“Ryan The Redistributionist”: More Income And Wealth For The Already Well Off
“Who is going to end up making all the money in the end if Obamacare continues to be in place?” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus growled Monday on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “It’s going to be the big corporations, right? And who gets screwed? The middle class.”
The Republican Party makeover is breathtaking. Now, suddenly, instead of accusing Democrats of being “redistributionists,” the GOP is posing as defender of the middle class against corporate America — and it’s doing so by proposing to do away with the most progressive piece of legislation in well over a decade.
Paul Ryan’s new budget purportedly gets about 40 percent of its $4.6 trillion in spending cuts over ten years by repealing Obamacare, but Ryan’s budget document doesn’t mention that such a repeal would also lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy that foot Obamacare’s bill.
According to an analysis by the non-partisan Tax Foundation, Obamacare redistributes income from the wealthy to the middle class. This is mainly because it hikes Medicare taxes on the top 2 percent (singles earning more than $200,000 and couples earning more than $250,000, including their investment income).
This year, for example, families in the top 1 percent will be paying about $52,000 more in Medicare taxes, on average, than they paid in 2012.
And where will the money go? Not to pay for the healthcare of poor families; most of them already receive Medicaid. The rich will be helping middle and lower-middle class Americans.
Obamacare also imposes some taxes and fees on insurance companies, drug makers, and manufacturers of medical devices. Here again, most of this will be borne by affluent Americans, who own most shares of stock (assuming the taxes and fees come out of corporate profits). And, again, beneficiaries are in the middle and lower-middle class.
In other words, Mr. Priebus has it exactly backwards. If Obamacare were repealed, who would end up making all the money? Big corporations and the wealthy. Who would get screwed? The middle class.
The rest of Ryan’s budget plan also runs counter to the new Republican thematic. Not only does it turn Medicare into vouchers (“premium support” in Republican-speak) whose value can’t possibly keep up with rising healthcare costs but it also dramatically reduces spending on education, infrastructure, and much else the middle class depends on.
Meanwhile, it redistributes upward, cutting the top tax rate for individuals down to 25 percent — a bigger tax cut for the top than even Mitt Romney proposed — and the corporate tax rate down to 25 percent, from 35 percent today.
Ryan would pay for these tax cuts by “closing tax loopholes,” but — where did we hear this before? — his budget doesn’t say which loopholes, or even hint at what it would do with rates on capital gains and dividends. Like Romney’s plan, it leaves all the heavy lifting to Congress.
The reality, of course, is that the only possible way Ryan could pay for his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would be to raise taxes on the middle class.
Don’t expect the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, or other Republicans reading from the same talking points, to admit any of this.
But if you look at what they’re proposing rather than what they’re saying, the GOP isn’t really interested in balancing the budget at all. It’s out to redistribute income and wealth — to the best-off Americans, from everyone else.
If any party is into redistribution, it’s the Republicans. And Paul Ryan is leading the charge.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, March 12, 2013
“From Tragedy To Farce”: Paul Ryan’s Obamacare “Repeal” Fails The Laugh Test And The Cry Test
Paul Ryan releases his budget plan today and the rollout and coverage of the document and its author represent a test for both Ryan and the media. I’m speaking specifically of its provisions regarding repealing Obamacare—or more precisely “repealing” Obamacare.
The test for Ryan is the extent to which his reputation as a straight-shooting budget wonk survived the ill-fated Romney campaign. Longtime Ryan observers know that that standing was more contrivance than reality (he cast a string of budget-busting votes during the Bush years before finding his inner fiscal warrior when a Democrat was in the White House, and his budgets have been less intellectually honest than advertised), but its durability showed it to be impervious to reality.
So the question now is whether that disconnect will endure? Because even before it’s fully unveiled Ryan’s budget fails both the laugh test and the cry test—both, as I said, regarding its treatment of the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare.
The laugh test regards the fundamental premise that Ryan’s budget anticipates the law’s repeal. Agree or disagree with the idea of repealing the law, you have to admit that it’s about as likely as Mitt Romney signing any bills into law any time soon.
National Journal‘s Jill Lawrence wrote an article yesterday looking at the political logistics of repeal, and they’re daunting, to put it mildly.
