The Great Renege: The GOP Roadmap to America’s Ruin Budget II

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The GOP's boy genius and Ayn Rand acolyte, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who gave us the GOP's Roadmap to America's Ruin Budget last year that proposed to privatize Medicare by turning it into a voucher program, is back today with his revised Roadmap to America's Ruin Budget II that reneges on the budget deal agreed to last August by setting discretionary spending lower than the agreed upon level.

As Jonathan Bernstein says, Paul Ryan's budget is not serious:

Paul Ryan’s budget for fiscal year 2013 has now been released. It isn’t that different, in basic concept, from last year’s version. It’s a public relations document, not a real, detailed budget. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s a perfectly legitimate strategy in an election-year with divided-government.

But there’s nothing “serious” about this document.

A few quick points:

* Ryan proposes major tax reform, with lower corporate and personal rates balanced out by repealing various tax deductions. The problem? Just like last year, he doesn’t tell anyone which deductions he’s going to eliminate. That’s not a budget proposal. That’s an aspiration. It’s very, very, easy to say you want tax reform. It’s very, very, difficult to do.

His budget would cut tax rates on all federal income taxpayers, especially the wealthy, and the danger is that he would pass the rate reductions without offsetting them by repealing deductions. All this means is a huge tax cut (mostly for the rich) and enormous deficits.

* Ryan is selling the fact that he’s reduced the number of tax brackets as “simplification.” But, as Matt Yglesias says, one has nothing to do with the other. Simplification comes from removing deductions, credits, and loopholes, which amounts to taking money away from people. That’s why it’s hard!

* The cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care programs — including repealing health care reform — are the bulk of the “savings” in Ryan’s budget. Without some sort of mechanism to control medical costs, all these cuts do is shift the burden from the government to individuals.

* The real tell in Ryan’s budget is that in the long run, he projects that all discretionary spending (and automatic spending outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) be reduced to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. Why does that matter? Because that category includes military spending, which as CBO reminds us has never dropped below 3 percent* of GDP since World War II. Since Ryan doesn’t want to cut the military, that would leave less than one percent of GDP — to fund the entire rest of the government.

In other words, Ryan’s long term proposal would basically shut down the federal government except for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the military.

* * *

The bottom line is that this is less of a budget or a blueprint than it is a partisan document designed to score partisan talking points in an election year. Of course, what Ryan believes are good talking points for Republicans — slashing spending, claims of lower deficits — may also provide Democrats with plenty of ammunition against House Republicans and Mitt Romney. But in budgetary terms, there’s no reason to take this thing seriously, or to give Ryan any points for courage.

Ezra Klein is equally dismissive of the seroiousness of the Ryan budget proposal. Klein’s initial take on the GOP Roadmap to America's Ruin Budget II:

Here’s the basic outline of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget in one sentence: Ryan’s budget funds trillions of dollars in tax cuts, defense spending and deficit reduction by cutting deeply into health-care programs and income supports for the poor.

At the end of his initial release, Ryan posts a table comparing his budget to the president’s budget. The single largest difference is in the tax section: Ryan raises $2 trillion less in revenue than the White House does. In the president’s budget, those revenues come mostly from increasing taxes on the wealthy. So that’s the first big gap between the two proposals: Under Ryan’s budget, revenue would be lower, and the distribution of taxes more regressive, than under Obama’s budget.

On the spending side, Ryan’s biggest cuts come from health-care programs. He eliminates the $1.5 trillion that the Affordable Care Act uses to purchase health insurance for 30 million Americans. Then he cuts Medicaid and related health programs by $770 billion — which is to say, by about a third. Medicare takes $200 billion in cuts on top of that.

* * *

Ryan’s next significant source of cuts is so-called “other mandatory.” Compared to the president’s budget, Ryan cuts $1.8 trillion from this category. Some of that might simply be an accounting difference: The president’s budget proposes to move infrastructure spending from the “discretionary” side of the budget to the “mandatory” side. Ryan might be moving that back, which isn’t, in and of itself, a spending cut. But beyond that, the main programs in “other mandatory” are low-income supports like refundable tax credits for the poor and food stamps. Ryan is cutting these quite substantially.

On a first pass, then, it appears that Ryan is offering a large tax cut, leaving seniors mostly alone for the next 10 years, increasing defense spending and cutting spending on programs for the poor.

Ryan prides himself on making tough choices. But where such choices need to be made for politically powerful constituencies — say, the tax breaks offered to the wealthy and the middle class, or the benefits offered to current seniors — Ryan punts. Changes for seniors don’t begin for a decade, the tax breaks Ryan will close to pay for his tax cuts go unnamed, and, of course, there are no tax increases at all. When such choices need to be made for programs that the poor depend on, however, Ryan is considerably more specific, and considerably more willing to inflict real budgetary pain on current beneficiaries.

So what it all boils down to is a blueprint for "class warfare" waged by the wealthy elite plutocrats against the "ninety-nine percent" of the rest of Americans.

As Greg Sargent says at The Plum Line, "The presumption of [Ryan's] fiscal seriousness really deserves serious scrutiny from reporters." But we all know that the oh so serious media villagers and Beltway bloviators will treat Paul Ryan oh so seriously as the GOP's boy genius, even though he is a complete fool.