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Tag Archives: United States House Committee on the Budget
BUDGET:Paul Ryan’s Path To The Poorhouse
Repost from 2011
Writing in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled the Republican budget plan that he calls the “Path to Prosperity,” a plan that “would privatize Medicare for future retirees, cut spending on Medicaid and other domestic programs, and offer sharply lower tax rates to corporations and the wealthy.” Right-wing pundits in corporate media immediately offered plaudits. CNN contributor Erick Erickson praised the “Gospel” of Paul Ryan as a “solid proposal of solid reform.” New York Times columnist David Brooks says that Ryan’s “courageous” “leadership” “will set the standard of seriousness.” Reuters columnist James Pethokoukis thinks the plan is the “most important and necessary piece of economic legislation since President Ronald Reagan‘s tax cuts in 1981.” But Ryan’s plan doesn’t ask the most well-off Americans or the country’s corporate titans to make any sacrifice, instead leaving the burden of deficit and debt reduction on the middle class, seniors, and a “shrunken public sector.” “The GOP’s budget breaks the fundamental promise of this country: That if you work hard and play by the rules, you can take care of your family and retire with dignity and peace of mind,” Health Care For America Now’s Melinda Gibson says. The budget plan “would get about two-thirds of its more than $4 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years from programs that serve people of limited means,” an analysis from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found.
RYAN’S MIDDLE-CLASS TAX HIKE: Ryan uses boilerplate language and topline bullet points to obscure an important fact: his plan would almost certainly raise taxes on most middle-income Americans even as it slashes taxes for the wealthiest. For Ryan to cut the top rate by nearly one-third and still keep revenue the same as it would have been under the Bush tax cuts regime, he has to raise taxes somewhere else. “And though he pointedly refuses to tell us where those tax hikes will come from, we can make an educated guess,” Michael Linden, Associate Director of Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, writes. “The rate cut at the top, of course, benefits only those in the top brackets (the richest two percent of Americans), but to pay for it, Ryan says he will ‘broaden the tax base.’ Broadening the tax base means removing some tax expenditures that currently benefit the middle class.” Ryan’s vagueness is probably deliberate, “since any detailed description of his ideas for tax ‘reform’ would reveal a massive tax hike for the middle class.” What about Ryan’s estimates of booming economic prosperity, including taking “unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015”? He is relying on the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, which used the same “megalomaniacal” methods to promise us that George W. Bush’s tax policies would lead the country into a brave new era of prosperity. Heritage claimed Bush’s tax cuts would create millions of jobs when in fact payroll employment was back down to 2001 levels in 2009, that they would boost tax revenue when in fact it led to record deficits, and they promised a surge in personal income when in fact the country got the worst income performance ever. “If you believe George W. Bush unleashed an unprecedented economic boom with great jobs performance, rising incomes, and the paying off of the national debt then you’ll find a lot to like about Rep. Ryan’s plan,” CAP’s Matt Yglesias writes.
RYAN ATTACKS SENIORS AND FAMILIES: The Ryan budget plan would, quite simply, put an end to our current healthcare system, repealing the Affordable Care Act, and replacing Medicare and Medicaid with private systems that provide less care at a higher cost. The plan’s repeal of the Obama health care legislation means 32 million people are likely to lose their health insurance coverage. The Ryan budget “phases out Medicare over 10 years,” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall explains. “Ryan’s extremist plan would decimate Medicare and Medicaid and terminate the Affordable Care Act, undermining the economic security of America’s struggling middle class.” “Republicans want to roll back the clock” by “ending Medicare and screwing over seniors,” Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen writes. “The plan shows Medicaid cuts of $771 billion, plus savings of $1.4 trillion from repealing the health reform law’s Medicaid expansion and its subsidies to help low- and moderate-income people purchase health insurance,” the CBPP explains. Ryan’s plan is a “radically ambitious plan to roll back the Great Society and fundamentally transform how the United States takes care of its poor, sick and elderly,” Salon’s Andrew Leonard summarizes. “The wealthiest Americans and corporations are getting tax breaks while healthcare for the most vulnerable Americans is under assault,” Leonard added. “Dismantling Medicare while giving bonus tax breaks to the very wealthiest in America is what may pass for bold in Washington, but in Oregon it is unacceptable,” says Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR). “Paul Ryan made clear that the Republican budget will protect Big Oil companies subsidies over seniors health care,” said Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “It’s already becoming clear who will be the priority in the House Republican budget — special interests, not middle class families.”
