Tag Archives: deficit

The Republican and Democratic Conventions Told Us a Great Deal about the Parties

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If anyone was in any doubt that the Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will run on anything but their actual policy prescriptions for the country, the GOP convention should have dispelled them.

Ryan’s dishonesty and Romney’s vapidity were telling not for the words they spoke but for those they omitted. Their speeches were devoid of specific policy ideas or elucidations on the broad themes they have proposed – you know, like cutting taxes primarily for the wealthy while increasing the defense budget, but also reducing the deficit; all to be paid for by unspecified cuts to non-defense discretionary spending.

How does the arithmetic on that work exactly? Well it doesn’t, as Bill Clinton pointed out in his brilliant address at the Democratic convention even as he made the very word an applause line; or at least not without massive reductions in spending on everything from homeland security to the national parks to education programs, to services for returning veterans, to all manner of help for the poor and most vulnerable in our society. That would certainly bring a change in direction to the country, one which shreds an already tattered safety net and would serve to widen the already yawning gap between the rich and the rest of us. In comparison the Democratic convention was, if not a feast for policy wonks, at least a decent meal, particularly Clinton’s fifty minutes.

Republicans love to talk about the American Dream applying to everyone but the fact is that, for them and us, it’s just words. Upward mobility has diminished dramatically in the US in the last thirty years as wealth has increasingly become concentrated in the hands of the few. Meanwhile countries that once were hampered by strict class divisions and ruling aristocracies have now surpassed us in the opportunities they offer for everyone to rise above the economic level to which they were born.

And what does the GOP offer? Well, more of the same policies that brought us to this point, but on steroids. More massive tax cuts for the wealthy and slashing of government programs that help the poor and middle class (and their children) to obtain the skills they need to compete in a global economy for high paying jobs.

No wonder that at their respective conventions, Democrats were happy to talk about real policies to help ordinary Americans while Republicans were all but silent.

Paul Ryan is a Fake Fiscal Conservative

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Paul Ryan’s budget is a lie. Paul Ryan does not care about deficits. Paul Ryan cares about the redistribution of wealth – from the poor to the rich.

His tax plan includes a 10% reduction of the top tax rate from 35% to 25% and a new 10% tax rate for everybody else. The plan calls for the elimination of taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inheritance. Almost all of these types of income go to the very richest Americans.

People earning over $1 million, a group representing one half of one percent of all tax payers, would receive 37% of all tax savings. Their tax savings would average out to $265,000 a piece resulting in an increase of their after-tax incomes of 12.5%. The middle class would receive tax cuts that would increase their after-tax incomes by 1.9%.

The Tax Policy Center predicts that the loss of revenue would be $4.6 trillion over a ten-year period. Ryan says his budget is revenue neutral because he will offset the lost revenue with an equal amount of spending cuts and tax-loophole closures – none of which he has the balls to identify. Based on his comments about Obama’s military budget, we can safely assume there would be no cuts there, and based on his zero tax rate on dividends and capital gains, we can assume he isn’t going to close the hedge-fund manager loophole, so what does that leave? Sounds like safety-net programs is the only place left he could come up with $4.6 trillion in savings.

If he could get congress to pass those kinds of cuts to Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, Pell grants, and unemployment benefits; people without jobs or very low paying jobs who rely on government assistance to get by would be in a world of hurt.

He’s not saying how much he would cut and from what programs because he knows congress would never approve of such drastic cuts. (Citizens would turn against those in office that cut their benefits, wouldn’t they?)

Ryan’s budget is not conservative. It’s just another multi-trillion dollar transfer of wealth back to the super rich, and it would result in colossal federal debt. He calls his plan “A Roadmap for America’s Future.” If America’s future is found at the top of a ravine rimmed with the opulent homes of the super rich who drink Dom Perignon from crystal glasses as they gaze down at the masses of the burned out poor and middle classes, then Ryan is a brilliant cartographer.

He’s not.

Paul Ryan is a punk for the 1% and, for his extraordinary mendacity, he will be rewarded by them.

Karl Rove’s Audacity of Mendacity

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Karl Rove continues doing what he excelled at doing for President George W. Bush: Presenting the Untruth as Truth.

Today in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece he set his sights on President Obama’s campaign video, The Road We’ve Traveled.

