Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Is This The Real Life, Is This Just Fantasy?

Rep. Paul Ryan's Magical Dreamer Budget(tm) is a towering work of fiction.  It might even win some sort of award.  Here's what it's going to do, folks!

Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president's budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage's analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

Plus it's clinically proven to stop the gum disease gingivitis and will increase crop yields by 14%.

The man is on crack.  In four years Ryan expects to have created 8 million jobs we've lost, and then enough to push our unemployment rate back down to better than it was under Bush or Clinton, to boost stagnant middle class wages by $1,000 a year, to get our economy growing at China (purported) levels and to do all this by making massive cuts to Medicaid and privatizing Medicare.

Here's what would really happen:  corporate profits would continue to skyrocket at the 25%+ a year rate we're seeing now, which would be plowed back into massive bonus checks and stock earnings for the richest Americans.  Those $1.1 trillion in additional wage growth each year?  Something like $1 trillion would go to the top of the top.  The average American would see next to nothing.

Ryan would get rid of green energy subsidies as "corporate welfare", but keep oil company subsidies.  He'd get rid of Fannie and Freddie, but has no idea what would replace it and the millions of mortgages it holds.

And yes, he would make all these trillions in cuts over 10 years in order to cut the tax rate on the rich from 36% to 25%.

That's really the goal of Ryan's plan, to "create" trillions by cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans by a third.  You thought Obama was a "wealth distributionist"?  Republicans want to give trillions to the wealthy and make the rest of us pay for it through spending cuts, and they think you're too stupid to notice.  They assure us if we give the rich more money, they'll create jobs.

They will.  They'll just do it on Wall Street and overseas.

Amazing.  So how much will the Democrats capitulate on this?

[UPDATE]  Steve M. speaks for a lot of Americans who would get screwed by this plan after 2022 by saying "Well thanks, Paul."

The nerve of this little elitist. My wife and I are in our early fifties -- fairly close to retirement, yet still young enough, under Ryan's plan, to be thrown on the tender mercies of the free market for our health care when we're old -- and I just want to know what he thinks people in our situation do. Does he think we just sit around blissfully ignoring the passing of time until about about, oh, 64 or so, and then make our plans for how we're going to survive retirement in a couple of hours one evening? Does he think we don't worry about this, and strategize for it, years and even decades before retirement is imminent? 

What he thinks, old friend, is that you're expendable and half of folks your age will vote for the Republicans anyway just because they believe Ryan isn't talking about taking away Medicare from them, he means he'll take Medicare away from "those people who can't afford health care anyway".

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