Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has had the temerity to do what no other member of Congress or President Obama has had the guts to do. He has unveiled a thoughtful, comprehensive, yet inadequate proposal aimed at preventing the implosion of the American economy.
Ryan’s Plan is breathtakingly bold and filled with high stakes political risk for anyone who dares support it. Here are its central elements:
Ryan’s Plan is $6.2 trillion less than the budget that President Obama sent to the Hill in February. Those savings are achieved by wiping out funding for Obama’s health care reform legislation and ending Medicare as an unlimited entitlement for persons younger than age 55. Instead they would qualify for what amounts to premium supports enabling them to purchase health insurance in the private market.
Medicaid, the federal health entitlement for the poor, would be reduced by over $700 billion over the coming decade. It would be transformed into a block grant program to the states.
Over the decade the plan would reduce domestic discretionary spending by about $1.6 trillion. This would take such spending back to 2008 levels.
Finally, Ryan’s plan would revamp the tax code for both individuals and corporations. It would reduce the top marginal rate from 35% to 25% and eliminate unspecified deductions and loopholes.
Even with all of the above, Ryan’s plan would take 30 years to eliminate the budget deficit. And those annual deficits will require more borrowing, borrowing that will increase the national debt over the next decade from $14.3 trillion to over $23 trillion.
And here’s what Ryan’s plan should have also proposed, but didn’t:
It doesn’t cross the bow of Social Security. It doesn’t propose significant reductions at the Pentagon or Homeland Security. And, true to Republican orthodoxy, it proposes no new taxes.
His plan is painful, but not perfect. But it is a legitimate starting point.
For it to have any chance of success it will be essential for a competing plan to emerge from the Gang of Six in the Senate. Led by Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the Gang of Six continues to work toward the development of a different, but equally bold plan to avert national economic Armageddon.
Meanwhile the Coward-In-Chief, who has no plan, is hunkered down in his bunker working on ways to savage the Republicans in his forthcoming campaign for a second term.
The savagery has already begun in the media. On the day that Ryan unveiled his plan, Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, waved a copy of it in front of the camera and intoned, “this thing’s got a skull and crossbones on it—death for seniors and the poor”.
We certainly can’t expect Tom Hanks to try to save the modern day Ryan. But maybe the Gang of Six will give him some much-needed cover.
LeRoy Goldman
April 6, 2011
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