For the health-care law to be repealed before 2017, you’d have to believe that either Obama would, lamb-like, accept repeal of his signature domestic accomplishment, or that Republicans in 2014 would somehow win veto-proof two-thirds majorities in the House (290 votes if all 435 representatives are present, 58 more seats than the GOP held as of mid-March) and the Senate (67 votes, which would require a net gain of 22 seats).
For repeal to be feasible in 2017, a Republican would have to win the White House in 2016; Republicans would need to hold their House majority, and Republicans would need a filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate (15 more than they have now).
That latter scenario, Lawrence notes, also doesn’t take into account the day to day reality of the law in 2017—the practical problems of unwinding a system that will have become entrenched as people use it to get health coverage and so forth.
“The continuing assumption that Obamacare will be repealed, even with Obama reinstalled in the White House, is just one more factor that makes Ryan’s budget more wishful than credible,” Lawrence concludes. That’s putting it politely. The fact is that if we’re to take Ryan and his budget seriously, it should be grounded in reality, not in the wishful thinking of the right wing.
But Ryan’s Obamacare repeal also fails the cry test for being so intellectually dishonest as to make a noncynical citizen weep. You see Ryan’s repeal of Obamacare isn’t actually a full repeal of Obamacare. As the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein points out, “Ryan’s version of repeal means getting rid of all the parts that spend money to give people health insurance but keeping the tax increases and the Medicare cuts that pays for that health insurance.” So the $716 billion which Obamacare cut from Medicare and which Ryan and running mate Mitt Romney campaigned so hard against last year? Those cuts are in Ryan’s budget … just like they were in his previous budgets. He was, as TPM’s Sahil Kapur points out, against those cuts before he was for them before he was against them before he was for them. Or something.
As the Washington Post‘s Jonathan Bernstein notes, “This is no garden-variety flip-flop. It’s a fundamental decision to govern one way and campaign the exact opposite way.” It’s breathtaking, really.
And the governance/campaigning dichotomy is the more striking for the results of the campaign. You would think that after losing a race that the GOP insisted was a grand philosophical showdown, Republicans would attempt some sort of course correction other than reverting to their we say we hate it, but we’re happy to use it stance on Medicare cuts. Voters disapprove of both the party and its policies, and Ryan’s response is more of the same. To paraphrase his least favorite philosopher, his budgets seem to repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce.
The question remains whether Ryan will be called on it in news reporting or whether he will reclaim his reputation as honest-green-eye-shade guy. Stay tuned.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, 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 Obamacare Referendum”: Paul Ryan Is Using Shorthand Again In Selling Changes To Medicare
Did you know that on November 6, 2012, in conjunction with the national election, the United States also had a referendum on Obamacare that Republicans won? No, I didn’t, either, until Paul Ryan informed me of this, via this Think Progress report:
On Sunday morning, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) stopped by Fox News Sunday to preview his new budget, which will be released in full on Tuesday. As it had the past two years, this year’s version will call for massive cuts to social service programs, including food stamps, job training, Medicaid, and Medicare. Host Chris Wallace challenged Ryan on the viability of his plan, pointing out that he wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, and, “that’s not going to happen.”
Still, Ryan insisted that he and then-running mate Mitt Romney won the election on this issue because they “won the senior vote.”
Now I think we all understand that Ryan is using some shorthand here: many Democrats hoped, and Republicans feared, that Ryan’s budget, by proposing to change Medicare from an entitlement to publicly-provided health insurance into a premium-support system, would make his party vulnerable to losses it could not manage in its old-white-folks electoral base. Instead, by a variety of means (including over two years of insanely mendacious “death-panel” demagoguery about the impact of Obamacare on Medicare, and the systematic “grandfathering” of seniors from Ryan’s proposed Medicare changes), the GOP ticket managed to promote a health care message that nicely meshed with its overall pitch to old white folks that those people along with their atheist hippie allies were threatening to take away everything good virtuous retirees had worked so hard to secure for themselves, including Medicare (which they tend to regard as an earned benefit as opposed to Obamacare’s “welfare”).
