Today on ABC’s This Week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) acknowledged to host Christiane Amanpour that the latest round of congressional town hall meetings have revealed a building frustration among voters over the budget plan he engineered for the Republicans:
AMANPOUR: How are the crowds increasing in their levels of anxiety and frustration?
RYAN: It’s increasing, no two ways about it. [...]
RYAN: The crowds are really getting bigger, and people are getting much more anxious about, just, where the country’s headed.
Watch it:
The frustration is understandable and merited. As ThinkProgress has reported, Ryan’s budget would strip huge amounts of funding from Medicare by transforming it from a guaranteed health benefits system into one that merely provides a fixed level of money — which does not keep up with rising health care costs — that seniors can use to purchase private plans. It also guts Medicaid by block-granting the funds to the states and strips funding from food stamps and other programs to support the middle- and lower-income classes. And it does all this while keeping taxes on the wealthy extraordinarily low.
Indeed, the perverse priorities revealed by the Republicans’ proposed budget has driven a wave of rising Main Street anger across the country over the last week:
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