Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
It appears that the crazy train has left the station. The GOP's alleged boy genius, Ayn Rand fanboy Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has offered his dystopian Randian vision for America's future.
But Ryan's radical vision is not the most radical. There are crazy people in the House GOP who are even more radical, who don't think that the Flimflam Man does enough damage.
The Republican Study Committee (RSC) has jumped into the fray with their own budget proposal. Think Progress reports, The Most Radical Proposals In The House Conservative Budget:
The Republican Study Committee (RSC), helmed by Chairman Rep. Steve
Scalise (R-LA) released an even more radical plan than the official
House Republican budget, which disproportionately guts programs for low-income Americans while giving even bigger tax cuts
to the wealthiest Americans. The RSC budget purports to eliminate the
deficit in just 4 years and limit total discretionary spending to $950 billion,
the lowest level since 2008. In order to achieve this goal, the RSC
cuts non-defense spending by $6 billion over four years, while the GOP
budget slows spending growth over the same period.
Here are 5 of the most extreme proposals in the budget from the RSC,
of which roughly two-thirds of Republicans in Congress are members:
1. Raise the retirement age to 70. The RSC budget
would delay eligibility for Medicare and Social Security benefits to age
70, while calculating cost-of-living adjustments using chained CPI,
which cuts benefits by $1300 a year for each recipient. Raising the eligibility age for Medicare would force seniors to pay $11.4 billion in extra costs.
2. Reinstate Bush tax cuts. Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have greatly exacerbated income inequality
while doing little for economic growth. As such, President Obama
allowed the tax cuts for people making over $450,000 a year to expire at
the end of 2012. The RSC would reintroduce those tax cuts, eliminating $823 billion in revenue and adding $950 billion back into the deficit over ten years.
3. Freeze all spending for four years. In order to
meet the fantastical goal of eliminating the deficit in four years, the
RSC budget would cap all discretionary spending to $950 billion,
allegedly close to 2008 spending levels but actually around $100 billion
less when adjusted for inflation. It would then freeze all discretionary spending at that level until 2017, when the budget would supposedly be balanced.
4. Eliminates the National Labor Relations Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Public Broadcasting.
The RSC budget entirely does away with the NLRB, which oversees labor
practices, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the budget
states is a “government-supported media outlet” against the principles
of “a free society,” and the National Endowment for the Arts, which is
“an inappropriate function of the federal government and is nowhere
justified in the Constitution.”
5. Repeal Obamacare. The House has wasted more than 30 votes trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, undeterred by public opinion
or a Supreme Court decision. Still, the RSC budget would repeal
Obamacare, kicking more than 30 million Americans off their insurance
and once again allowing insurance companies to discriminate against
people with pre-existing conditions.
The New York Times today gave op-ed space to Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) to promote this far-right radical vision. Paul Ryan’s Ax Isn’t Sharp Enough:
THE latest budget proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan, called “The
Path to Prosperity,” is anything but. It fails to seriously address
runaway government spending, the most pressing problem facing our
nation. I cannot vote for something that would trick the American people
into thinking that Congress is fixing Washington’s spending problem,
when in actuality we’d just be allowing it to continue without end.
Supporters of the “Path to Prosperity,” including many of my fellow
Republicans, say that we have to stop spending money we don’t have, an
idea I promote every chance I get. But under the proposal by Mr. Ryan of
Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, the federal
government would continue to spend more than it will this year.
Spending would grow by an average of 3.4 percent annually, only slightly
less than the rate under President Obama’s plan, which is 5 percent a
year. After 10 years — Mr. Ryan’s target for eliminating the deficit —
the “Path to Prosperity” will have spent $41 trillion, when the
president’s plan would allow spending of $46 trillion. My party’s de
facto position has become “we’re increasing spending, but not as much as
the other guy.” That’s not good enough.
Just reducing growth in spending does almost nothing. We have to dig
deeper and make profound cuts now. We cannot continue to assume that
future Congresses will do our dirty work for us.
We ought to get rid of certain federal departments and agencies,
stopping only to shift the role of governing back to the states, where
it belongs. The Departments of Education and Energy, for example, are
two bloated bureaucracies that we don’t need; their core functions would
be absorbed by the states through block grants, saving taxpayers at least $500 billion over the next decade.
