Upstream | April 05, 2011 | 47 comments

Paul Ryan’s budget in summary

source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/paul-ryans-budget-in-summary/2011/03/28/...

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It occurs to me that I haven’t yet posted a simple summary of what House Budget Commitee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget does. So before I comment on it further, let’s do that.

To begin with, you can download his budget here (PDF). But the best way to understand it is probably to break it down by categories. One thing that surprised me when reading through the budget was just how much Ryan was actually proposing to do here. For instance: There’s no obvious reason that repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law should be in the budget, yet there it is. Anyway, onto the summary:

1) Discretionary spending

a) Non-defense discretionary: Brings spending back to pre-2008 levels and freezes it there for five years.

b) Defense-related discretionary: Echoes Obama’s budget request in accepting the $78 billion in “savings” that Defense Secretary Robert Gates identified and going no further. I put “savings” in quotation marks because it’s really a reduction in the growth rate that Gates previously requested.

2) Financial system

a) Financial regulation: Repeals Dodd-Frank.

b) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “This budget . . . proposes eventual elimination of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, winding down their government guarantee and ending taxpayer subsidies. It supports increasing the guarantee fees Fannie and Freddie charge lenders in order to bring private capital back, shrinking their retained portfolios, and enacting various measures that would bring transparency and accountability to the GSEs.”

3) Safety net

a) Medicaid: Converts federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant that’s indexed for inflation and population growth. To offer some context, health-care costs often increase at twice the rate of inflation or more.

b) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Better known as food stamps, SNAP gets the Medicaid treatment: block grants indexed for inflation and population growth.

c) Pell Grants: Cut back to 2008 levels, wiping out recent increases.

d) Health-care reform: Repeals the Affordable Care Act.

4) Retirement security

a) Medicare: Privatizes Medicare. Future beneficiaries will choose from a menu of private options. They won’t have the choice of the standard Medicare plan. Wealthier beneficiaries will get a small voucher and poorer beneficiaries will get a larger voucher. Vouchers grow at GDP+1%, whether or not Medicare does the same.

b) Social Security: Calls for a bipartisan process to develop reforms.

5) Taxes

a) Tax reform: “Reform the tax code by consolidating the current six brackets and cutting the top individual rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.”

b) Tax revenue: Prevents the Bush tax cuts from expiring in 2013. So the revenue-neutral tax reform locks in today’s rates, which is to say it makes the Bush cuts permanent.

c) Corporate taxes: Lowers corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. “This budget would offset lower rates with a broader base, scaling back or eliminating entirely the deductions.”

6) Energy

Endorses “The American Energy Initiative”: I don’t know much about this bill, but you can find the GOP’s official case for it here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/paul-ryans-budget-in-summary...
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47 comments // Paul Ryan’s budget in summary

  • UrbanGypsy
    • +1
      UrbanGypsy  

    • Maybe we should just get rid of the Federal government and break up the Union. Maybe its time for each state to be a country. Because at this rate, we'll have no federal government with all these cuts. These guys want to eliminate everything.

      Let's break up, things haven't been the same since the honeymoon.

    • 1 year ago
  • samthesixth
  • noxidereus
    • -1
      noxidereus  
    • samthesixth:

      The Democrat's plan is to feign outrage at the Republican plan, and to appear weak rather than complicit when the Democrats' action does not match their rhetoric -- the same plan they always have.

    • 1 year ago
  • mikeywes
    • +2
      mikeywes  

    • Sounds like a hybrid Wall Street /Insurance industry thinktank drew up this monstrosity......I guess it is like doing business....start from outerspace and finally come to some kind of compromise.....I hope....

      These 'save America' guys are the ones who will end up siphoning off all the remaining energy and capital that the middle class has....they may not be criminals but their intent is. Vote them out

    • 1 year ago
  • August_K
    • +1
      August_K  
    • Image

    • Ryan The Ridiculous

      "Except briefly during the Korean War, the United States has never achieved unemployment as low as Ryan and co. are claiming. The Fed believes that the lowest unemployment rate compatible with price stability is between 5 and 6 percent — that is, twice what Ryan is claiming he will achieve.

