I suppose we should get the greetings and pleasantries out of the way first.

Paul Ryan, please DROP DEAD!

 

That’s how much I loathe his proposed and supposedly serious budget. None of his ideas are new, they are based on fuzzy math and proposals that don’t work. But the selfish throngs of the tea party as well as many journalists who should know better, are in love with Ryan and his plan because it promises “tough love”. After all to a teabagger- it’s not good government if it’s not abusive. It’s good governance BECAUSE someone is getting screwed. The alternative, that being generous and kind could have no downsides, is just incomprehensible to Ryan and the ignorant masses that support him and his fellow despot’s like minded conservatives.

The quick description of Ryan’s proposal can be summed up thusly:

Guess what, Andrew. Paul Ryan just released his very “serious” plan with massive tax cuts, huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, a repeal of the ACA with no replacement (throwing 30 million off insurance), and putting in place a system that will cost the most vulnerable more, do nothing to stem the cost of medical care, and still does nothing to help our long term financial condition. We’ve now seen the GOP plan, and Alan Grayson nailed it a couple years back. “Die quickly” is the Republican position……

Is this my “shared sacrifice,” and I’ll be told to eat a bag of salty dicks while they cut taxes for the Koch brothers and the rest of their fat cat donors and big business?

Yep-that’s exactly what Paul Ryan wants you to do. Your only choice is to decide if you want mustard on those salty dicks or not.

I’ll say one thing for the Tea Party, they have made selfishness completely fashionable these days. It used to be,  in the bad old days before GWB became President, that the GOP had to hide its real agenda of screwing the average citizen to support the rich corporate executives behind some sort of smoke screen, e.g. “The Contract with America” etc. Now they don’t even bother-they just come right out and say it straight: “We want to fuck you over and we don’t care if you don’t like it.” So long as our Galtian overlords can be assured of that their costs for existing in society are reduced to at or near zero-that would appear to be the only thing that matters.

There is nothing serious about what Ryan is proposing-except the consequences to all but the wealthiest Americans. Furthermore, by ignoring what put us in this mess-three wars funded off the books by government borrowing, which was necessitated by a completely unnecessary and unaffordable tax cut-Ryan proposes to shift the burden of the “cure” to a demographic least equipped to be able to pay the bill. His specific overlooking of any reduction in the defense budget or any of the parts of the security structure, and the almost religious acceptance of the idea that taxes cannot be raised under any circumstances means that he has deliberately chosen to increase the level of pain involved in the solution, and more importantly left the GOP with little room to compromise on a real plan that might stand a chance of working its way through labyrinth of the legislative process.

So if it doesn’t stand a chance of passing why are you worried about it?

Because the caliber of your average GOP legislator has changed. Now they elect lunatics and assholes like Allen West and Michelle Bachmann and  instead of shunting them to a well deserved place on the sidelines-they are given up front placement in the party. These people are so dedicated to the prospect of destroying anything that may be even remotely associated with improving American society as a whole, that they are willing to burn down the house in order to “save it”. Witness their rhetoric about a government shutdown.

Very well then, what of the specifics of Ryan’s plan?

Well first of all his math doesn’t really work. It’s based on some flawed and overly optimistic assumptions about job growth which quite simply are not being backed up by current trends in the economy. The plan assumes that tax cuts will set off a literally unprecedented boom. Most economists think that is the budgetary equivalent of smoking crack.  Automation, out sourcing, and improved productivity-as well as a large shift from a manufacturing based economy to a service sector based economy are all market forces that will push back against Paul Ryan’s trickle-down economics.

Another glaring omission of the Ryan plan is that he assumes revenues into the federal coffers will remain constant at 19% of GDP. The CBO and The Economist (hardly bastions of left wing sympathy) show pretty valid reasons why that cannot be the case. Especially when, thanks to the way Ryan structures the taxes-only the top 20% of Americans benefit. He ignores some of the great uncertainties-such as the toxic effects of wars without end on world energy prices and its effect in  upping the expenditures of the Pentagon. Because Ryan  adheres with religious faith to the idea that no new taxes can be levied-it makes his assumption that non-defense expenditures can be squeezed to 6% and eventually to 3.5% of GDP is a preposterous assumption-made more so because Ryan  never  tells us how he is going to do it. What Ryan’s plan really does is to create the same pre-conditions that raised the deficit in 2009-revenues dropped off precipitously as a result of the recession.

