is that unless new protections are put into place, millions of Americans are going to continue to get sick from contaminated food.”

After Scranton, PA Mayor Chris Doherty (D) reduced the pay of hundreds of his city’s public workers — including firefighters, police officers, and other safety workers — to minimum wage earlier this month, three unions challenged the cuts in federal court. In a deal reached today, the mayor has agreed to pay back the wages that the city owes to its public workers. In addition to restoring employees’ wages, Doherty will also award them with interest for the backlogged salaries, Reuters reports:

Mayor Christopher Doherty agreed that the city would pay approximately $750,000 in compensation owed to firefighters, police officers and public works employees, plus at least $5,100 in interest, said Tom Jennings, a lawyer for the employees’ unions.

In exchange, the unions said they would drop their bid to have the mayor held in contempt of court, according to the agreement, reached Saturday and presented to a judge on Monday.

Despite the fact that a federal judge issued an injunction preventing the city from decreasing workers’ pay to minimum wage, Doherty slashed the wages of hundreds of public employees earlier this month, claiming that Scranton could not afford to pay their full salaries.

John Judge, the president of Scranton’s firefighters’ union, said he remains “cautious” about the settlement’s good news for public workers, expressing hope that the city won’t hold workers’ living wages hostage in the future.

As ThinkProgress has noted on numerous occasions, the nation’s unemployment rate would be a full point lower were it not for budget cuts that have forced hundreds of thousands of public workers to lose their jobs. The last three years, in fact, were the worst on record for public employment.

This sort of austerity, of course, has negative implications for economic growth, which in the U.S. was a sluggish 1.5 percent last quarter. As the Tax Policy Center noted, “in 2011, the state and local sector contracted 3.4 percent, the largest decline since World War II.” Budget cuts have actually knocked several tenths of a percentage point off of national GDP in each of the last two years and in the first half of 2012, as this chart shows:

Europe is presenting a shining example of the effects that austerity has on a national economy. For instance, the UK has been in a double-dip recession for three quarters, while Spain’s youth unemployment rate is above 50 percent. Conservatives, however, have not stopped pushing for more European-style austerity.