The Paul Ryan Budget: Why The GOP Is Still The Party Of The Rich
On Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wisc.) released the House GOP budget, which was greeted with no small amount of incredulity for being almost exactly the same as the economic platform that he and Mitt Romney ran on in 2012 — a platform that was roundly rejected by voters who decided to go with President Obama’s proposals instead. But Ryan, retreating into rhetorical vagueness, claims to see the matter differently. “Are a lot of these solutions very popular, and did we win these arguments in the campaign?” he said. “Some of us think so.”
As has been recounted in depth elsewhere, the Ryan budget would, in all likelihood, lead to massive cuts in aid for the poor, while dramatically reducing tax rates for the wealthy. It’s hard to say with any certainty because, as Dana Milbank at The Washington Post puts it, “There are so many blanks in Ryan’s budget that it could be a Mad Libs exercise.” However, an independent analysis last year of the Ryan-Romney plan, which is similar in structure, showed that the math doesn’t add up without draconian spending cuts and closing tax loopholes for the middle class.
The smart money is that Ryan doesn’t believe his plan has a chance of passing a Democratic-controlled Senate, let alone Obama’s desk. It changes Medicare into a voucher program, strips Medicaid of a guaranteed source of federal funding, and repeals ObamaCare. “In a real way the whole thing is a sop to rank and file conservatives who haven’t come to grips with that reality,” say Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo.
Indeed, Ryan may have angered the right wing by including the fiscal cliff deal to raise taxes on the wealthy as part of his budget projections. “You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage,” says Joshua Green at Bloomberg Businessweek, “but some conservatives don’t agree that Ryan’s budget is a shockingly right-wing ‘lightning rod’ proposal — they think it’s too liberal. And they’re deeply disillusioned by what they view as Ryan’s breaking faith with the conservative movement.”
But even if Ryan’s budget dies in Congress, the fact of the matter is that it is out there, outlining the Republican Party’s economic and fiscal priorities. “Budgets are statements of values,” writes Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic. “And with this budget, Ryan, once again, has revealed what Republican values are: Cutting taxes, primarily to benefit the wealthy, while savaging programs on which the poorest Americans rely.”
In the end, with Ryan’s budget, it will only be that much harder for the Republican Party to shed its image as the party of the rich, a reform that several conservative commentators have argued is absolutely essential to winning back power. Indeed, the Ryan budget shows that Republican officials are gambling that a makeover on immigration and social issues may be enough to turn the tide — a theory that Democrats will surely be glad to test in the next election.
By: Ryu Spaeth, The Week, March 12, 2013
“Grounded In Even Less Reality”: Paul Ryan’s Make-Believe Budget
If Rep. Paul Ryan wants people to take his budget manifestos seriously, he should be honest about his ambition: not so much to make the federal government fiscally sustainable as to make it smaller.
You will recall that the Ryan Budget was a big Republican selling point in last year’s election. Most famously, Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program. He offered the usual GOP recipe of tax cuts — to be offset by closing certain loopholes, which he would not specify — along with drastic reductions in non-defense “discretionary” spending.
If the plan Ryan offered had been enacted, the federal budget would not come into balance until 2040. For some reason, Republicans forgot to mention this detail in their stump speeches and campaign ads.
Voters were supposed to believe that Ryan was an apostle of fiscal rectitude. But his real aim wasn’t to balance the budget. It was to starve the federal government of revenue. Big government, in his worldview, is inherently bad — never mind that we live in an awfully big country.
Ryan and Mitt Romney offered their vision, President Obama offered his, and Americans made their choice. Rather emphatically.
Now Ryan, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, is coming back with an ostensibly new and improved version of the framework that voters rejected in November. Judging by the preview he offered Sunday, the new plan is even less grounded in reality than was the old one.
Voters might not have focused on the fact that Ryan’s original plan wouldn’t have produced a balanced budget until today’s high school students reached middle age, but the true deficit hawks in the House Republican caucus certainly noticed. They demanded a budget that reached balance much sooner. Hence Ryan’s revised plan, which claims to accomplish this feat of equilibrium within a decade.