One of Rove’s most mendacious statements is about the debt created under Bush compared to Obama. Rove states that, “the administration has piled up more debt in three years and two months ($4.93 trillion) than his predecessor did in eight years ($4.8 trillion).” Rove, who was deeply involved in the workings of the Bush administration should know better and probably does, but he doesn’t want you to know what he knows. I’ll let The Old Viking explain. Here’s an excerpt from a recent email:

Since 1980 the federal fiscal year begins on October 1.

Bush was elected in 2000 and took office in January 2001. At the end of that budget the national debt was $5.8 trillion (57% of the GDP)

Bush left office in January 2009. He created the 2009 budget under which Obama operated for 8 mos & 2 weeks. At the end of that budget the national debt was $11.9 trillion (84% of the GDP)

Bush’s budgets increased the national debt by $6.1 trillion because of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the tax cuts and the bailout packages.

Obama’s first budget year ended on September 30, 2010. Total national debt was $13.6 trillion (93% of the GDP)

As of February 7, 2012 the national debt was $15.4 trillion (101% of the GDP).

Therefore it is fair to conclude that Obama’s budgets–including those that originated in the GOP House of Representatives–have increased the national debt by $3.5 trillion (29%), not $6.4 trillion (64%)

Rove’s numbers in his Wall Street Journal column are way off, and it’s no surprise that the WSJ, now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (Fox News), let him get away with such falsehoods.

Rove also says the economy Obama inherited wasn’t “the worst” since The Great Depression and goes on to complain about Obama’s stimulus package and very successful auto-industry bailout that saved hundreds of thousands of jobs.

But worst of all, he brushes aside one of Obama’s major accomplishments: the successful mission to find Osama bin Laden that ended in his death. Rove strapped on his big brass balls before writing this:

Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film, “that’s the call I would have made.”

Two problems: First, George W. Bush lost interest in putting himself in that situation, so he never had the opportunity to make the call.  And second, thanks to News Corp, Rove got away with presenting only part of what Bill Clinton actually said:

He took the harder and more honorable path. When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, “I hope that’s the call I would have made.”

After being attacked by Obama supporters, the WSJ edited the original column by adding “I hope” to Clinton’s quote. If the editors had any balls they would have put in the whole quote, but then that would have underminded Rove’s phony criticism even more than what was done by adding those two words.

Karl Rove is a despicable man that only the likes News Corp would hire to offer political opinions that pit President Obama against his boy George Bush, who will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever.

The Fiscally Irresponsible Republicans vs. Obama

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It’s not just Mitt Romney that has a tax plan that will bankrupt our country. All four of them have plans that will significantly increase our national debt. Here’s a chart from Krugman’s blog that tells the tale:

 

The graph shows your new Republican Party is not much different from the Republican Party of a decade ago. Who was it that said, “Deficits don’t matter”? Oh yeah, that was Dick Cheney, and the four candidates running against President Obama all believe it too.

The chart shows Ron Paul’s plan is close to Obama’s, but only because it relies on spending cuts that would be nearly impossible to get through congress (read Krugman for details). Romney’s plan is more expensive, but Santorum and Gingrich are offering what appear to be national bankruptcy plans.

So why are Republican candidates who are constantly attacking Obama for our huge debt (that he inherited from the last Republican president) offering plans that will make it worse? The answer is simple. Regardless of what Republicans tell you (according to a recent Gallup Poll, the more wealthy the Republicans, the more likely they are to say they are concerned about the debt than they are about unemployment) they don’t give a damn about the debt – they haven’t since the mid-eighties. They are most concerned about keeping their taxes low so that the government can’t give their money away to who they perceive as the undeserving masses. You know; the people who lost their jobs, and the people who lost their health insurance when they lost their jobs, people on Medicare, and people on food stamps.

So now you have four Republican candidates promising to slash taxes to impossibly low rates and cut government spending to impossibly low levels to sell their tax-and-cut plans that make the rich richer and screw everyone else.

Same as it ever was.

Rich People Love Mitt Romney

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Rich people are turning out in record numbers for their wealthy, capitalist, ”job creating,” candidate. The Washington Post reports:

In 2008, 22 percent of GOP primary voters in Michigan made at least $100,000, and that group made up 21 percent of the electorate in Ohio, according to exit polls.

This year, 33 percent of voters in Michigan made that much money, while 30 percent of Ohio voters did.

In both cases, the number of wealthy voters grew by about 50 percent — a pretty stunning increase in that demographic over just a four-year span.

