House Republicans wrote the Democrats’ fall campaign script Tuesday when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan presented a dramatic overhaul of federal taxing and spending that would slash Medicare, food stamps, Pell grants for poor college students, farm subsidies and other long-standing federal programs and cut taxes just as fiercely.
The Ryan plan would have just two income tax rates, 10 percent and 25 percent. He didn’t give the income levels involved. His plan depends on his assumption that tax revenues would remain the same as at present, even with those large reductions.
Medicare would be the primary victim. Rather than continue the present system under which government pays doctor and hospital bills, the Republican plan would push seniors into subsidized private insurance plans. Whatever cost control this change would create would come from the ability of the insurance companies to limit health care cost increases — an ability they have yet to demonstrate.
Ryan also would sharply reduce federal spending on Medicaid, which provides medical care for the poor. Rather than cost-sharing with the states based on costs, Ryan would substitute block grants to the states. Presumably, the states would be left holding the bag if program costs rose, since the federal share would be fixed arbitrarily without relationship to actual costs.
The Ryan blueprint would reduce the deficit much faster than would that of President Obama. The administration budget, in stark contrast, would leave Medicare, the safety net programs for the poor and farm programs as they are and depend on raising income taxes on the well-to-do for deficit control. To repeat, the Ryan plan depends almost entirely on cuts in federal spending on domestic programs for its deficit reductions. The Obama approach is to preserve existing programs and ask the wealthy for more money to reduce the deficit.
Rep. Ryan and those who agree with him assume that the American people will choose deficit reduction over maintaining health care for the elderly and poor, keeping the food stamp program in place, subsidizing low-income college students, maintaining farm subsidies and continuing the other safety net programs.
The budget committee is now considering the Ryan blueprint. Supporters look for a House vote soon. If it passes and becomes the official Republican position, it will then become the primary issue in the national election.
IT REMAINS to be seen whether Ryan’s slash and burn economics is good politics — for sure, it is viciously destructive public policy.
Mr. Ryan and those in his cabal work on the purblind assumption that the richest nation in the world can’t summon up the resources to take care of its citizens, protect them from their enemies, and stand at their side as they follow their dreams — and balance the federal budget at the same time.
They are dead wrong.
Yes, health care costs need to be brought under control. If they are not, they will eat us alive. We now are spending between 16 and 17 percent of our gross national product on health care — about twice what any other nation spends. We must establish control over that sector in order to get control over state and national spending. If we can’t figure out how to do that by ourselves, there are many systems up and running we can copy.
Yes, the tax structure must be altered. The object should be to raise enough through taxes to cover spending. Elementary dear reader; economics 101.
And, yes, the rich must pay more. It’s really scandalous that the richest candidate in the presidential race paid less than 15 percent of his enormous income in taxes last year.
No, it is not acceptable to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, the hungry, the sick and the old.
And it’s absolutely amazing that Mr. Ryan and those who think as he does consider their protect-the-rich, beggar-the-poor blueprint for America to be a winning vision.
— Emerson Lynn, jr