It will, in fact, do nothing of the sort, because it appears to depend on at least one ridiculous assumption and two glaring contradictions. That’s for starters; I’m confident we’ll see more absurdities when the full proposal is released soon.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Ryan said his plan assumes that the far-reaching reforms known as Obamacare will be repealed. Host Chris Wallace reacted with open disbelief: “That’s not going to happen.”
Indeed, to take Ryan seriously is to believe that legislation repealing the landmark Affordable Care Act would be approved by the Senate, with its Democratic majority, and signed by Obama. What are the odds? That’s a clown question, bro.
As he did in the campaign, Ryan attacked Obama’s health reforms for cutting about $700 billion from Medicare over a decade, not by slashing benefits but by reducing payments to providers. Ryan neglected to mention that his own budget — the one he convinced the party to run on in 2012 — would cut Medicare by the same amount. Actually, by a little more.
This was hypocrisy raised to high art. How could anyone who claimed to be so very worried about the crushing federal debt blithely renounce $700 billion in savings? Ryan suggested Sunday that once Obamacare is repealed, this money can be plowed back into Medicare. Which, as you recall, will never happen.
While Ryan’s new budget assumes that Obamacare goes away, it also assumes that the tax increase on high earners approved in the “fiscal cliff” deal remains in place. “That’s current law,” he said, as if Obamacare were not.
Ryan’s sudden respect for a tax increase that had to be — metaphorically — crammed down Republicans’ throats is easily explained. He needs the $600 billion in revenue it produces to make his new fantasyland budget appear to reach balance.
Ryan is likely to reprise — and even augment — the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts he proposed last year for social programs. He indicated that he still believes Medicare should be voucherized, although he objects to the word and insists that what he advocates is “premium support.” And he asserted that Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor, is “reckless” — even as tea party-approved Republican governors such as Rick Scott of Florida announce their states’ participation.
From the evidence, Ryan cares less about deficits or tax rates than about finding some way to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. He has every right to hold that view. But it’s hard to take him seriously as long as he refuses to come clean about his intentions.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 11, 2013
“The B-Word”: Paul Ryan And The GOP Think Voters Are Dumb
Do House Republicans think voters are stupid? Why yes, yes they do, judging by the latest messaging the GOP is preparing to roll out in its big budget push. In the Republican view, simple voters find notions like “balance” confusing when it comes to issues of taxes, spending cuts, and the budget.
Politico has an article up raising the curtain on the Republican PR effort around the budget plan Rep. Paul Ryan will unveil next week. About halfway through, it contains this nugget on the Republican messaging strategy
“Democrats’ calls for a ‘balanced approach’ are clearly poll-tested, but it’s because people associate the word ‘balanced’ with a balanced budget — exactly the opposite of what Democrats’ budgets actually do,” the aide said. “Look for Republicans to go on offense on Democrats’ ‘balanced’ rhetoric by pointing out that there is nothing ‘balanced’ about Senate Democrats or the president’s budgets — in fact, they never balance at all.”
In short “balanced,” in the view emanating from Paul Ryan world, is some sort of magical word which simple voters are easily confused by. They hear “balanced” and—apparently incapable of absorbing the words around it in a given thought—just assume it means “balanced budget.” Now I get the concept of the low information voter—people who pay only passing attention to politics and so have details and often entire facts wrong—but this is an assumption of a low intelligence voter. You voters are too stupid to realize it, the messaging goes, but you really agree with us. You just need to understand that you’re easily confused by concepts like “balance.”
While we’re here let’s quickly reality-test the assertion, just for kicks. What do polls say about a balanced approach? Do voters really prefer Obama’s balanced way of dealing with deficits, and if so is it because they’re ensorcelled by the b-word, or do they get the substance? Conveniently, PolitiFact.com recently checked out the assertion that most voters agree with Obama’s approach. Their conclusion: “Obama said of a balanced approach to deficit reduction that ‘the majority of the American people agree with me and this approach, including, by the way, a majority of Republicans.’ … The majority of the polls we found support the president. We rate the president’s statement Mostly True.”
