Trouble brewing for the Republicans because of the Ryan budget

A McClatchey-Marist poll released earlier this week shows 80% of Americans oppose cuts to Medicare and more surprisingly 70% of Tea Party adherents oppose cuts to the program.  More importantly, the question asked wasn't whether Medicare should be privatized, use a voucher system or changed in any way other than having benefits cut.  Even something as minor as cuts received an emphatic thumbs down.

Imagine if the question was 'should Medicare be changed into a voucher system to buy insurance from private health insurance companies?'  The 'No's would be in the mid nineties.  So much for the idiotic signs that appeared during the height of the Tea Party fervor saying 'keep Government's hands off my Medicare."

Just as revealing was a Town Hall meeting held by Ryan himself.

CONSTITUENT: The middle class is disappearing right now. During this time of prosperity, the top 1 percent was taking about 10 percent of the total annual income, but yet today we are fighting to not let the tax breaks for the wealthy expire? And we’re fighting to not raise the Social Security cap from $87,000? I think we’re wrong.

RYAN: A couple things. I don’t disagree with the premise of what you’re saying. The question is what’s the best way to do this. Is it to redistribute… (Crosstalk)

CONSTITUENT: You have to lower spending. But it’s a matter of there’s nothing wrong with taxing the top because it does not trickle down.

RYAN: We do tax the top. (Audience boos). Let’s remember, most of our jobs come from successful small businesses. Two-thirds of our jobs do. You got to remember, businesses pay taxes individually. So when you raise their tax rates to 44.8 percent, which is what the president is proposing, I would just fundamentally disagree. That is going to hurt job creation.

The audience doesn't look as though they're all Democrats who showed up to jeer Ryan. Ryan’s outraged constituents are representative of the country as a whole. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 72 percent of Americans wanted Congress to raise taxes on wealthy Americans making more than $250,000 per year.

These are winning issues. Obama seems to be getting it. They need to pound on it from now till the elections in 2012 and all the Koch money in the world won't be able to save the Republicans.