I suppose it’s understandable that Ryan would view any success in selling big changes in Medicare to old folks would represent a political ten-strike, even if he’s now having to incorporate into his budget the same Medicare savings he implicitly attacked during the campaign as a token of Obamacare’s ultimate goal of sending seniors off to euthanasia camps. But it’s still bizarre that he’s touting an incumbent president’s re-election victory as a repudiation of his most important legislative accomplishment. It’s enough to give Dick Morris hope he can come back from ridicule and disgrace and claim he was right all along in predicting a big Romney-Ryan win.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 11, 2013
GOP Meltdown: Paul Ryan Doubles Down On His Losing Southern Strategy
After years of drifting apart, the jobs report and the stock market aligned this week, at least momentarily, as unemployment fell to the lowest level in over four years while the Dow and the S&P 500 continued to climb. We’re hardly out of the woods— the workforce participation rate remains stuck in neutral, overall growth remains sluggish, and worker income is still lagging behind the stock market gains—but there are signs of hope.
Yet some things don’t change. As the sputtering economy tries to get into gear, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan keeps talking about depriving hard working-taxpaying Americans of their retirement benefits, while offering nothing in return. This is the strategy that failed Mitt Romney and Ryan in November, and that alienates not just senior citizens, but voters over 45 — one of the few groups that’s so far remained reliably right-leaning as Asians, Hispanics, upscale Episcopalians, graduate degree holders and others have abandoned the shrinking GOP tent.
If the President’s electoral playbook called for uniting the rich and poor and treating the middle class as an afterthought, the Congressman has a more direct, if less palatable, approach: he simply attacks the middle class, by trying to gut their earned entitlement programs.
Harping on social issues and bashing the 47 percent, along with Mitt Romney’s antipathy on the auto bailout, is why Republicans got their clocks cleaned in the industrial Midwest last November, eking out just a 5-point plurality among non-college grad white voters in the Great Lakes (a group they won by 19 points nationally).
Apparently, the failed vice presidential candidate has not internalized these lessons. Instead, Ryan & Co. seems to be doubling down on 2012’s failed bet, and treating working Americans as little more than moochers. A year ago, Candidate Ryan called for voucher care instead of Medicare for Americans who were then 55 and under. Now, he is pressing the idea of setting the cut-off at 56 in an effort to force more Americans off of Medicare.
Polling data consistently show that voters disapprove of vouchers for seniors, and Ryan’s gambit may have even cost the Republicans Florida.
It’s no surprise, then, that the few standing members of the ever-dwindling cohort of centrist House Republicans are furious with Ryan’s latest suggestion.
Tenaciously, Ryan continues to press ahead. As an unidentified member told The Hill, the “big problem was that a lot of people have been telling people that it’s 55 and that’s the number . . . And if you change it, it’s going to make us look like [liars].”
The sole source of income for most Americans now turning 65 is their monthly Social Security check, which averages a little more than $1,200 and that is before paying $100 a month for Medicare Plan B.
The origins of Ryanism trace back to John C. Calhoun’s South and Herbert Hoover’s America—and that is a losing coalition. Indeed, for a southern-based party like the current iteration of the Republican Party to regain traction, it must reach out to and make inroads with the Northern working class. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both Bushes demonstrated that this task was doable. And yet, the current crop of Republicans just does not seem to get it. When the party of the South decides to go it alone, it fails.
Single women now rival white evangelicals as a voting bloc, and the former – which preferred Obama to Romney by a staggering two-to-one margin—is just not cottoning to the Republicans’ message on personal autonomy or anything else. With childrearing and marriage increasingly distinct and recent studies showing that the life expectancies of subgroups of women are declining regionally, even as life expectancy on the whole is rising, a call to replace a long-established safety net with faux personal responsibility is not a winning message.
Religion also has lost traction at the lower end of the income spectrum, particularly outside of the South. Rather, regular worship is now the province of married upper-income Americans, be they Republicans or Democrats. SMU families and their Scarsdale counterparts have more in common than either may realize.
If the Republicans stay on their present course, the fate of the old Democratic Party awaits them.
Between 1860 and 1932, the Democrats were a Southern-based party that managed to elect only two presidents in 18 elections.
And in fact, Ryan the Midwesterner does seem to look to the South. He supported relief for the victims of Katrina, but opposed aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. At least on disaster funding, the Congressman can whistle Dixie. The question for the Republican Party is whether it has the will to change. After losing five straight elections to FDR’s New Deal Coalition, the Republicans got their act together. Will history repeat itself?
One thing is for sure: Alienating your base when you need every vote that you can get is not smart politics.
By: Lloyd Green, The Daily Beast, March 10, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 