They didn’t check whether simpleton voters were just entranced by the “b-word,” but they did cite poll after poll after poll where the word wasn’t used but rather the concept—dealing with the budget deficit with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases—was explained, and majorities of voters favored it over a spending-cut-only approach. This is in line with the preponderance of polls which also show that most voters favor notions like compromise generally.
In short, “balance” polls well on the substance so Republicans are trying to neutralize the concept as a talking point by—in a Orwellian bit of redefinition—muddying the meaning of the word.
The rest of the Politico article does provide some insight into Ryan World. The budget won’t cut much more than last year’s, it says, even though it balances the federal books twice as fast as the last version (Ezra Klein explained why yesterday). And, reporters Jake Sherman and David Nather write, Ryan aides are unafraid of a backlash against the plan:
Politically, House Republicans think it carries next to no risk: Conservative truth-telling, they say, is in vogue. Two years after Ryan’s decision to transform Medicare into a voucher-like system, the party’s presidential ticket won seniors by 17 percentage points and House Republicans are still comfortably in the majority, even if Mitt Romney did lose the presidency with Ryan as his running mate.
What’s a presidential level thumping between friends? Especially when voters are such nimwits. What’s striking is what a hoary talking point this is. Has there been any point in the last, say, four years when House Republicans would have said that “conservative truth-telling” wasn’t in vogue? (And the notion of “conservative truth-telling” is especially funny when it comes to Paul Ryan and his budgets.)
A line much later in the Politico piece nicely sums things up: “All of this doesn’t mask a larger problem for Republicans: Their budget messaging stinks.”
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 7, 2013
“Simpson-Bowles Rebaked”: Playing To The Peanut Gallery
Simpson and Bowles have returned to the stage with a far worse plan than the one they had before. Their old formula sought $2.9 trillion in cuts and $2.6 trillion in revenues, while this new one that they touted at a Politico breakfast this morning seeks just $1.3 trillion in revenues and jacks the cuts up to $3.9 trillion.
The change is driven not so much by any kind of ideological shift or decision that we need more pain as it is driven, or so says Ezra Klein, by their apparent decision this time not to create their own new thing wholly from scratch irrespective of what the pols are saying, but to use Obama’s and Boehner’s latest offers as sort of starting points and guides:
This isn’t meant to be an update to Simpson-Bowles 1.0. Rather, it’s meant to be an outline for a new grand bargain. To that end, Simpson and Bowles began with Obama and Boehner’s final offers from the fiscal cliff deal. That helps explain why their tax ask has fallen so far: Obama’s final tax ask was far lower than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles plan, while Boehner’s tilt towards spending cuts was far greater than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles.
That said, while this plan doesn’t include more tax increases than Obama asked for, it does include significantly more than the $1 trillion in spending cuts than Boehner asked for — about $500 to $700 billion more, if I’m reading it right. In increasing the total deficit reduction, Simpson and Bowles have put the weight on the spending side of the budget.
But why would they shift so dramatically in the Republicans’ direction? Derek Thompson of The Atlantic sees two reasons:
First, there aren’t enough people in Washington who want to raise taxes on anybody making less than $250,000 to make the original $2.6 billion figure work. Second, Congress has demonstrated a fairly strong appetite for scheduling budget cuts.
Well, alas, he’s undoubtedly right about that. But really, this is not to be taken seriously. I’m not usually part of the Entitlement Chicken Little Caucus, because I concede that something needs to be done, provided that “something” is first and foremost to change the way Medicare reimbursements are made, which would save many trillions over the years, and then see what else needs to be done. But to be “responsible” people inside the Beltway you must thirst for seniors and future seniors and poor people and future poor people to sacrifice more. Simpson and Bowles are just playing to that peanut gallery, for which a Politico breakfast is the perfect audience.
One might generously say that Simpson and Bowles are just bowing to the extant political reality. But I thought their job was to suggest the most responsible way forward. They of all people should be standing up to GOP intransigence, not accepting it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 19, 2013
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