And an argument could be made that the increase put Romney over the top.

In both states, Romney won this demographic by 14 points but didn’t win among any other income demographic. And given he won by such small margins overall — 1 point in Ohio and 3 points in Michigan — it’s not unreasonable to think he would have lost those states without the uptick in wealthy voters.

I wonder if it has anything to his latest tax plan that provides more huge tax cuts for the rich.

Romney’s latest plan would cut the rate of all six brackets by 20% thereby lowering the income tax on top earners from the current, already-too-low rate of 35% to 28%. (Assuming all of their income is earned income and not unearned income that is taxed at a way-too-low rate of 15%.) So for example, if some hotshot Wall Street investment banker was able to skim off $5M dollars in earned income from his clients, his tax liability would drop by $350,000. The average tax break for all households under Romney’s plan would be $2,900.

Romney would also repeal the new ACA taxes scheduled to go into effect in 2013: the 0.9% tax on wages and the 3.8% tax on investment income of high-income individual taxpayers.

And Romney would reduce the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% and declare a “tax holiday” for corporations to bring their overseas profits back to the USA.

No wonder the rich are voting in favor of Romney.  He’ll fatten their oversized pocketbooks with hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax cuts!

And you may be wondering what kind of effect Romney’s tax-slashing plan would have on the federal budget.  Two recent studies predict Romney’s plan will add trillions to the deficit over the next ten years. A study by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says it will increase the deficit by $2.3 trillion, and the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says it will increase it by $3 trillion.

That’s what we’d get from the candidate with “business experience.”

Gridlock in Washington is Voter-Induced

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It’s mind-boggling to me how the public and media continue to delude themselves over the principal cause of the governmental policy paralysis that grips Washington.  

The latest example of gridlock is the failure of the so-called super committee, born of the debt-ceiling fight during the summer, and comprised equally of Democrats and Republicans to reach agreement on $1.2 trillion of deficit reduction. 

Yet the failure of the deficit reducing committee and the current governmental dysfunction was perfectly predictable and, indeed, unavoidable thanks to the electoral choices the country made in the fall 2010 mid-term elections. Americans, in short, seem to be in denial over the simple truism that elections matter.

In 2010 for example, a grumpy electorate focused on Democrats as the scapegoats for the continued struggles of the economy, the housing crisis and the high unemployment rate. Never mind that it was GOP’s deregulatory zeal that had created the conditions for the financial collapse that, in turn, precipitated the crisis in the first place. Never mind also that Democrats had passed a stimulus bill which, when combined with the TARP passed under the previous administration, had almost certainly prevented the Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression. And never mind also that the 111th Congress had been extraordinarily productive, passing legislation that curbed credit card company abuses, reformed the banking industry to avoid future financial meltdowns, enacted much needed reforms to food safety and student loans and, as the crowning achievement, overhauled the health care system to expand coverage to most of the uninsured while curbing the worst abuses of the health insurance industry.  All of these laws benefitted ordinary working Americans, almost always over the strenuous objections of powerful industries and the GOP.

Yet because Democrats, despite worthy efforts, failed to fix in two years an economy that most now recognize will take up to a decade or more to repair, the country booted them from power in the House of Representatives and reduced their Senate majority in favor of a Tea-Party- dominated GOP whose principal characteristic is an unwillingness or inability to listen to reason. Hence the ridiculous brinkmanship over raising the debt ceiling and almost fanatical refusal to consider tax increases on America’s wealthy to address the deficit.

Of course it’s much easier to blame “government” than to acknowledge our own culpability for the mess we created in the 2010 mid-terms. I mean, what were we expecting exactly? Peace, harmony and bipartisanship? 

In 2012 the stakes are much higher. All I ask is that we make a clear choice between two contrasting visions of what sort of society America will be in the future. And that whatever we decide, we do not blame a faceless, amorphous government, that we voters played the pivotal role in shaping, for what follows. 

Obama’s Battle with the Boehner Tea Party enters the Fourth Quarter

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Today John Boehner presented the Tea Party’s deficit reduction plan that – in spite of President Obama’s passionate call last Friday for a bill that asks for shared sacrifice from the poor, the middle class, and the rich – still consists only of cuts in government expenditures that will hurt only the middle and lower classes. 