Then there is the worst part of his proposal and the one that potentially could affect me if it catches on. His treatment of Medicare. There is so much that is flawed with it-I am not even sure where to begin. I think I will start with Ezra Klein:

1) Ryan’s suggestion that Medicare and Medicaid can or should be held to the rate of inflation is absurd. His budget has no way of making that happen, save for draconian cuts in both (this goes far, far beyond “means-testing”). And you don’t have to take it from me. Alice Rivlin, an eminent budget expert and co-author of Ryan’s original Medicare proposal, will tell you the same thing. But those cuts are how he saves so much money going forward. They’re the assumptions that make the rest of the budget work. And they’re essentially no less ridiculous than predicting that unemployment under Ryan’s budget will drop to 2.8 percent.

2) The idea that conservatives believe the savings in Ryan’s plan are realistic while those in the Affordable Care Act aren’t boggles the mind. For one thing, Ryan includes the supposedly unrealistic savings from the Affordable Care Act; they can’t be realistic in Ryan’s budget but not realistic in the ACA. For another, the ACA’s savings are more modest, and the law has many, many more ways to attain them than simply saying “the government promises not to spend more than inflation, even if spending less means millions of seniors and disabled Americans will have no health care.” I spent a lot of time taking conservative arguments on the ACA’s half-dozen cost control mechanisms seriously — including in a conversation with, yes, Paul Ryan — so watching Ryan propose this budget is both frustrating and disillusioning.

3) I suspect Ryan capped Medicare and Medicaid at the rate of inflation rather than at GDP+1% because when he used GDP+1%, he couldn’t get the numbers to add up without including some tax increases. (Skippy-san comment: Which is why Rivilin won’t support the plan-something she has been very clear about, and Ryan has lied about).

Furthermore, Ryan wants to repeal the ACA-which would thus repeal two key parts of making private insurance type plans work for Medicare: A mandate for health insurance when you are younger ( in order to make preventive care available-and thus make you healthier going into your golden years) and the requirement for insurers to insure people with pre-existing conditions. Life happens-by the time most of us are 65 most of us are going to have something wrong with us that insurers won’t like.

There is no mechanism in his plan to prevent the worst abuses of insurance companies from being inflicted on seniors. There is not mechanism for cost control-and since it’s individuals dealing with companies, they can simply use a “divide and conquer strategy” to push up individual premium prices.  The thing that works with a large entity bargaining is the power of the dollars they bring to the table. With the right regulations in place it can work to keep the greed of insurance companies in check. Ryan’s plan is a gift to big pharma and big insurance by giving them a windfall-with no responsible action required on their part.

As Paul Krugman points out, the plan “does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs. The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care. “

Ryan specifically does not address defense spending, something that eats up 27% of the federal budget. You aren’t a serious deficit person if you don’t address this in your plan. He doesn’t even begin to imagine a world where US forces are not constantly at war-which is a pretty glaring omission. The US has it in its power to remove its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan this year-with direct savings because of that withdrawal. Even assuming we don’t do that-long term there needs to be a major strategic review of US aims with an eye towards some degree of global retrenchment. We can’t afford our “empire with no perks”.

Similarly, Ryan really does not address Social Security-except to say that folks under 55 can divert a portion of their payroll taxes to private plans. As I have noted previously, without a control over how this is done, it will drop a windfall of cash in the hands of the same jerks who gave us the financial crisis to begin with. It would have been better to leave Medicare alone and attack Social Security through a transition to a CPF type of arrangement. (Starting with people under 35 and working upward from there over time.)

Probably the worst thing about the Ryan plan is its overall cruelty and transference of the burden of life’s hardships to individuals who can least afford to be put in this position. Sure, the government needs to limit taxpayers’ exposure to Medicare cost inflation. I think this plan is a fundamentally immoral way to do it.  His Medicaid plan of block grants is simply deferred murder of the poor.

 I am not diminishing the need to do something about the deficit-but you cannot tax cut your way to Nirvana. There are other ways to accomplish Ryan’s goals-through a balance of well thought out spending changes, targeted tax increases,  and decreases and a realignment of the way money flows in this country. But our boy Paul is looking at none of those proven methods. We know why-he has selfish children to appease. But making rich people richer-while making the rest of us poorer is not the way to do it.

So Paul Ryan-please go jump off a cliff. And take your boy Allen West with you when do.