Rummaging around among the disclosure forms of the House GOP plutocrats and debthounds

Is Paul "How to Marry a Millionaire" Ryan going to teach us all how to marry a mining heiress?

Frederick Deligne, in Le Pèlerin (France)

by Ken

Wednesday, you may have noticed, was Disclosure Day, when congressmembers' annual financial disclosure forms were made public, listing income, assets, liabilities, and other data. The Washington Post's David A. Fahrenthold and Karen Yourish focused on "the firebrand class of Republican freshmen" and found heavy concentrations of Richie Riches and debthounds. They found "at least 24 new millionaires," joining "a Congress that already had plenty." At the other end of the spectrum, however, they found:

Among the 87 new GOP members of Congress, the documents show, at least 30 had liabilities totaling $50,000 or more in 2010.

Those debts included large mortgages on investment properties, as well as student loans and credit card balances. At least seven freshmen had credit card debt exceeding $15,000.

As the WaPo reporters note,

The newcomers have helped press a simple GOP message about the public debt: The country has too much and must reduce its burden immediately.

"Among those with credit card debt," Fahrenthold and Yourish report, "was Rep. Blake Farenthold (Tex.) [presumably no relation to reporter Fahrenthold], who has pressed for major action to control the national debt."

Earlier this year, Farenthold issued a statement rejecting any increase in the debt limit without major spending cuts.

“Like the rest of America,” the statement said, ‘the government needs to tighten its belt and work within its means.”

Farenthold’s 2010 disclosure forms show credit card debt of $45,000 to $150,000. A spokeswoman for the congressman said she could not comment, because she had not located his accountant to discuss the filing.

SPEAKING OF THOSE CONGRESSIONAL MILLIONAIRES . . .

Meanwhile reporter Fahrenthold teamed with Paul Kane to look at the House plutocrats, starting with the ones who run the place: "House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Majority Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.) , the GOP leaders who rode to power on the grassroots wave of tea-party activists, are multi-millionaires with financial investments in some of the nation’s largest corporations."

OF COURSE HOUSE DEMS AS A CLASS
AREN'T EXACTLY POVERTY-STRICKEN EITHER

As Howie has been pointing at DWT here for years, this has been a cornerstone of the caucus's electoral strategy dating back at least to the reign of Master Rahm Emanuel at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, whose practice was to look wherever possible for "self-funding" candidates, whose personal wealth, and willingness to spend it to get elected, constituted a gift that would keep on giving: not just providing a campaign war chest, but offering strong assurance that in the event of success the newly minted incumbent would faithfully uphold and defend the interests of the plutocrats. Win-win is the technical term, I believe. As the old saying goes, "Money talks, everybody else f**k off."

And then there's the extra-special case of the Man Who Would Be America's Economic Mastermind, at least if the rising-star class of Republicans have their way. (Remember the "Young Guns"?)

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the House Budget Committee chairman whose 2012 budget has dominated the congressional agenda recently, has practiced what he preaches in his personal finances in terms of shrinking the mounting federal debt. The 41-year-old is worth at least $1 million, much of it from his wife’s family holdings in an Oklahoma mining company and an Oklahoma gravel company. Ryan’s own investments include holdings in Apple (at least $1,000), Berkshire Hathaway ($1,000), Google ($1,000), McDonald’s ($1,000) and Phillip Morris ($1,000). [Emphasis added.]

Now as we've been pointing out ever since Paul "How to Marry a Millionaire" Ryan emerged from whatever rock he crawled out from under, the man is an economic ignoramus -- and that's not a slur, just a simple statement of fact. His tiny brain is apparently so muddled that it's impossible to distinguish the point at which the ignorance and delusion give way to plain old lies. HIs economic "insights" come from the burblings of Ayn Rand, a writer so stupid and ill-informed that she would have had to be smartened up by an order of magnitude to qualify as a moron.

I don't think "ironic" is quite the word to describe the situation where the man anointed as the great economic thinker who has been charged -- by himself, anyways -- with restructuring the U.S. economy is a total tool of . . . well, why don't we just say a total tool? I suppose it's touching to learn that the Ryans, concerned parents, "have already invested more than $150,000 in college savings plans" for their three young children. What a tender tribute to their parental caring! But we need to bear in mind that this is the economic perspective of the man charged with carving up a new version of the American economic pie, whose idea of "equality of opportunity" is heavily weighted toward the children of men who marry into mining fortunes.

Do we need to ask him specifically how he feels about that "second Bill of Rights" President Franklin Roosevelt enumerated in his 1944 State of the Union address? (The last of the rights he enumerated as having already "become accepted as self-evident," by the way, was "the right to a good education.") I doubt it. After all, it's people like him who have been denouncing FDR and the New Deal since it was being formulated, and now see its dismantling within their greedy grasp.

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