Obama took the stage during prime time tonight to summarize the plans offered from both sides of the aisle, and again the president said all the right things.  Here he describes his balanced approach:

The first approach says, let’s live within our means by making serious, historic cuts in government spending.  Let’s cut domestic spending to the lowest level it’s been since Dwight Eisenhower was President.  Let’s cut defense spending at the Pentagon by hundreds of billions of dollars.  Let’s cut out waste and fraud in health care programs like Medicare — and at the same time, let’s make modest adjustments so that Medicare is still there for future generations.  Finally, let’s ask the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to give up some of their breaks in the tax code and special deductions.

And then he places blame for this reasonable plan not gaining traction in congress squarely on the Tea Party caucus:

The only reason this balanced approach isn’t on its way to becoming law right now is because a significant number of Republicans in Congress are insisting on a different approach — a cuts-only approach -– an approach that doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to contribute anything at all.

…Most Americans, regardless of political party, don’t understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask a corporate jet owner or the oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don’t get.  How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries?  How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don’t need and didn’t ask for? 

That’s not right.  It’s not fair.  We all want a government that lives within its means, but there are still things we need to pay for as a country -– things like new roads and bridges; weather satellites and food inspection; services to veterans and medical research.

Bravo Obama! Now how are you going to get your balanced approach to prevail?  Will the Democratically controlled Senate fight for you?  Tonight you said:

…The Senate has introduced a plan to avoid default, which makes a down payment on deficit reduction and ensures that we don’t have to go through this again in six months.

 I think that’s a much better approach, although serious deficit reduction would still require us to tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform.

Uh… that’s nice, but if you were waiting to hear the part about how the Senate was holding fast to its demand for increased revenue from profitable corporations and billionaires in exchange for painful cuts to the federal budget, you’ll have to keep waiting. 

 Joshua Green described Harry Reid’s latest sorry senate plan this way:

From the outset of the debt-ceiling fight, House Republicans have made two clear demands: any agreement to raise the debt limit must include offsetting cuts of at least $2.4 trillion and could not include any revenue increases. For a time, it appeared that some grand bargain to reform the tax code and entitlement programs might obviate these demands. But those talks fell apart. Democrats first pushed for a deal that would include roughly 3 to 1 spending cuts to revenue increases. Then 4 to 1. And then, last night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threw in the towel and announced he’ll introduce a bill with at least $2.7 trillion in cuts and no revenue increases at all. That’s a clear win for Republicans, although they’re certain to ask for more.

Yes, once again the Democrats have started by meeting Republicans midfield and then – instead of using favorable public opinion, an ethical game plan, a majority in one camp, and a skilled orator leading the team down the field to score some points for the average American – they  give ground, and give some more ground, and ultimately end up giving their greedy, government hating opponents more than they asked for in the first place.

Krugman nailed it with this early morning blog post:

The thing that strikes me is that this administration just keeps on making the same mistake. Again and again, policy is predicated on the notion that Republicans will act reasonably; again and again, they don’t. And yet Obama and company never seem to learn.

Is it too early to start drinking?

No, in these times it’s never too early to start drinking.  Drink away Paul, I am right there with you.

Deficit Reduction Must Include Tax Increases

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Republican insistence on taking tax increases off the table in talks on deficit reduction as a condition for raising the national debt ceiling is unrealistic, unworkable and cruel.  Democrats should not cave no matter what the polls say. The result if they do will be a huge hit against America’s most vulnerable citizens, particularly after state and local budget cuts have already inflicted great damage.

President Obama has rightly pointed to the pernicious effect that GOP budget proposals will inevitably have on federally funded scientific and technological research and development programs that enhance the country’s competitive edge.  When added to destructive cuts to social programs that help working Americans at both the federal and state levels, these spending cuts promise to seriously set the country back over time rather than help to propel it forward.

There is no evidence to support the fantasy peddled by the GOP that attacking the budget deficit through spending cuts alone will somehow jumpstart the economy. On the contrary, there is more reason to believe that it will have the opposite effect.

The GOP has taken particular aim at health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. For example, Republicans have lined up behind Congressman Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher program. They deny the claims of critics that this will, over time, dramatically increase out of pocket expenditures for seniors as the value of the proposed premium support fails to keep pace with health cost inflation. Yet they are at pains to reassure existing seniors who are 55 or over that they will continue to be covered by the existing Medicare program. Question: If Ryan’s proposal is so great, why not implement it as soon as possible after it becomes law?  Maybe because seniors will learn that critics of the plan are right.

