Paul Ryan wishes he'd done even more damage to the country before resigning

Apparently unsatisfied with the amount of lives already destroyed under his watch, former Speaker Paul Ryan regrets not fully completing his dreams of dismantling safety net programs and giving Trump his wall.

Before a conference hosted by the Edison Electric Institute Monday, Ryan lamented that he was unsuccessful in destroying these programs millions of Americans rely on.

“One thing I regret the most is we did not get a debt reduction plan in place,” Ryan said, according to the Washington Examiner. “If you don’t get these entitlements under control, we will have a debt crisis in this country.”

But increasing the deficit by $1.9 trillion to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy was fine.

The GOP’s 2017 tax law, that Ryan wholeheartedly supported, gave major tax cuts to businesses and billionaires but also kicked 1.1 million off their health insurance, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey, due to the law rescinding the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate repeal. Without the mandate, some buyers dropped out of the marketplace, which drove prices up, making plans unaffordable for many who remained.

Unsurprisingly, the tax law was also proven to be a nearly $2 trillion scam. So much for being a “policy wonk.”

But not taking away health care from enough people wasn’t Ryan’s only “unfinished business.” He also regrets not giving Trump his sought after wall.

“Immigration has been plagued by politics. If we solve the immigration problem, which is totally solvable, and our debt problem, which is totally solvable, we are going to be great,” he added Monday.

However, Ryan was one of the biggest political pawns of Trump’s immigration crisis.

Last year Ryan helped the Trump administration hold young immigrant children, protected under the DACA program, hostage in his quest to build a wall along the southern border. DACA is the Obama-era program Trump rescinded in 2017 that protected about 1 million immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Republicans threatened deportation of these children to an attempt to extort a funding agreement from Democrats for the racist wall. Those efforts were unsuccessful.

And in his last months in office following the 2018 midterms, where his party lost 40 seats, he promised a “big fight” on border funding. That effort also failed.

During his 20 years in Congress, Ryan was known for proposing unsuccessful extremist policies that would have privatized or severely cut vital safety net programs. Ryan’s “A Better Way” blueprint plan, released in 2016, would have raised the Medicare eligibility age and “voucherized” the program by forcing the elderly to purchase coverage through private insurers. He also pushed for privatizing Social Security and helped pass legislation in the House that would have cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid, which provides coverage for over 70 million Americans.

Apparently destroying only so many lives wasn’t enough for Paul Ryan.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.