The Ryan budget is a remarkable document: all of its budget cuts hammer working class families, seniors, and students -- while all of its tax cuts go straight to millionaires. It does almost nothing to deal with the deficit, yet still manages to deal a death blow to virtually every member of the working middle class and everyone trying to work their way into it. It is especially hard on seniors and the most vulnerable in society in the midst of the toughest economic times since the Great Depression, doing serious economic damage to anyone who isn't a millionaire, oil company, or Wall Street bank. The good news, for those who are millionaires? They get so many economic benefits it will be hard to keep track of them all.
Let's start with the deficit itself. According to a new Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report, the actual deficit reduction in the Ryan plan would be only an average of $15 billion a year over the next 10 years. If we end up at a consistent 2.8 percent unemployment rate in spite of all the economic devastation this budget would bring to the middle class (which would be the lowest unemployment since the peak years of the 1950s), get out of the wars we are in pretty quickly, start no new wars or humanitarian "police actions," have the kind of income growth we haven't seen since the 1960s, and have no big terrorist attacks or natural disasters we have to deal with, the Ryan budget theoretically gets us to a balanced budget by about 2040.
Great. I can get to a balanced budget a lot faster than that, and do it without dismantling Medicare and Medicaid, and without taking an axe to Pell Grants, Head Start, and meals for shut-in seniors and hungry children. Heck, Jan Schakowsky's plan balances the entire budget except for interest payments on the national debt in five years. You can easily balance the budget in less than 10 years, even including those interest payments, simply by cutting the waste in military spending, reforming the government contracting procedures, ending tax loopholes for investment bankers and offshore companies, ending subsidies to oil companies and big agribusinesses, taxing speculative financial trades, and having millionaires pay taxes at the same rate they did under Ronald Reagan.
The Ryan budget has nothing -- not a single frickin' thing -- to do with cutting the federal deficit. It is all about income redistribution, simple as that. If you take away the budget savings Ryan claims from projecting that the wars we are in will wind down soon, he has $4.3 trillion in budget cuts and $4.2 trillion in tax cuts. And I bet you can guess which fact comes next: the budget cuts are targeted almost 100 percent at programs that help low-income families and the working middle class, while the tax cuts are almost entirely directed toward the wealthiest 10 percent. In fact, that comment on taxes is an understatement: Citizens for Tax Justice has an analysis showing that 90 percent of Americans will see their taxes go up under the Ryan budget, because the tax breaks his bill calls for actually total more than $4.1 trillion. The bottom 80 percent would pay $1,700 more in taxes under Ryan's plan, while the top 1 percent (those making more than $460,000 dollars per year) would pay more than $211,000 less on average. As the folks at CTJ say, "It is difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade while requiring 90% of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Ryan has met that daunting challenge."
In the meantime, the plan:
The modern Republican Party has been taken over by a lunatic fringe of conservatives that are making a concerted, determined assault on the American working middle class. They are trying to destroy unions for firefighters, cops, teachers, and nurses. They want to make dramatic cuts in Social Security, or privatize it entirely. They want to end the guaranteed health coverage of Medicare, and put seniors on their own, at the mercy of private insurance companies. They want to make dramatic cuts in nursing home coverage and medical care for the disadvantaged through Medicaid. They want to slash funding for Pell Grants, Head Start, education, veterans benefits, and disability benefits. They want to slash funding that allows the EPA to enforce the laws that keep our water and air clean, and slash the funding for the oversight that helps consumers and homeowners defend themselves against Wall Street predators.
Why do these conservatives want to do all this? Well, partly because they just hate government and everything it does, but mostly so they can give more tax cuts to millionaires, and subsidies and loopholes to big oil companies and banks. The Ryan budget, the attacks on unions, Eric Cantor's admission that "these programs [such as Social Security] cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be," and Spencer Bachus stating "my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks" are all part of the same story. These priorities seem pretty strange to me, and they probably do to you, but to the Republican Party, they are just business as usual. You have to dance with those who brung you, as the old saying goes, and the Koch brothers and the Wall Street bankers brought these Republicans to the dance.
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So, it is more like Obama wants to raise taxes on the middle class, while the real Millionaires, Mike, probably will be little affected. The Ryan plan supports the middle class by forcing the government to stop spending their money. For example, the average Federal worker makes more than the average private worker and the taxes the poorer private worker pays support the salaries of the wealthier people. The truth is Mike, that the democrats tax the poorer to pay the wealthier. An the truth is that in some parts of the country, and at some ages, and under some small business structures, reporting $250,000.00 is not RICH. So if you don't want to give Millionaires taxes breaks, that's one thing, but the arbitrary number of $250,000.00 makes no sense. So someone making $200,000.00/year is not rich? Where did this arbitrary number which reflect upper-middle class families (middle class, not upper class) come from? I say protect the entire middle class from tax hikes. If you make more, pay more and we do that already and the tax code should be fair, but that is different that fairness through taxation.
But that is very unlikely to happen. HP is great, put it is kept in a little box where no one but us reads it. The information here is not getting out because the 1% do not want it to become a part of the national dialogue.
What we need is less spending. Not raising taxes on the poorer (which is what the democrats are going to do).
And you on the public dole, really, that you make more than the private sector and retire younger...really that means that your salaries are coming from the taxation of people making less and working longer...its not labor solidarity when you protest a trim back on your benefits. It is purely a spoiled attitude when you don't see that you are taxing the poorer to pay the wealthier...that what these salaries and benefits do...so if you want to have solidarity with the labor force, join use, get less and stop expecting to have our money to maintain your higher salaries, greater benefits and earlier retirements. God bless you, but stop being spoiled.
Believe me, most of the working poor labor every bit as hard as the working rich-- and with a lot less.
Meanwhile, we have 1% of the country with more wealth than the bottom 90%. Do you seriously think that this distribution is fair? Shouldn't the tax code target these people with a much higher rate?
My point was also to challenge the number of $250,000.00. Aren't people making $200,000.00 or even $100,000.00/ year rich?
$250,000.00 at 50 years old is well off on Long Island, really, but I don't think that you fall into that category of "rich". You are upper-middle class, not "The Rich" and you should pay more taxes than the average person in Long Beach and you already do.
Now if you are single and 22 and live in Ohio and make $250,000.00 year, you may be moving toward the upper class.
There will always be richer and poorer and our tax code should be fair with this (ie: the rich pay more), but a fair tax code is not the equivalent of achieving fairness through taxation.
My point was that $250,000.00/year seems like an arbitrary to then call a person "Rich"or if it does, then why aren't those making $200,000.00 RICH too....its an arbitrary number and the president loses my support for calling people at $250,000.00 rich, but not those at $150,000.00.
The private sector supports the public sector and progressives treat private sector taxpayers as if they are the enemy of the state.
A recession strikes the private sector and the public sector remedy is to raise taxes so the public unions can maintain their lifestyle.
The republicans are trying stop the government efforts to continuously raise taxes on the private sector and this is who I support.
And I am a middle class taxpayer.
The states that manage themselves responsibly (like Florida) pay out more federal taxes then they receive.
The U.S. Government borrows nearly half of what it spends.
The Government is incompetent and Constitutional Amendments need to be addressed to control these people.
or make a subsidiary in other country which is favorable for taxation?
do you realize if you raise the taxes again and again on the "rich" and the "corporation" what will happen? you have a mini example right here
New Jersey, California and Illinois --> Arizona, Texas and Utah.
Wake up. we do not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.