The GOP budget: This is not a serious governing party

The New York Times summary says it all: “The Republicans’ proposed budget partly privatizes Medicare, turns Medicaid into block grants to the states, repeals the Affordable Care Act and reaches balance in 10 years.”

This is the same bullshit budget from the GOP’s alleged boy genius, Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan, every year since 2011. It is pouring old wine into a new bottle.

The GOP is not a serious governing party. It is consumed by ideological  extremism, trapped in the epistemic closure of its conservative media entertainment complex feedback loop. The GOPropagandists in the right-wing noise machine dictate public policy.

The Times reports, House Republican Budget Overhauls Medicare and Repeals the Health Law:

House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled a proposed budget for 2016 that partly privatizes Medicare, turns Medicaid into block grants to the states, repeals the Affordable Care Act and reaches balance in 10 years, challenging Republicans in Congress to make good on their promises to deeply cut federal spending.

The House proposal leans heavily on the policy prescriptions that Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin outlined when he was budget chairman.

Paul Ryan’s successor, Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, promised on Monday “a plan to get Washington’s fiscal house in order, promote a healthy economy, protect our nation and save and strengthen vital programs like Medicare.”

“We must destroy the village in order to save it.”

Democrats — and those Republicans who support robust military spending — will not see Mr. Price’s “Balanced Budget for a Stronger America” in those terms. Opponents plan to hammer Republican priorities this week, as the House and Senate budget committees officially begin drafting their plans on Wednesday, and then try to pass them through their chambers this month.

On Monday, President Obama tried to get ahead of the debate by criticizing Republican plans to abide by strict domestic and military spending caps. [aka the GOP budget sequestration]

“I can tell you that if the budget maintains sequester-level funding, then we would actually be spending less on pre-K to 12th grade in America’s schools in terms of federal support than we were back in 2000,” the president said in a speech to the Council of the Great City Schools. “The notion that we would be going backward instead of forwards in how we’re devoting resources to educating our kids makes absolutely no sense.”

But Republican aides said they have weathered those attacks ever since Mr. Ryan released his first budget plan in 2011. They said the easiest way to prevail in the House, at least, is to put forward the budget plan most House members have voted on multiple times.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.”

And then there is the outright fraud of “dynamic scoring” that I warned you about earlier this year. All of the GOP budget projections are faith based supply-side “trickle down” GOP economics fantasy:

The House Republican budget says it would reach a $13 billion surplus in 2024 and a $33 billion surplus in 2025. But it does so by projecting that increased economic growth related to its policy prescriptions will generate $147 billion in additional tax revenues for the government over the next 10 years. Without that so-called dynamic scoring, the budget will never come into balance.

Congressional budgets do not have the force of law and are largely advisory documents, but they represent the broadest statement of governing philosophy each year and set overall spending levels for the coming fiscal year.

The GOP governing philosophy is that “we are not a serious governing party.”

Josh Barro of the Times‘ The Upshot makes the point: Tax Cuts Still Don’t Pay for Themselves:

Last week, I wrote about the new tax plan from Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Mike Lee as the “Puppies and Rainbows Tax Plan,” because it’s a plan that includes something for everyone. It calls for big tax credits for middle-income families with children, corporate tax cuts and complete elimination of the capital gains tax — and as a result would cost trillions of dollars in revenue over a decade.

Or would it?

The Tax Foundation released a report last week arguing the Rubio-Lee plan would generate so much business investment that, within a decade, federal tax receipts would be higher than if taxes hadn’t been cut at all. According to William McBride, the chief economist at the right-of-center think tank, the senators’ plan would add 15 percent to gross domestic product and 13 percent to wages.

If it were not for right-wing billionaires who prop up these right-wing think tanks, these fraudulent economists would not have a job. They are paid to produce propaganda.

I discussed the Tax Foundation report with 10 public finance economists ranging across the ideological spectrum, all of whom said its estimates of the economic effects of tax cuts were too aggressive. “This would not pass muster as an undergraduate’s model at a top university,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University professor whom the Tax Foundation specifically encouraged me to call.

Of course, a lot of flawed think tank reports are released every year. This one matters because the House adopted a rule in January that requires “dynamic scoring” of tax bills: analyses (such as the Tax Foundation’s) that give legislation credit for its likely macroeconomic effects, including any rise in tax receipts due to economic growth.

* * *

The key question is, will the Congressional Budget Office, implementing dynamic scoring under new leadership chosen by Republicans, be more responsible than the Tax Foundation and other conservative think tanks in choosing its assumptions?

* * *

To be clear, Senator Rubio and Senator Lee have not claimed their tax plan would pay for itself. Mr. Rubio was quoted in Bloomberg as saying, “I’ve never believed that tax reform by itself should pay for itself.” While the Congressional Budget Office has not used dynamic scoring as the basis for official cost estimates in the past, it has provided informational estimates of major fiscal proposals’ effects on the economy, showing considerably more modest effects than the Tax Foundation finds, and with a significant range of uncertainty around those estimates.

* * *

Tax rate cuts in the past have not spurred much if any growth,” said William Gale, co-director at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a former staff member at the Council of Economic Advisers under George H.W. Bush.

Back to this fraudulent GOP budget:

House Budget Committee members previewed their plans in an unusual, campaign-style video on Monday. The plan envisions a remaking of the federal government. Future recipients of Medicare would be offered voucherlike “premium support” [coupons] to pay for private insurance rather than government-provided health care [that’s privatization that the GOP claims it is not doing, because they think you are stupid.]

Spending on Medicaid would be cut substantially over 10 years, with the money turned into block grants to state governments, which in turn would have much more flexibility in deciding how it is allocated. [Which in Arizona means a Tea-Publican legislature would reduce who is eligible for the program and eliminate coverage for medical care.]

The budget “repeals all of Obamacare,” Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, said the same day the Obama administration announced that the law had provided coverage to 16.4 million previously uninsured people. Data on Health Law Shows Largest Drop in Uninsured in 4 Decades, the U.S. Says .

[Note that there is not an equivalent GOP alternative, after five years of promising one. The GOP healthcare plan is essentially “perhaps they should die and decrease the surplus population.”]

To placate advocates of the military who say strict budget caps are hurting national defense, the House budget adds “emergency” war spending through the “overseas contingency operations” account, which does not count against the spending limits.

In other words, the GOP budget sequestration remains in place, but if they want to get their war on with Iran, they will use the “supplemental budgets” that George W. Bush used to hide the actual cost of his Iraq war. And this Congress will not raise taxes to pay for it any more than the last Tea-Publican Congress did, which is the deficit spending they all claim to oppose.

But wait, there’s more from the evil GOP bastards in this budget:

The House budget would also repeal much of Mr. Obama’s 2010 law regulating Wall Street financial firms. It would cut food stamps significantly, converting them into a “state flexibility fund” to be administered by state governments. And it would cut the size of Pell Grants, the popular federal financial aid program for higher education.

The budget will also include language that orders members of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee to draft a “fairer, simpler tax code,” said Representative Todd Rokita, Republican of Indiana.

And it will include parliamentary language — called “reconciliation” — aimed at allowing legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act to pass the Senate with a simple majority. If that bill is passed, it will still be subject to a presidential veto.

Conservative groups insist Republicans must keep their promise and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The modern-day Tea-Publican Party is a radical extremist insurgency that has declared war on the American people. Tea-Publicans represent a clear and present danger to the health, safety and welfare of the American people. The only appropriate response is for the American people to declare war on the Tea-Publican Party. This radical extremist insurgency must be defeated and removed from power. Enough is enough!