Sudden End to Credibility of Ryan’s Budget Plan
A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.
Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut. …NYT
It’s a big put-down, and it comes from the conservatives’ most credible budget guy: David Stockman. Stockman was, of course, the famous director of Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget.
In the Ryan plan, there is no effort to deal with “too big to fail” and no call for a return to Glass Steagall.
Stockman tears Paul Ryan’s pretensions into shreds. “Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt,” Stockman writes in an editorial. “Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to ‘job creators’ (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.”
… Hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.
Like his new boss, Mr. Ryan has no serious plan to create jobs. America has some of the highest labor costs in the world, and saddles workers and businesses with $1 trillion per year in job-destroying payroll taxes. We need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.
The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station. ...NYT
Stockman started going after Ryan last year when he told Tim Dickinson in an interview: “Ryan takes out the ax and goes after the very small part of the budget that’s either discretionary spending or means-tested programs for the poor – which is the last thing you ought to cut, not the first thing. That just doesn’t make any sense. It can’t work. And it simply exacerbates class warfare within the fiscal debate.”
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Republicans are worried about the attention to Ryan’s budget plan.
Republicans strategists are worried that Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) addition to the presidential ticket will cost their party House and Senate seats this fall.
Their concern: Democrats will successfully demonize Ryan’s budget plan, which contains controversial spending cuts and changes to Medicare.
“There are a lot races that are close to the line we’re not going to win now because they’re going to battle out who’s going to kill grandma first, ObamaCare or Paul Ryan’s budget,” said one Republican strategist who works on congressional races. “It could put the Senate out of reach. In the House it puts a bunch of races in play that would have otherwise been safe. … It remains to be seen how much damage this causes, but my first blush is this is not good.” …The Hill
Cross posted from Prairie Weather
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i know this isnt not the jest of the article, but….
We need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax.
yes we do!
I agree, means testing is needed, but it should at least return what folks have contributed with a fair rate of return.
The conservative bastion known as Forbes does a good job of attacking his Medicare plan as well today.
From the little I’ve read about alternate tax proposals like Flat Tax, and Value added tax, and consumption taxes, they still heavily favor the upper income brackets, in ways that I cannot discuss now, because I don’t have any solid facts about them handy. Suffice it to say that many of us will save a bundle by always buying second hand and becoming frequent customers of the Salvation Army and Goodwill. However, I was once asked to fill out a survey about my thoughts on such proposals, and even the 1 to 10 scale of approval, listed 1 as the most favorable and 10 as the least–completely opposite and counter-intuitive from other surveys and polls I have taken.
I can’t add anything profound about tax reforms, but, I am glad that Ryan seems to be getting flak from every direction about his faulty proposals. But what worries me as a Democrat, is not that his facts and figures may be in doubt, or whether any of his proposals are really solid, but rather that, the man talks excitedly and seems to totally believe everything he says. He is also endowed with the political blessing of having charm and charisma. I have no doubt that these qualities will make him preferable to many people who judge candidates on the basis of their personas and how energetic or sincere they come across as. Although many of his economic proposals may not hold enough water as a bird bath, I think Romney made a shrewd choice anyway.
As it is, Romney and Ryan are a flash of white teeth and smiling faces. They may impress some voters as really having “what it takes” to end this recession.
Personally, I find it amusing how the very same Republicans who eagerly criticized Democrats for not making cuts to Medicare and social programs, are now jumping on the bandwagon that says Obama wants to cut too much.
Apparently Mr. Ryan is shedding crocodile tears about ever supporting TARP in first place, and lamenting about how he was so wrong but has now seen the light.
Another common theme rising from the Republican masses is that, although Obama is a nice guy, he has miserably failed at getting us our of one of our deepest recessions in only 4 years. Apparently when he saw the entire economy headed towards the yawning abyss, he was at fault for thinking he had to spend money to prevent disaster. Even though President Bush started the TARP program and gave all of us a share of his 70 billion dollar shot in the arm, as a stimulus, Obama is supposed to have had the courage to let the banks fail and let survival oriented executive bite and claw their ways back to the top–absolute social Darwinist theory designed solely to make a few deserving specimens richer and richer.