GOP governors in particular rail against the growth of Medicaid that’s eating state budgets; they rarely mention that the reason is because demand has exploded along with the unemployment rate stemming from the financial meltdown and deep recession of 2008. In fact, the growth of Medicaid is an implicit rebuke of the private health insurance system’s failure to provide affordable coverage to lower income and newly unemployed Americans.  And GOP calls for “flexibility” in administering the program, which is jointly funded by the federal government and states, is simply code for raising eligibility requirements so as to be able to throw thousands off the rolls. And what happens to them then? The GOP has no answer.

It’s true that the rate of federal spending is at historic highs and that we must make significant and painful cuts to such programs as agricultural subsidies, and the defense budget, and wring more efficiencies from Medicare and Medicaid.  

However, we should not forget that tax revenues as a percentage of GDP are at low levels by historic standards, despite fanciful Republican claims that we are over-taxed. It is this imbalance that needs to be rectified, but not by spending cuts alone. No civilized society should balance its books on the backs of its most vulnerable citizens or its children, and to do so by seriously reducing its competitive edge is simply risking its economic future. 

In the situation in which America finds itself, there is only one thing worse than raising taxes – and that’s not raising them.

Mediscare and Other GOP Healthcare Myths

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Congressman Paul Ryan has been bleating pitifully of late about “mediscare” tactics from Democrats in their criticisms of his proposed 2012 budget. In doing so he glosses over the fact that he and all other Republican lawmakers spent 2009 and 2010 engaging in mediscare on steroids as they attacked the Affordable Care Act passed by Democrats and signed by President Obama.

The ACA merely calls for defunding government-subsidized private insurance supplementary plans and to find efficiencies in the Medicare program that don’t sacrifice quality of care. What we got from Republicans were screams of “rationing” and “death panels.”

What’s more Ryan’s budget does end Medicare as we know it and no rhetorical contortions, such as comparing it to the insurance plan of members of congress, or to the Medicare drug benefit, can conceal the fact. Ryan’s proposal differs in one critical respect: unlike those examples he cited in a desperate effort to reassure Americans, the value of his proposed Medicare voucher/benefit will not keep pace with health inflation meaning that, over time, its value will inevitably decrease and seniors’ out-of-pocket expenses soar. They will, in effect, be in the same boat as those working Americans who depend on the private insurance market and who are woefully underinsured. The chronically ill will take the biggest hit, a theme that runs through all GOP healthcare proposals (remember medical savings accounts?).

Ryan’s plan founders on two fundamental misconceptions held by the right-wing in this country: that healthcare is just another consumer product on which we should make our own decisions and thus can be successfully regulated by market forces; and that the free market is the most efficient way to control health costs.

The second proposition is easily disproved. America spends a much higher percentage of GDP on health than, say, the United Kingdom or Canada. Yet those countries (and all other advanced nations for that matter) provide universal healthcare with zero out-of pocket expenses to their citizens, while the private insurance system here leaves scores of millions of Americans either uninsured or so under-insured that they risk personal bankruptcy if they incur large medical expenses. The reason is simple. Government-regulated systems abroad are able to wring far greater efficiencies from employing rational rationing of services, than is the private insurance industry in America, which employs irrational rationing based on whether you are fortunate enough to have a job with health insurance or rich enough for it not to matter, or whether you are insurable because you don’t have a pre-existing condition. And Medicare, despite room for improvement, still delivers more bang for the buck than private insurance companies, with their 15% administrative overhead.

There are two key flaws in attempting to treat health care like any other consumer product. First, it assumes that we can make decisions on buying healthcare insurance and services as we do in deciding whether to buy a new car or pay for private school for my kid. The fact is I can do without those things if I decide I can’t afford them or they just aren’t cost effective. That isn’t the case with health care which will be needed by all of us, whether we like it or not, and where delay can be fatal. And secondly, am I really the best judge of what health services I need? Are any of us? That’s why we have doctors and other health professionals to help us through those decisions; making them alone based in part on the economics, which is the essence of the GOP’s health care ideology, has far greater potential for higher costs later and lousy outcomes as we delay or defer necessary and maybe urgent treatment, or purchase a bare bones policy with huge deductibles.