RYAN ATTACKS EDUCATION: The budget lays out little in terms of cuts to specific programs, instead simply decreeing caps on levels of spending. But one cut is explicitly proposed in the document — a cut to the Pell Grant program, which provides college tuition assistance to low-income students. If implemented, this would be the largest reduction in Pell Grants in history, more than eight times higher than the previous record, which was a $100 reduction in the maximum award in 1994. These cuts “will reduce the number of low income students receiving Bachelor’s degrees each year by about 61,000.” “It’s obviously pretty drastic, and the impact on Pell is dire,” says Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. Pell Grants are key to the country’s economic competitiveness and to boosting an educational attainment rate that has stagnated. Cutting them in this way provides little in terms of real budgetary savings, but undermines economic competitiveness and the nation’s supply of human capital
Center for American Progress
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FW: Pay-Per-View Government?
We’ve seen reports that at least two more Republican members of Congress — Reps. Lou Barletta (R-PA) and Renee Ellmers (R-NC) — are avoiding public constituent meetings this August recess, opting instead for the “pay per view” events Michael wrote to you about last week. This new “pay per view” practice mocks the spirit of Democracy and the First Amendment, and tends to weed out non-supporters in order to shield members of Congress from criticism or even challenging questions.
Speak out now by signing our petition to members of Congress — help us keep the heat on these representatives to hold them accountable and make them stop. www.pfaw.org
By voting for policies as unpopular as the ones congressional Republicans have recently supported, like ending Medicare and Medicaid as we know it, it’s understandable that these representatives would attract some criticism, but denying their constituents free access to them so they can cravenly hide from that criticism is wrong.
— Ben Betz, Online Strategy Manager
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: Michael Keegan, People For the American Way
To: Ben Betz
Date: Thursday, August 18, 2011
Re: Pay-Per-View Government?
Tell Members of Congress: Respect the First Amendment and Democracy, Stop Charging Your Constituents for Access!
Dear Ben,
It seems that congressional Republicans either have a severe distaste for, or a severe lack of understanding of, the First Amendment of the Constitution.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) is not holding any open-to-the-public town hall meetings in his district this August recess — instead, he’s charging constituents $15 for face time with their democratically elected representative. And Ryan isn’t the only member of congress whose recess meetings are, as Politico put it, “strictly pay-per-view.”
Speak out by joining our petition to members of Congress now and help us draw attention to this growing problem. www.pfaw.org
Congressmen like Ben Quayle (R-AZ) and Chip Cravaack (R-MN), instead of hosting town hall meetings, are having events hosted for them by friendly organizations with a fee for attendance. These Republican members of Congress are so desperate to shelter themselves from criticism that they are denying their constituents’ basic democratic access to their elected officials.
The First Amendment states that Americans have the right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” and does NOT include the words “only if they are willing and able to pay for that privilege.” What Ryan and his colleagues are doing is an affront to American democracy AND to the First Amendment.
Exercise YOUR First Amendment right and petition Congress now.
Selective disregard of the Constitution by the Right Wing is nothing new, but this latest wave of hostility to the First Amendment is so cowardly and begs for a light to be shined on it and for accountability for the elected officials engaged in it.
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) recently had a sign reading, “Private Property: No soliciting, No protesting, No loitering,” appear outside his district office. This was in response to protests by progressive activists after Lamborn referred to President Obama as a “tar baby.” However, the restriction appeared not to apply to Lamborn’s supporters who held a “spontaneous” rally outside the office on Friday.