To me, it seems that once Wall street pulled the rug out from under Main Street, and we were threatened with an all consuming economic void, Obama had no option but to spend great amounts of money to counteract such a dire economic threat. Are we really supposed to believe that Republicans, in all their wisdom would have let everything fail, except for a grand survival of the fittest opportunity?
Criticizing the President for responding to a looming crisis by attempting to take neccessary steps to insulate our economy against going ever deeper and steeper nose dive, by committing monetary assistance, is like criticizing FDR, for preparing for War after Pearl harbor–but once the ball is set in motion the POTUS has no choice but to use all his resources to slow it down. He must declare War, and he must realize that the capital to spearhead the War industry, is necessary and unavoidable. I doubt any other President would really have done much differently than employ stimulus and Tarp funds.
So here come these energetic Robber Barons like Ryan and Romney flashing their 23-and-a-half percent-fewer-cavity-smiles and promising to save the day.
The risk to Democrats is not that they have any good ideas or compassionate understanding of the middle class–the risk is that they possess the smarts to convince Americans that they do. God help us all!
In addition to everything else wrong with Ryan, we now have Romney (in his new attempted firebreathing incarnation) accusing Obama of running a campaign of hate and division! Given the history of the GOP and it’s standard bearers this is stunning in it’s hypocrisy.
Petew, the vat would not be an alternative tax. It would be an additional. It can be worked so it does not hurt the poor… Such as lower rates for food ect.
It is hard to see how a VAT could be worked so that it doesn’t hurt the poor. It is a consumption tax and the poor spend virtually all of their income on consumption.
The main reason to lie in a campaign is because the truth will hurt you. The working mantra of the GOP for more than thirty years.
The Ryan budget is not intended to balance the Federal government’s budget. The truth of the matter is that there are very good reasons not to balance the federal government’s budget, not the least of which is that we are still in a stagnation after the recession and on the edge of sliding back into recession again. If we have learned anything it’s that these are not the times to impose austerity.
The intent of the Ryan budget is to solidify the Republican and conservative meme that it is a moral hazard for the government to offer too much help to the poor and the middle class, and not a moral hazard and in fact a moral obligation to run the government for the benefit of the wealthy. That the poor and the middle class should not be given too much money so that they have the incentive to work harder and that the rich must be given ever increasing amounts of money so that they have the incentive to work harder.
The Ryan budget doesn’t make any sense because the rational behind the Ryan budget doesn’t make any sense.
The rational behind the Ryan budget doesn’t make any sense but he and his supporters sure do love the hell out of it!
In addition they are usually so exhausted (physically and emotionally) from struggling to make ends meet they have neither the time nor energy to make their complaints known. This of course plays into the hands of those who believe this sort of neofeudalism is a good thing. Who will speak for these people? In days of old it was the democrats, now it seems they have no voice at all.
P, ” He is also endowed with the political blessing of having charm and charisma. I have no doubt that these qualities will make him preferable to many people who judge candidates on the basis of their personas and how energetic or sincere they come across as.”
Thanks for mentioning Obama.
Yes dduck,
Obama does also possess a great deal of charisma, but I am not supporting him because he can sing with soul, or because he has such a toothy smile. Instead I think he has really given his all to making changes that benefit the middle class, and is absolutely correct that this upcoming election is about two different visions of what Americans stand for. But I agree that often how a candidate looks (no matter for which party) can allow him to win a popularity contest, but still make him or her a lousy President. I think Obama is a cut above that. Unfortunately, one of his great hindrances is a Republican party pledged to make him fail and vote against everything he proposes–unless the fallout from negative PR forces them to comply.
I might also add that I never thought he could magically change Washington and Capital hill into Camelot utopia overnight, or even in 4 years. I would bet that all Presidents feel that their business is undone even if they serve a full two terms.
Your words say it all.