When George McClellan first took command of the Union armies around Washington, he issues a frantic report claiming that the Confederates had over 100,000 soldiers facing him in Virgina. (The real number was less than half that). Union General Winfield Scott, who sensed that McClellan was exaggerating wildly, responded with a remark for the ages: “General McClellan hereby places himself on record.”

I’m reminded of “Old Fuss and Feathers” remark as I read Democrats place themselves on record defending Obamacare.

Let’s have some fun!

Whatever amount you want to use, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t “cut Medicare” – it saves Medicare by reducing expenses. Let SeniorCorps.org explain:

Despite the doom and gloom tactics of some members of congress and talking heads, the cuts will come from two prime sources; (1) eliminating Medicare fraud, and (2) a reduction in the amount of payments that are paid into Medicare Advantage programs that are offered by private insurance companies.

Let’s count by the numbers!

First, we’re going to cut costs by eliminating fraud! Three problems I see with that fanciful assumption:

1. “Fraud” is a relative term. A Medicare expense that I think is fraudulent, may seem proper to you.
2. Since when, in human history, has fraud ever been eliminated?
3. Fraudsters aren’t all stupid. Some of them are very clever and very hard to catch. You can be sure that many of them will be much smarter than the political apparatchiks the Democrats will hire to chase the crooks.

Oh, I think fraud will be around for quite a while. To be sure, Baja Democrats says that improved fraud protection in Obamacare “enables the Medicare Administration to significantly reduce this waste.” But, if you don’t catch enough fraudsters, how can you significantly decrease Medicare costs?

Second, reducing the amount of payments that are paid into Medicare Advantage programs that are offered by private companies. Let’s see what the fish had to say about this:

Medicare administrative costs average 3-4%, while private insurance companies’ administrative costs average around 15%. One reason is that the Medicare Administration doesn’t pay hundreds of millions in salaries & benefits to CEOs like the big insurance companies do. And private insurance companies don’t like to lose money, so they got the Republicans to include a “risk adjustment” factor into the Medicare Advantage program that guarantees the insurance companies will always get paid more than their actual cost. It doesn’t matter if their higher costs are from bloated administrative costs or actual benefits paid out to enrollees, they always get paid more.

I’ve every confidence that Denise and David did due diligence in their research, so I’ll concede those figures in the first sentence. I’ll also concede the risk adjustment factor. And, I agree that insurance corporations pay their leaders big salaries.

Of course, insurance corporations are businesses that respond to stockholders and can be—and often are—sued. Companies often fire under-performing leaders, lest their business fail. (By contrast, government bureaucracies are much more insulated, much harder to challenge and much less interested in efficiency. Try firing a career civil servant—especially one who knows how to play the system. Plus, if you irritate one department of the government [by, say, filing a complaint against Medicare], you run the risk of OTHER parts of the government [the IRS, the building inspector] taking much, much more interest in you personally.)

So, what is Obamacare’s remedy?

The Affordable Care Act remedies that by reducing and capping payments to insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage policies. The leaner, more efficient companies will do just fine and continue to offer policies, while the companies with bloated costs will abandon the market.

What happened to…”if you like your health plan, you can keep it?” Or, “if you like your doctor, you can keep seeing him/her?” I guess there were expiration dates on those promises.

And seniors don’t lose a single benefit – if they don’t fine find a Medicare Advantage policy that meets their needs they simply re-enroll to get those benefits directly from Medicare.

“seniors don’t lose a single benefit.” I LOVE it when people go on record!

That last statement presumes that Medicare can continue paying the benefits its paying now, well into the future. Raise your hands if you think that’s realistic.

American society has changed drastically in the past three decades. We baby boomers whose salaries funded decades of expanding entitlements are now drawing on those entitlements. We are living much longer; that means we’ll place an even greater demand on Medicare. Our national debt has skyrocketed and is projected to keep on going up and up and up.

Given all that, do you really think that seniors won’t “lose a single benefit?” You don’t expect to see ANY services eliminated or curtailed, or co-pays to go up?(I’m sure that, if those things happen, most people would view that as losing benefits.

Or, we could just keep up the deficit spending. And run up more bills for our children and grandchildren to pay.

In response to Baja Democrats’ post today on a long-forgotten Republican economics luminary from 30 years ago (David Stockman) writing in two publications that would rather commit seppuku (look it up) than say anything honest about Republicans (Rolling Stone and the New York Times), let me respond with the words of Erskine Bowles. The former Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, and the Democratic party’s lead on the recent Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission.

Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is “sensible…honest, serious.”

Why is this important? Erskine Bowles has a long pedigree as a Democratic budget thinker — and presidential adviser. When Barack Obama needed to pick the co-chair for his deficit committee, which he roundly ignored in the end, he chose Bowles to represent his side on the panel. Bowles served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and earlier ran the Small Business Administration for Clinton. Ezra Klein predicted on Friday that Bowles would be the front-runner for Tim Geithner’s job at Treasury if Obama wins a second term.

(Emphasis added).

For comparison, the last time David Stockman was in a position of authority in a Republican administration, I was a lieutenant in Germany watching the Soviet Army.

Having read what Erskine Bowles just said about Paul Ryan’s budget proposals, go reread Baja Democrats’ post.

To be clear, Bowles didn’t agree with Ryan’s budget. However, Bowles clearly considers Ryan to be…well, as he said, sensible, honest and serious.

Apparently Bowles and Stockman will have to agree to disagree. The question is, dear reader, who do YOU consider to be a more thoughtful and responsible authority on Paul Ryan’s economic opinions? I’ll go with Erskine Bowles here.

