The GOP Budget and America's Future

[Nbadan]

The Ryan Plan is just another bottom to top redistribution of wealth, more of what we don't need..

Ryan would cut $770 billion over 10 years from Medicaid and other health programs for the poor, compared with President Obama’s budget. He takes an additional $205 billion from Medicare, $1.6 trillion from the Obama health care legislation and $1.9 trillion from a category simply labeled “other mandatory.”

Pressed to explain this magic asterisk, Ryan allowed that the bulk of those “other mandatory” cuts come from food stamps, welfare, federal employee pensions and support for farmers.

Taken together, Ryan would cut spending on such programs by $5.3 trillion, much of which currently goes to the have-nots. He would then give that money to America’s haves: some $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, compared with current policies, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

Ryan’s justification was straight out of Charles ens. He wants to improve the moral fiber of the poor. There is, he told the audience at the conservative American Enterprise Ins ute later Tuesday, an “insidious moral tipping point, and I think the president is accelerating this.” Too many Americans, he said, are receiving more from the government than they pay in taxes.

http://special.registerguard.com/web...-cuts.html.csp

nothing wrong with streamlining things, but not raising taxes and even lowering taxes now is insane..

[Winehole23]

Matt Continetti provides the most ridiculous spin of the day:

The template for the Ryan budget, the Roadmap for America’s Future, became an election issue in 2010 when the president singled out Ryan for attack. That did not stop Republicans from winning a huge victory in the fall. Many of the candidates linked to the Roadmap, including Marco Rubio in senior-laden Florida, came under heavy fire. Rubio won, and he was not alone. Nationwide, the Republican share of the senior vote went from 48 percent in 2008 to 58 percent in 2010.

The Republican tilt among seniors was driven almost entirely by the GOP’s successful use of a tactic that they have since derided as “Mediscare,” and Republicans benefited even more from this because of the above-average midterm turnout of voters 65+. One of the main Republican attacks on the health care legislation focused on its cuts to Medicare, and Republican leaders demagogued those cuts for all they were worth. The changes that the ACA made to Medicare were among its most unpopular provisions, elderly voters were the most opposed to the ACA of any age group, and Republicans in Congress did their best to exploit that unpopularity. Prior to the midterms, Republican leaders were running away from Ryan and his proposals as quickly as they could. The political lesson to be drawn from this is that making significant changes to Medicare is a major political liability. En lement reform is necessary, and Ryan might be on the right track, but there is no use pretending that it is not dangerous for the party that attempts it. Using the 2010 results as evidence to the contrary is preposterous.

http://www.theamericanconservative.c...erms-prove-it/

[boutons_deux]

Romney Is (Literally) Correct About Ryan


Mitt Romney defends the House Republican budget, saying it "does not balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the elderly." Steve Benen objects, pointing out that more than 60 percent of the budget cuts come from the small fraction of federal spending targeted to the poor. But Romney is actually right about this: the Ryan budget does not balance the budget on the backs of the poor. That's because it doesn't balance the budget at all.

Or, at least, it doesn't balance the budget until 2040, and this is assuming it can produce trillions upon trillions of dollars by eliminating unspecified tax deductions, and will reduce the non-en lement portion of the federal budget to less than what Romney wants to spend on defense alone.

So possibly this is one of those carefully-crafted Romney statements designed to be technically correct but in a fashion his audience could not anticipate.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03...bout-ryan.html

[Winehole23]

Bruce Bartlett:

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Column...ity.aspx#page1