The “no protesting” portion was removed after Lamborn received pressure for his selective allowance of free speech at his congressional office and his blatant disregard for the spirit of the First Amendment. Now we need to make sure all members of Congress are receiving similar pressure.
Help us keep up the pressure by speaking up and joining PFAW’s petition now.
Since voting on many anti-middle class policies, especially the “Ryan Plan” attacks on Medicare and Medicaid, Republican members of Congress have been facing angry constituents at town hall meetings and protests at their offices. That’s called democracy — elected officials being held accountable by their constituents.
By outsourcing meetings to third parties that raise money on the events, members of Congress are ducking all but their most supportive constituents, and in some cases, creating a misleading media narrative by allowing in local reporters and TV cameras.
If these Republican members of Congress are so scared of Democracy, then they’re in the wrong business.
Please help us keep the pressure on by joining our petition and then by helping to spread the word.
As always, thank you for all you do.
Sincerely,
Michael Keegan
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Budget:A Better Path To Prosperity
As the nation edges closer to hitting the debt ceiling, President Obama delivered at George Washington University yesterday a new plan to reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion over the next 12 years — a rebuttal to the GOP’s “Path to Prosperity” plan sponsored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Matching targeted spending cuts with less drastic entitlement reform and a more realistic tax policy, Obama’s plan, as Center for American Progress notes, “puts us on a much more sustainable path, and most importantly, would do so without putting further burdens on seniors and an already-struggling middle class.” While a big step away from his 2012 budget, Obama’s plan stands in stark contrast to Ryan’s “draconian” vision that gouges out the budget at their expense. Trading cuts and reforms that overly burden vulnerable populations for tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Ryan’s budget earned rebuke even from conservative economists. Former President Ronald Reagan’s budget director called it “a measure of how far off the deep end Republicans have gone.” Obama did not mince words when drawing the contrast between the GOP vision and his “compassionate” alternative. In response, House Republicans elected to decry what they saw as the president’s political, unfriendly treatment rather than offer the merits of their policy. Hearkening back to the 1995 government shutdown, Republicans are now hinting that Obama’s strong words might be enough to derail budget negotiations — no matter how valid the proposal.
OBAMA’S VISION: Rather than relying exclusively on deep spending cuts, President Obama’s deficit plan offers a framework to more responsibly reduce the deficit over the next 12 years through a multi-pronged approach. To achieve the $4 trillion in deficit reductions, Obama called for $2 trillion in spending cuts while maintaining “investments” in “schools, highways, bridges and research” that help maintain global competitiveness. However, aware of the ballooning defense budget, Obama also called to cut $400 billion from national security over 10 years — a move the GOP has specifically avoided. On entitlement programs, Obama asked both parties to “work together now to strengthen Social Security” and proposed saving $340 billion on Medicare and Medicaid by 2021 through increasing efficiency. “We will reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments” and “cut spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s purchasing power to drive greater efficiency,” he said. In stark contrast to Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan, Obama’s Medicare plan builds on the cost containment reforms in the health care reform law by expanding IPAB, a 15-person commission tasked with advising Congress on how to reduce excess growth in Medicare if costs exceed GDP per capita plus one percent but will do so without rationing care or raising premiums or cost sharing. Obama’s clearest policy declaration, however, centered on his rebuke of the Bush-era tax cuts. “We cannot afford one trillion dollars in tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew then again,” he said. Opting to move towards his fiscal commission’s policies, Obama plans to allow those tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012 and would raise an additional $1 trillion by overhauling the tax code to lower rates and eliminate tax breaks. And should all these deficit reduction efforts miss their targets, Obama called for a fail-safe “trigger mechanism ” that would force “across-the-board spending reductions if the ratio of debt-to-GDP is not stabilized by 2014 and projected to decline for the rest of the decade.” While Obama’s plan does propose significant cuts and misses opportunities to add additional revenues and find secure additional savings in the Pentagon budget, it provides a more “balanced” deficit plan than offered by the GOP. In response, U.S. bonds and the dollar rose based on hopes that Obama’s plan would “shore up the United States’ credit-worthiness and the dollar’s reserve status.” Oil recovered by 1.5 percent.
