Oh Lord. I almost forgot that today is Paul Ryan Day, even though I wrote about it just yesterday. So what’s in the 2014 version of the Ryan budget? Let’s see:
- Repeal of Obamacare (though we keep Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare, as well as its new taxes).
- Medicare would be converted into a voucher system.
- Big cuts to Medicaid.
- Big cuts to other domestic programs.
- Repeal of the sequester cuts in the Pentagon budget.
- A “simplified” income tax system with only two brackets, 10 percent and 25 percent.
- A reduction in the corporate tax from 35 percent to 25 percent.
I’ll dive into the details later. Maybe. But basically this is the same old same old. Big tax cuts on the rich, big tax cuts for corporations, and big spending increases for the military. For the poor, the middle class, and the elderly, we have big spending cuts and—though Ryan doesn’t admit it—the almost mathematical certainty of big tax increases.
At this point, I honestly have only one wish for all this: that the press finally wises up and refuses to call this a “deficit reduction” plan. It’s not. It’s a plan to dramatically cut domestic spending, full stop, mostly on the poor, the middle class, and the elderly. Every other component of the plan increases the deficit.