Everyone with a brain knows that Ryan’s privatization proposal for Medicare is not about cutting the deficit but, rather, a reflection of the GOP’s ideologically-driven hatred of a government program that works. The phony mantle of deficit reduction did not, however, shield the GOP from the ire of the electorate. To their credit even seniors who would be grandfathered (no pun intended) under the present system have rejected it.

There’s no doubt that many billions in savings are possible from making Medicare more efficient, but the starting point has to be to preserve it in its present form, and to implement the ACA in its entirety for the rest of us. For Americans to follow the GOP on health care is to court disaster.

Republicans Want to Make the Rich Richer by Screwing the Middle Class

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Now that the big news stories about President Obama’s successful mission to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the Republicans’ sideline chatter about giving President Bush, who hasn’t been in the game for the last two years, some props even though he gave up on the search for bin Laden sometime around 2005 has died down, the Republicans have renewed their fight for the only thing they’ve ever given a good goddamn about- screwing the middle class and MAKING THE RICH RICHER!

Yes John Boehner kicked off the week calling for drastic cuts in spending on programs that benefit the poor and elderly and another HUGE tax cut for the richest of the very rich.  This I heard on NPR this morning while driving to work:

Republican House Speaker John Boehner told the Economic Club of New York earlier this week that he’s holding out for big cuts in federal spending — cuts measured not in billions of dollars, but in trillions.

“Without significant spending cuts and changes in the way we spend the American people’s money, there will be no increase in the debt limit,” Boehner said.

The only practical way to achieve spending cuts of the size Boehner is talking about is to go after popular entitlement programs, such as Medicare.

Boehner says those programs should be on the negotiating table, along with every other part of the budget — except for one thing.

“I’ve made it pretty clear that raising taxes is off the table,” Boehner said. “Raising taxes on the very people that we expect to invest in our economy and create jobs will have a devastating impact on our ability to balance the budget.”

Yes he’s made it clear that raising taxes  – even if the taxes are raised only for the grossly undertaxed top 2% earners and highly profitable corporations that use loopholes to not only avoid paying taxes but receive government subsidies – is “off the table.”  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed the same message by saying “The American people clearly believe we have the deficit problem because we spend too much, not because we tax too little.”

The NPR story recorded these statements about the Republican plan for economic disaster and followed with:

Federal spending as a share of the overall economy is at its highest level since World War II, while tax revenues are at their lowest level since 1950.

That’s a fact:  Spending is high and income taxes are low, so anyone or any party that puts forth a deficit-reducing budget plan that is made up of spending cuts without any increases in revenue is not serious at all about deficit reduction.

These guys may seem incredibly stupid on the surface, but they aren’t.  Republicans think the American public is stupid enough to believe their false rhetoric is really about fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction and not about their real goal:  Dismantling Roosevelt’s New Deal and funneling more wealth to the super rich at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.

How much do they wish to cut taxes for the rich and how will their plan screw children and the poor? Think Progress reported today:

Digging into the specifics of Toomey’s alterations to the tax system, it consolidates the income tax system into fewer brackets (though where Ryan leaves the final number unspecified, Toomey settles on three brackets) while lowering marginal tax rates. For corporations, it cuts their tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, while instituting a territorial approach to taxation, that exempts corporations from paying taxes on overseas profits. … it does indeed follow Ryan’s model and hold all marginal tax rates to a maximum of 25 percent.

…

In reviewing the House Republicans’ budget, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that the proposal would require “severe reductions ” in health-care for children and the disabled, while also curtailing long-term care for seniors. On top of that the CBPP also found that nearly two-thirds of Ryan’s cuts — $2.9 trillion in all – would impact low-income Americans. More recently, The Kaiser Foundation found that carrying out this scheme would kick between 31 and 44 million Americans off the Medicaid roles by 2021, leaving them without any other readily affordable options for coverage.

In spite of how angry these stories made me, I am optimistic enough to think the public will grasp that, no matter how they frame it, the Republicans’ plan is the same as it ever was:   Cut taxes to sharply reduce revenue and then call for severe spending cuts that will destroy government safety nets.   The public will see this incarnation of their ever recurring plan as a giant step backwards to a time before the Great Depression when the wealthy squeezed the life out of the middle and lower classes and left children, the poor, and the infirm to fend for themselves.

President Obama’s plan to raise taxes and cut spending without destroying safety nets or killing much needed job creating expenditures on infrastructure rebuilding and education programs isn’t perfect, but it is a far more serious proposal than anything the Republicans have offered.