RYAN’S ‘PESSIMISTIC’ PLAN: A driving factor behind Obama’s plan was to provide a “compassionate” alternative to slash-and-burn Republican proposal offered last week. “This debate over budgets and deficits is about more than just numbers on a page,” Obama said. “It’s about the kind of future we want.” Dubbing Ryan’s plan as a “pessimistic” vision that “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America,” Obama blasted Republicans for implementing cuts that allow our infrastructure to “crumble” and “collapse” and, by slashing billions from Pell Grants, for telling “bright young Americans” that “we can’t afford” to support their education. He then lambasted Ryan’s Medicare voucher program for “end[ing] Medicare as we know it.” “Instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck — you’re on your own,” he said. Indeed, according to the non-partisan CBO, seniors will end up paying significantly more for their health benefits if House Republicans have their way. He viewed the GOP’s plan to rob Medicaid of $771 billion over the next decade by turning it into a block grant program as a vision that tells 50 million Americans, including “poor children,” “middle-class families” with disabled children, and low-income seniors “to fend for themselves.” But “worst of all,” he said, was the Republican vision increase the burden on the vulnerable just so a corporate tax rate can be ten points lower and so we can “afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.” Criticizing the tax break he’d receive while asking seniors to pay “$6,400” more in health costs, Obama said “that’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.”
POLITICS OF WHINING: Invited to the address, House Republicans bristled under Obama’s rebuke and quickly rejected his plan as a “political broadside from the campaigner-in-chief.” Almost completely ignoring his policies, House Republicans took their turn at the podium to lambast the president for engaging in “partisan rhetoric .” House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) insisted that Obama’s plan was “light on the specifics” but “didn’t lack shameless political attacks and scare tactics.” Ryan claimed Obama’s “demagoguery” was “exploiting people’s emotions of fear, envy, and anxiety.” Indeed, Ryan gave a detailed account of his hurt feelings, tracing them from “excited” to “naively optimistic” to “disappointed” then to “sad,” and hinted that Obama’s rebuke “sure doesn’t help” Republicans forge a budget consensus. Now “sincerely disappointed” at Obama’s “partisan broadsides against us,” Ryan is also suggesting that his hurt feelings will make it “that much harder for the two parties to come together with mutual respect of one another to get things done.” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), however, did offer House Republicans’ sole policy response: “We, as a conference, won’t raise taxes” on the wealthy.
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The Progressive Path To Deficit Reduction
Today, President Obama will deliver a wide-ranging speech laying out a strategy to deal with the U.S. budget deficit. Although the exact policies that he will endorse are unknown, he is expected to lay out a vision that will alter the country’s entitlement programs and call for high-income earners to pay more taxes. In addressing the U.S. debt, Obama is entering an increasingly heated debate about how to address our long-term deficits in a way that does not shoulder Main Street Americans with undue burdens or hinder job growth. On one side, conservatives are proposing cruel plans that would sacrifice the services and investments in America’s great middle class while asking nothing more from the wealthiest among us. On the other side, a growing number of progressives are demanding fair sacrifice that protects our crucial needs while demanding fair sacrific e from those who are richer than ever. The path that we choose will determine the very kind of country we will have in the future: one where only the wealthiest among us have opportunities or one that enshrines the American Dream — the idea that anyone, no matter what their background, can work hard and succeed.
EXPLAINING THE DEBT: To understand the most responsible way to tackle our long-term deficit problem, it’s important to first understand exactly what the challenge of the debt is and what caused it. Interest rates and inflation are currently low, and addressing unemployment is a far more pressing immediate problem. A March 2010 CBS News poll found that 51 percent of Americans said that jobs/economy is the most important problem facing the country, and only seven percent said the deficit was. Still, we should address the $14.2 trillion debt and the $1.3 trillion budget deficit over time, as doing so is crucial to our long-term economic health. In the short-term, there are a handful of major factors driving our debt. This includes the cost of two wars, a runaway defense budget, the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, taxes on the richest Americans being the lowest in a generation, and a recession caused by the lack of regulation of Wall Street. The greatest long-term driver of our debt is health care costs, with our “possibly most inefficient” system in the world having us spend more than any other country in the world on health care with worse results. Thus, long-term deficit reduction plans that do not seriously deal with these causes of the current debt are avoiding the key issue.
