WASHINGTON — There’s a reason Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been pushing the Heritage Foundation mercilessly on their show for months and it was to pave the way for Paul Ryan and his Heritage Foundation hallucinations.
But some of the savings in Ryan’s budget will be difficult to realize and others are ambiguous; further, it is not clear if his economic or revenue assumptions are credible. – The National Journal
The Heritage Foundation’s ideological shop is the driving engine for Rep. Ryan’s math, who in using the Heritage Center for Data Analysis as his cover conjured up the stamp of right-wing approval for his “Path to Prosperity.”
It’s going to solve all of our debt problems and even make parents able to stand their teenagers.
Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.
A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year. – The GOP Path to Prosperity, by Rep. Paul Ryan
With the Heritage Foundation helping to package Ryan’s “GOP Path to Prosperity” what could possibly go wrong?
But Mr. Ryan and his backers are a great example of not thinking about tomorrow and instead pressing your ideology today, because you know you’ve got opponents who won’t call you out publicly, but whose default reaction is to always cave.
It helps that many Americans simply can’t do the math.
Here’s a snippet of an article from over at Politico that I think paints a perfect tableau of what Obama, Reid, Boehner and the Republicans face tomorrow when they meet and continue to hash out the budget before Friday.
[…] There were hints over the weekend that Obama could call Boehner’s bluff and refuse to sign another stopgap spending bill absent a deal this week. But having stayed on the sidelines so long, it could be too late for the president to intervene so forcefully and achieve a settlement before Friday.
Reid’s own hand is weaker because of the divisions in his caucus that have led him to avoid Senate floor votes — therefore robbing him of a record to point to against the House. Boehner again hammered home this point Monday, but he is also vulnerable, walking a narrow line between placating the right wing and achieving the legislative goals he wants as speaker. […]
Pres. Obama, Democrats and progressives don’t know how to do what Ryan and the Tea Party are pushing Boehner to do. Instead, Democrats game out the politics, ignore their own principles in order to get a deal at any cost, which always includes Obama caving in to what the Republicans and the right-wing want, because Pres. Obama would rather do anything than stand on a line and make the Democratic case for the budget the Democrats want and know is better for the American people. Then there’s that other problem: that progressives on Obama’s long lackey list think he knows best even when he’s silent.
What’s continually frustrating is that Democrats aren’t making their side of the argument, which includes revenue streams to raise taxes on mil-billionaires, while also rolling back the Bush tax cuts, then going into the Pentagon budget, including accelerating our exit from Afghanistan and Iraq, adding a tariff on imported Chinese goods, ending farm subsidies and corporate welfare, too.
I’ve never seen anything like what’s going on with this budget, never mind that Rep. Paul Ryan hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve such limelight. That he’s getting away with it is monumentally embarrassing. Seriously, ending Medicare in ten years, then gutting Social Security? Because a voucher system is code for sticking seniors in a system where they try to pay for private insurance with a coupon that doesn’t cover the costs. Ryan thinks math doesn’t impact living, breathing people. Not only is what he’s suggesting horrific public policy, but it will devastate the lives of scores of people if it’s enacted and cause retirement plan managers to jump off roofs. But at least Ryan is embracing SecDef Gates Pentagon recommendations, even if he’s calling them “inefficiencies” instead of long overdue defense cuts. After all, he doesn’t want the heads of his own caucus to explode en masse.
Meanwhile, as Rep. Paul Ryan unloads his hocus pocus Democrats in the House are talking about offering up a alternative budget to counter him. First they have to finish their tea.
Taylor Marsh is a political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics, foreign policy, and women in power. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.