      This is ridiculous; it’s megalomaniacal. If Obama tried to claim that his policies would achieve anything like this, he’d be laughed out of office."

      http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

      Dr. Krugman -- Nobel Prize in Economics 2008

    • 1 year ago
  • Jake_Leonard
    • +1
      Jake_Leonard  
    • August_K:

      Unemployment rate almost physically cannot get below 5-6 percent, can it? What with those in school, those switching jobs, and those finding jobs just after school. Supposedly, that is essentially the lowest we can go...? I know only little, so someone please inform me. (Thanks for the Krugman article, will read when I have a chance).

    • 1 year ago
  • August_K
  • sammykatz
    • +4
      sammykatz  

    • http://3.an

      ttp://3.an

      It's not enough that the GOP wants to "balance the budget" by severely curtailing social safety nets for the elderly, disadvantaged, and downtrodden with Draconian revisions to S.S., Medicare, and Medicaid; their American Energy Initiative is equally devastating to the EPA. The plan proposes eliminating ANY government regulation that, in effect, holds companies accountable AND responsible for protecting the health and safety of workers, the public, and/or the environment.

      Per Speaker of the House John Boehner's March 10, 2011, posting on his web site: President Obama is responsible for 1.) the high cost of gas, a direct result of HIS cap and trade national energy tax; 2.) continued dependence on foreign oil due to HIS moritorium on drilling in the Gulf; 3.) job losses that the Heritage Foundation estimates "could exceed 800,000 for several years under these regulation", or "two million jobs yearly" as estimated by the US Chamber of Commerce (corporate America's bag man). The House Energy and Power Subcommittee approved the Energy Tax Prevention Act (HR910), supposedly to lower energy prices. (Hedgefund managers, apparently, have nothing to do with rising costs...) Energy Commission Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) and Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD),both of whom serve on the Natural Resources Committee, in op ed pieces posted on Boehner's FB (April 4, 2011), reiterated the GOP's movement forward on their energy plan by outlining three bills that advance GOP agenda. The title of each bill is telling: The Putting the Gulf Back to Work Act; The Restarting American Offshore Leasing Act Now; and The Reversing President Obama's Offshore Moratorium Act.

      The proposed GOP budget is about defunding, deregulation, and detaxing for the top 2% as a means to end the role of the federal government...The GOP message is clear, consistant, and reiterated in every venue available to them: repetition is everything in the selling.

      And the alternate universe we're living in continues...

    • 1 year ago
  • August_K
    • +1
      August_K  
    • sammykatz:

      The GOP's budget is moving us towards a Fascist state. Handing control of Medicare and Medicaid to private for profit insurance companies is the first step.
      If the GOP takes the WH in 2012 Social Security will be given to Wall Street to manage and we all know they can't regulate themselves very well. Our health care money and pensions will disappear in some new meltdown and they'll probably ask for the taxpayer to bail them out again.

      I don't trust them at all.

      Franklin D. Roosevelt in an April 29, 1938 message to Congress warned that the growth of private power could lead to fascism:

      The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

    • 1 year ago
  • tlbuffin
  • sammykatz
    • +3
      sammykatz  
    • tlbuffin:

      So do I; however I'm not going to hold my breath. Only in America do we freely and willingly vote to disenfranchise ourselves. As of 1:55 am, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race was too close to call: Why????

    • 1 year ago
  • mikeywes
    • -1
      mikeywes  
    • sammykatz:

      Yeah....there are some schmucks in the Heritage foundation....their research consists of blindfolding themselves and throwing darts at a wall with balloons that have numbers on them....that is their target and they base their conclusions on that info......talk about a think tank.....yeah a sensory deprivation tank and they are sense challenged to begin with. I would laugh but it hurts too much.

    • 1 year ago
  • madammarsh
    • 0
      madammarsh  
    • sammykatz:

      Your earlier comment was excellent.Keep in mind Proesser spent 3x what Kloppenburg did and she was not previously well-known. A remarkable leap whether she wins or not (fingers crossed).