Any Democrats with a lick of common sense (there are a few) should be mighty worried about Paul Ryan’s selection as the Vice Presidential nominee on the GOP ticket. The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund explains one of the reasons why:

No doubt there are many Democrats rubbing their hands in glee in contemplation of reviving some version of the ad that featured an actor playing Paul Ryan pushing a grandmother in a wheelchair off a cliff. But the smarter ones are worried.

First, if Ryan is an extremist and his proposals are so unpopular, how has he won election seven times in a Democratic district? His lowest share of the vote was 57 percent — in his first race. He routinely wins over two-thirds of the vote. When Obama swept the nation in 2008, he carried Ryan’s district by four points. But at the same time, Ryan won reelection with 65 percent of the vote, meaning that a fifth of Obama voters also voted for him.

Ryan has pointed out to me that no Republican has carried his district for president since Ronald Reagan in 1984. “I have held hundreds of town-hall meetings in my district explaining why we have to take bold reform steps, and I’ve found treating people like adults works,” he told me. “All those ads pushing elderly woman off the cliffs don’t work anymore if you lay out the problem.”

Democrats and the media (yes, I repeat myself) have already started blasting the airwaves, claiming that Paul Ryan wants to steal the benefits of poor and sick Americans.

Unfortunately for those Democrats, Paul Ryan does a very good job of explaining why America’s entitlement system needs to change.

We don’t have the money to keep up the entitlement spending of the past 50 years. You can’t get the money you’d need by taxing people who make over $250,000 a year. There aren’t enough wealthier Americans to pay all the bills the Democrats want to run up.

The smarter Democrats know that. They know Paul Ryan knows that, and can explain himself. Very convincingly. (Ask the Democrats in his district who vote for him, time and time again.) THAT’s why the smart Democrats are scared.

That’s why the Democrats will try to demagogue him. That’s why the Democrats hope that their allies in the media will inhibit Ryan’s attempts to make his case to the American people.

Ultimately, though, it’s up to the American people to decide. What kind of future do they want? Paul Ryan is going to tell you some things that are tough to hear. We won’t have the money to do all the things we’ve done in the past. Anyone who’s been paying attention has known this day was coming. Well, it’s here.

The GOP is gambling that a majority of Americans will look at our economic situation soberly and thoughtfully. If they do, the GOP is confident that the Romney/Ryan ticket will win in November.

From Mary Katherine Ham of HotAir. If the Democrats want to debate ideas, and the course that America wants to chart for its future, Paul Ryan is ready for that debate.

With Ryan on the ticket, the debate should no longer be about contraception and the deferred cancer-causing capabilities of Bain investments. It will be about the budget and the $16-trillion debt, the unsustainable trajectory of the federal government and the promises it’s already breaking to generations to come. It will be about Simpson-Bowles and a federal government that hasn’t even bothered to pass a budget since before the iPad existed. It will be about how four years of grossly increased spending has stimulated us into the worst recovery in American history…It will be about how creating new entitlement programs cannot possibly fix the ones that are already broken. And, it will be about whether we value an ever more dependent society or an ever more successful one.

As Ryan said this morning, it will be about, “what kind of country we want to be” and “what kind of people we want to be.

Here are more reasons why the smart Democrats will fear Paul Ryan:

He has earned the respect of Democrats and liberals who oppose him.

William Saletan, in Slate magazine—a publication that’s not exactly known as a conservative magazine: (All emphasis is added).

Ryan refutes the Democratic Party’s bogus arguments. He knows that our domestic spending trajectory is unsustainable and that liberals who fail to get it under control are leading their constituents over a cliff, just like in Europe. Eventually, you can’t borrow enough money to make good on your promises, and everyone’s screwed. Ryan understands that the longer we ignore the debt crisis and postpone serious budget cuts—the liberal equivalent of denying global warming—the more painful the reckoning will be. There’s nothing compassionate about that kind of irresponsibility.

Maybe, like me, you were raised in a liberal household. You don’t agree with conservative ideas on social or foreign policy. But this is why God made Republicans: to force a reality check when Democrats overpromise and overspend.

Erskine Bowles, former Clinton Chief of Staff, disagreed with Ryan’s budget proposals—but he called them “sensible…honest, serious” (Hat tip to Ed Morrissey at HotAir)

Paul Ryan is an effective debater and advocate

Ryan is smart, well-spoken and tenacious in an exchange of ideas. He bedeviled the Democrats during the Obamacare debates. He is a great choice to lead the GOP’s resistance to out-of-control, foolish Democratic Party spending. The online pundit “Iowahawk” said it best this weekend: “Paul Ryan represents Obama’s most horrifying nightmare: Math.” Paul Ryan can, and will, do the math.

Ryan comes from a background that’s hard to demagogue.

Ryan grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin (population 63,575). His father was a lawyer who died when Paul was 16. Ryan didn’t go to an Ivy League university; he attended Miami of Ohio, the kind of college that a middle-class kid in the Midwest would attend.

Ryan used money from his deceased father’s Social Security benefits to help pay for college. Democrats will gleefully point to that and call Ryan a hypocrite. Ryan, however, is skillful enough to point out that he’s trying to reform federal entitlements so they can endure for future generations.

Does anyone, really, think that our entitlements don’t need massive reforms? This fellow knows they do:

And what I’ve tried to explain to them [Democrats] is, number one, if you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up. I mean, it’s not an option for us to just sit by and do nothing.

That “fellow” was Barack Obama.

My fellow Tucsonans, given what you’ve seen the Democrats do with power—and with your children’s and grandchildren’s money—over the past three years, do you really think they’re committed to meaningful entitlement reform? Or, will they kick the can down the road for our grandchildren to deal with?

THAT is why smart Democrats fear Paul Ryan.

* This article was originally posted over the weekend—I have modified and expanded it