Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently told the Washington press corps that the Party of No would roll out its plan for governance "in late September." This would be just days before early voting begins in many states, including Arizona (October 7).
The media villagers and Beltway bloviators accepted this lie at face value knowing full well that their role is to provide media saturation for the new "GOP Contract on America" for this "October surprise." It is a kabuki dance in which everyone knows their part.
The truth is, we already know what the "GOP Contract on America" contains. It is the same old ideas that they have been repackaging in "new and improved" bottles for the past 30 years: faith based supply-side "trickle down" GOP economics designed to redistribute wealth upwards from America's middle class to the über-rich and investor class, i.e., the "two percenters." (Every media villager and Beltway bloviator you see on your TV machine is a "two percenter" — they stand to financially benefit. Keep this in mind).
The "economics guru" of the Party of No today is Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. This blog told you about his "Roadmap to America's Future (Ruin)," i.e., the basis for the new "GOP Contract on America" earlier this year. The GOP Road to Ruin; Update: The GOP Road to Ruin; GOP's Roadmap to America's Future (Ruin): Plutocracy on Steroids.
Keith Olbermann touched upon Congressman Ryan's "Roadmap to America's Future (Ruin)" in a segment of Countdown on Friday evening (rough trancript):
More hypocrisy under the GOP's ferocious desire to embrace tax cuts at all cost, usually your cost. The party's plan to do just that having been mapped out by congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the mainstream media's new visionary of purported "fiscal responsibility."
Mr. Ryan's claims don't hold up to anybody who actually checked the math on his numbers. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman revealing in the New York Times that Mr. Ryan aims to give the nation's richest 1%, 117% of his plan's total tax cuts, more than the total. How is that even possible? It's possible by raising taxes for 95% of the population, that's how. That's how you do it. It would be a tax hike. You would invert Robin Hood. You would steal from the poor and the middle class and give to the rich. Quite literally.
Thus, you make it appear as though the GOP's numbers add up. Mr. Ryan assumes zero growth in all domestic discretionary spending, basically everything that is not defense, which is actually a 25% cut in spending once you factor in inflation and population growth. From which programs would Mr. Ryan slash funding by one-quarter? He does not say. The facts so undeniable that one Republican lawmaker now admitting the truth about extending the Bush tax cuts, Senator George Voinovich saying the Bush tax cuts will not, can not, pay for themselves. He is retiring.
The Paul Krugman opinion referenced by Olbermann is The Flimflam Man – NYTimes.com:
One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.
Which brings me to the innovative thinker du jour: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”
But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.
Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”
But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.
And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.
And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.
Finally, let’s talk about those spending cuts. In its first decade, most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Mr. Ryan doesn’t say.
After 2020, the main alleged saving would come from sharp cuts in Medicare, achieved by dismantling Medicare as we know it, and instead giving seniors vouchers and telling them to buy their own insurance. Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the same plan Newt Gingrich tried to sell in 1995.
And we already know, from experience with the Medicare Advantage program, that a voucher system would have higher, not lower, costs than our current system. The only way the Ryan plan could save money would be by making those vouchers too small to pay for adequate coverage. Wealthy older Americans would be able to supplement their vouchers, and get the care they need; everyone else would be out in the cold.
In practice, that probably wouldn’t happen: older Americans would be outraged — and they vote. But this means that the supposed budget savings from the Ryan plan are a sham.
So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.
But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.
NB: The Neocon Washington Post is particularly troublesome. The Post teamed up with far-right deficit hawk Pete Peterson at the end of 2009 for content sharing at the Post. That's right, a Billionaire's think tank gets to publish its articles in the Post as news, which will be echoed by the Post's stable of conservative commentators (Broder, Will, Krauthammer, etc.) Everything the Post produces is tainted and suspect as a result. It comes perilously close to being propaganda. Calls Begin For Washington Post To End Content-Sharing Agreement With Pete Peterson-Funded “Fiscal Times”:
On the last day of 2009, the Washington Post ran an article titled “Support grows for tackling nation’s debt.” Its premise was that Congress was poised to impanel a budget deficit commission to examine the nation’s long-term debt and provide recommendations, citing analysis from the Concord Coalition and the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform. The byline included the words “The Fiscal Times”…
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Nowhere in that brief does it mention that the Fiscal Times is headed by Pete Peterson, the billionaire hedge fund manager and former Nixon Commerce Secretary who has been bankrolling a decades-long campaign to slash safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare (Incidentally, Peterson also funds both the Concord Coalition and the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform, the think tanks cited in the article). The Fiscal Times is his latest venture, which will produce articles about fiscal issues and essentially lease them to newspapers. The Washington Post recently entered into a content sharing agreement to run Fiscal Times stories on their news page. So a man dedicated to fraying the nation’s social safety net now has real estate on one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers, and if this initial story is any indication, will use it to push a deficit-mania agenda as a means to subvert legislative procedure and create momentum for major cutbacks. It’s essentially a buyout of a national news section.
Dozens of prominent economists have now written a letter to the Washington Post’s ombudsman, protesting the use of Fiscal Times stories in the news section and calling for an end to the content sharing agreement.