Villagers of the Beltway were taken for quite the ride upon the delivery of Paul Ryan's very best script. The story that was hyped was that of serious-as-a-heart-attack "tough" decisions, as RNC Chairman Reince Priebus put it. Decisions that would and could be made only by the most serious of serious men. The twist in the plot would be that the same people who got us into this mess, who would go on to mysteriously survive the killer's knife, would be the ones to get us out of it. This was sure to be a blockbuster and everyone was going to bask in its monolithic genius.
Then something happened. The bewildering high experienced by various villagers and pundits after witnessing Paul Ryan's exorcism of the fiscally-demonic federal budget was shattered by the sobering buzz-killer also known as mathematics. After processing the numbers seen in Ryan's plan, which Paul Krugman called "ludicrous and cruel" it became clear that Ryan had simply lured them into the back of the van with the blacked-out windows by writing "serious" on the sliding door, not by presenting a substantive policy proposal.
The numbers reveal a much different story than the one Ryan's script originally promised. They reveal a budget that makes a big deal out of planting the seeds of deficit-reduction through spending cuts, but then takes a piss on them with trickle down economics. And, as anyone who has seen Spiderman 3 can empathize with, the audience left the theatre feeling violated.What was ultimately revealed is that Paul Ryan's slasher-film of a budget would only reduce the deficit by a meager $155 billion dollars despite the no-holds-barred approach to tackling spending.
Even some critics of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan have praised his “courage” and his willingness to make “hard choices” to address looming deficits. But, upon closer inspection, Chairman Ryan’s widely reported claim that his plan produces $1.6 trillion in deficit reduction proves illusory. In fact, the numbers in his plan show that his budget produces just $155 billion in real deficit reduction over ten years.That means that, despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history — two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes — the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That’s because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.
Here it is in graph form:
I wouldn't suggest that $155 billion dollars is chump change, but when you're proposing to cut $4.3 trillion dollars in spending, one would hope to see a little more than $155 billion in savings as a result. The reason you do not see that within the Paul Ryan Path to Poverty is because the cuts he proposes, several of which are ambiguous in nature, are almost entirely canceled out by the fire-sale of tax cuts that would accompany them.One of the elements of Ryan's budget that I would label as ambiguous is the fact that his original proposal contains $5.3 trillion dollars in savings, but $1.3 trillion of it is essentially fake because it assumes an otherwise indefinite continuation of the funding required for Iraq and Afghanistan. All U.S. troops are required, under Iraqi law, to be out of Iraq by the end of this year, and the drawdown of Afghanistan is still on-track to begin this summer, according to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Regardless, Ryan's plan assumes that $1.3 trillion will be saved by not extending those commitments to 2021. Something which isn't going to happen anyway.In contrast President Obama's budget proposal, one which exemplifies responsibility, compassion, and dare he say -- patriotism -- offer's a grounded and comprehensive approach to actually solving our problems rather than exasperating them or kicking the can down the road. If the dueling budgets were movies, President Obama's budget would be Batman Begins and the Republican Path to Poverty would be Batman and Robin, with Paul Ryan stepping into the role of Mister Freeze.I'll let the president speak for himself:
Now, before I get into how we can achieve this goal, some of you might be wondering, “Why is this so important? Why does this matter to me?”Here’s why. Even after our economy recovers, our government will still be on track to spend more money than it takes in throughout this decade and beyond. That means we’ll have to keep borrowing more from countries like China. And that means more of your tax dollars will go toward paying off the interest on all the loans we keep taking out. By the end of this decade, the interest we owe on our debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion. Just the interest payments.Then, as the Baby Boomers start to retire and health care costs continue to rise, the situation will get even worse. By 2025, the amount of taxes we currently pay will only be enough to finance our health care programs, Social Security, and the interest we owe on our debt. That’s it. Every other national priority – education, transportation, even national security – will have to be paid for with borrowed money.Ultimately, all this rising debt will cost us jobs and damage our economy. It will prevent us from making the investments we need to win the future. We won’t be able to afford good schools, new research, or the repair of roads and bridges – all the things that will create new jobs and businesses here in America. Businesses will be less likely to invest and open up shop in a country that seems unwilling or unable to balance its books. And if our creditors start worrying that we may be unable to pay back our debts, it could drive up interest rates for everyone who borrows money – making it harder for businesses to expand and hire, or families to take out a mortgage.The good news is, this doesn’t have to be our future. This doesn’t have to be the country we leave to our children. We can solve this problem. We came together as Democrats and Republicans to meet this challenge before, and we can do it again.
"The good news is, this doesn't have to be our future."That is not the gospel being preached by the Republican Path to Poverty. The Republican plan says, as the president rightfully pointed out, that we can't afford to be the nation we currently are. And to those ends their plan is essentially a gigantic lie because it shortchanges the American people by telling them that they have to sacrifice the things they hold dear so we can funnel more wealth to the already obscenely wealthy.What struck me as a clear rebuttal of the media narrative that the Republican alternative was to be taken seriously, a narrative that was conceived inside the back of Paul Ryan's "serious" van, President Obama astutely said "There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill."From the outside, President Obama's proposal and the Republican's proposal, which several of the current Republican presidential candidates have vouched for, may seem similar in their immediate goals. The major difference is in how those goals are reached and what the ultimate conclusion of each vision for the country looks like.If you follow the vision for the nation laid out by Republicans, government would be almost entirely eliminated by 2050, and things such as public education and regulation would essentially become novel concepts from a previous era. If you follow the vision for the nation laid out by Democrats, the more patriotic vision, government will continue to play the role it was originally intended to fill - providing for the general welfare of its citizens.