EMACIATING MAIN STREET, ENRICHING THE RICH: Conservatives in Congress and the right-wing intelligentsia have unleashed a flurry of deficit reduction plans in recent months, which both continue to enrich the wealthy with massive tax cuts and which take aim at programs and investments for Main Street — solutions that were tried under the previous president and failed. In House Republicans’ much-touted budget resolution, H.R. 1, some of which made it into the recent budget deal to keep the government open, they dramatically cut Pell Grants, Head Start, foreign aid to children suffering from malaria, and other programs that benefit ordinary p eople, but are in no way the cause of our modern deficits. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) upped the ante when he released his FY2012 budget, which continues to call for massive and crippling cuts to the Pell Grant program, slash the Food Stamp program by $127 billion over ten years, effectively privatize Medicare, and likely increase taxes on the middle cl ass while dramatically cutting them for the rich and corporations, actually making taxes on the rich lower than at any other time since Herbert Hoover’s presidency. At the end of the day, Ryan’s budget would leave the safety net in tatters, investments in Main Street severely under-funded, and would have seniors paying the majority of their income for health care, destroying the promise of Medicare — a system that Americans actually want expanded, not crippled. And while these conservatives are quick to ask Main Street to pay for debt that it did not primarily cause, they have no problem exempting some of the nation’s biggest dirty energy corporations from fair sacrifice. Last month, House Republicans effectively said “so be it,” as they voted in lockstep to protect billions of dollars in corporate welfare for Big Oil.
THE PROGRESSIVE PATH: While conservatives seem intent on blaming the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the middle class for deficits that they did not primarily cause, progressives are promoting plans that tackle the deficit by promoting fair sacrifice and responsibility. The CAP report “The First Step: A Progressive Plan for Meaningful Deficit Reduction” lays out a number of progressive deficit reduction steps that rely equally on raising revenues and cutting spending. It calls for implementing a graduated surtax on adjusted gross income for households making more than $1,000,000 a year, imposing a $5 per barrel fee on imported oil, and other measures that, when combined with spending cuts like wasteful tax expenditures, subsidies for Big Oil, a downsized defense budget more appropriate to our needs, and other measures, would yield single-year deficit reduction of $255 billion. This plan would stabilize the debt situation by 2015. This plan would stabilize the budget situation by 2015. Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Cauc us (CPC) has put out its own budget proposal, called “The People’s Budget,” which if enacted would reach primary balance in 2014 and result in a budget surplus by 2021. The major proposals within the budget include, but are not limited to, enacting a millionaire’s tax, initiating a progressive estate tax, ending corporate welfare for the dirty fuels industry, reining in the defense budget, and enacting a public option in the health care system as well as authorizing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower drug prices. Economist and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs notes that the CPC budget is a “truly centrist initiative,” if judged by American public opinion. Progressive economist Dean Baker has proposed allowing Medicare beneficiaries to seek care overseas, taking advantage of cheaper health care systems. Baker estimates that if fifty percent of Medicare beneficiaries opted for this globalized option, then taxpayers would save more than $40 billion a year by 2020. Additionally, there are numerous proposals for a financial transactions tax — which would ask that some of the very same banks that caused the global financial crisis would be responsible for helping us pay for it. A Dean Baker analysis of these plans finds that a “0.25 percent tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other Wall Street financial instruments…would easily raise between $50 billion and $150 billion annually,” while doing little to actually harm economic productivity. While there is healthy debate among progressives about these ideas, they make one thing clear: there is a way to reduce long-term de ficits that does not have to unduly harm Main Street America and that asks for fair sacrifice that includes the richest among us.
Be a Seed for Change 
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