Constitutionally speaking, the federal government should not have a role
in K-12 public education anyway. Overpaid Washington bureaucrats
shouldn’t be deciding how to provide for teachers and students, whose
own state and local governments are better equipped to understand their
needs. A Heritage Foundation study showed that in 2010, the average
salary of an Education Department employee reached $103,000 — nearly
double the average public-school teacher’s salary. Let’s phase out a
large portion of the department’s roughly $70 billion budget. We can
transfer the remaining dollars directly to the states, where they will
be used more wisely.
Let’s also abolish the Energy Department, which is one of the biggest
federal culprits responsible for the mismanagement of taxpayer dollars.
Without unending government backing, the Energy Department would have
ceased to exist long ago because of its ineffectiveness, corruption and
poor investment strategy. Taxpayers are now on the hook for hundreds of
millions of squandered dollars because of failed federal loans given to
green companies like Solyndra and Fisker Automotive.
The only constitutionally necessary service provided by the Energy
Department is regulation of the nation’s stockpile of atomic weapons, a
function that can return to the Department of Defense. Eliminating this
bureaucracy would be a large, permanent spending cut, and restore
energy-related venture capitalism to its natural home, the private
sector.
Our spending crisis is so severe that we can’t stop at these two
departments — there are more areas to cut. For example, we should also
phase out the federal highway financing system and allow states to keep
their own gas tax receipts. States would then be free to determine their
own transportation needs and explore creative funding for roads like
public-private partnerships.
As a family doctor for more than 30 years, I understand that we must
look for savings in our health care system too. I recently co-sponsored
legislation that would convert Medicaid and the Children’s Health
Insurance Program into state-managed programs through a single federal
block grant. This would save approximately $2 trillion over 10 years by
capping federal funding at 2012 levels for the next 10 years and giving
states an incentive to seek out and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
The government agency closest to the consumer can most efficiently
manage taxpayer dollars.
We’re not done. We must repeal Obamacare — including the associated
taxes, which the Ryan budget leaves intact by assuming the enactment of
tax reform later on. We’ll replace it with a market-based health care
system devoid of government involvement and managed by patients and
their doctors, a plan I have described in my Patient Option Act.
If we get government out of the way and put Medicare in patients’ hands
by increasing contribution limits to health savings accounts, it will
transform Medicare into a more flexible premium assistance program.
To cap all this off — literally — I have proposed a balanced-budget
amendment that would force Congress to stick to the principle of not
spending more than we take in. Passing a constitutional amendment is no
easy task. While it’s a large undertaking, I’ll continue to fight for
its passage. Just a few weeks ago, the House put enough pressure on the
Senate to force it to produce a budget — something Senator Harry Reid of
Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, hadn’t attempted in over four
years. If we keep up the pressure, we’ll continue to see results.
Rather than nibbling around the edges as the Ryan proposal does, we must
do all of this and much more now. There is a “Path to Prosperity,” but
Mr. Ryan’s budget isn’t it. The only way to protect our nation’s
financial future as well as our citizens’ liberty is to stop the
outrageous spending in Washington and permanently reduce the size of our
overreaching federal government.
Unbelievably, this guy is an M.D. (i don't know how that is possible). You may remember Rep. Paul Broun for some of his other views. Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA): An Anti-Science Legislator Who Serves on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology:
Rep. Paul Broun is the chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on
Investigations and Oversight. Broun doesn’t just think that the
“scientific community” has perpetrated a hoax about climate change—he
also thinks scientists have made up lies about evolution, the age of
planet Earth, the Big Bang Theory, and embryology…and that those lies
come “straight from the pit of Hell.”
During a speech that Broun gave at the 2012 Sportsman’s Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia on September 27th, he said this:
God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I
was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all
that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. It’s lies to try to keep me
and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need
a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found
out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth.
I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe
it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.
In his speech, Broun claimed that as a legislator he takes direction from the Bible:
And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s
handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives
individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it
teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society.
And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the Holy Bible as being
the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll
continue to do that.
He continued:
Our Constitution was written by men that believed that! And in
fact, the Constitution’s written on Biblical principles — in fact, the
three branches of government come right from Isaiah, Isaiah 33:22, go
look it up!