    • 1 year ago
  • August_K
    • +1
      August_K  

    • Ryan has been trying to push some kind of budget reform since at least 2008.

      After reading this on wiki I wonder who he thinks is going to fund the government
      and how close is it to his "current" GOP version?

      "In late January 2010, Ryan released a new version of his "Roadmap.
      "It would give across the board tax cuts by reducing income tax rates; eliminating income taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest; and abolishing the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the alternative minimum tax.

      The plan would privatize a portion of Social Security, eliminate the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance, and end traditional Medicare and most of Medicaid. The plan would replace these health programs with a system of vouchers whose value would decrease over time.

      Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took issue with the contention that Ryan's plan would reduce the deficit, alleging that it only considered proposed spending cuts and failed to take into account the tax changes.

      According to Krugman, Ryan's plan "would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population" but would produce a $4 trillion revenue loss over ten years because of the tax cuts for the rich. Krugman went on to label the proposed spending cuts a "sham" because they depended on making a severe cut in domestic discretionary spending without specifying the programs to be cut, and on "dismantling Medicare as we know it", which is politically unrealistic."

      ** Dr. Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008

    • 1 year ago
  • PigFarmington
  • Joeydee44
  • PigFarmington
  • letsliveinpeace
  • letsliveinpeace
    • +3
      letsliveinpeace  
    • Image

    • Posts Tagged ‘Paul Ryan’

      How's my driving
      We will be presented with a truly radical budget proposal this week from Wisconsin’s own conservative poster boy Paul Ryan. It shifts Medicaid to a black grant given to states and converts Medicare to a plan that no longer guarantees care to seniors, but subsidizes private insurance. You have to give it to conservatives, their push to dismantle the social safety net is nothing if not relentless. Oh, and at the same time their budget increases the financial burden on the middle class and poor, it cuts taxes on the wealthiest.

    • 1 year ago
  • DougChristian
    • +5
      DougChristian  

    • The cuts are bad, but by far the worst thing about this is the tax rates. They're seriously proposing a massive cut in taxes for the wealthiest people when we desperately need to move in the other direction. And this proposal doesn't even come close to balancing the budget now or at any time in the future even using Republican math. They're not even trying to hide what they're doing.

    • 1 year ago
  • letsliveinpeace
  • tlbuffin
  • SFirman
  • madammarsh
  • Leen61
    • +9
      Leen61  
    • Image

    • This is Paul Ryan's own austerity program. Once again, the only groups who come away unscathed are the corporations and the mega rich. I knew those Bush/Obama tax cuts for the top 2% would stay permanent. Thanks to Obama and the Dem congress for refusing to kill them. This is what Bernie Sanders was so rightfully upset about. The party that hates entitlements so much for the poor and elderly, definitely sure loves them for the assholes who fill their campaign coffers.

      Here's an article about who's "Buying Ryan."

      http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/05-5

    • 1 year ago
  • corderodedios
  • Leen61
  • crash_text_dummy
  • SFirman
  • SoCalFramer
  • BenjaminDover
  • tlbuffin
  • crash_text_dummy
  • Leen61
  • Leen61
  • Seauvan
  • corderodedios
  • tlbuffin
  • SFirman
  • corderodedios
  • DougChristian
    • +1
      DougChristian  
    • tlbuffin:

      And making the Bush tax cuts permanent is mild compared to what this is actually doing. It makes the tax cuts permanent and then takes a ADDITIONAL 10% off the top tax rate. It's downright criminal.

    • 1 year ago
  • tlbuffin
  • SFirman
    • +2
      SFirman  
    • tlbuffin:

      Not sure I'm remembering right but when Obama was campaigning for health care, did he say he would only do away with Medicare Advantage. This is more expensive and has extra perks, but is also done through big Ins. I have Reg. Medicare. Do I remember this right or not?

    • 1 year ago
  • PeteLeS33
  • madammarsh
  • captain_insano
  • bambuu
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