In announcing the Republicans' new budget and tax plan Tuesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said "We are sharpening the contrast between the path that we're proposing and the path of debt and decline the president has placed us upon."
Ryan is right about sharpening the contrast. But the plan doesn't do much to reduce the debt. Even by its own estimate the deficit would drop to $166 billion in 2018 and then begin growing again.
The real contrast is over what the plan does for the rich and what it does to everyone else. It reduces the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25 percent. This would give the wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of at least $150,000 a year.
The money would come out of programs for the elderly, lower-middle families, and the poor.
Seniors would get subsidies to buy private health insurance or Medicare -- but the subsidies would be capped. So as medical costs increased, seniors would fall further and further behind.
Other cuts would come out of food stamps, Pell grants to offset the college tuition of kids from poor families, and scores of other programs that now help middle-income and the poor.
The plan also calls for repealing Obama's health care overhaul, thereby eliminating healthcare for 30 million Americans and allowing insurers to discriminate against (and drop from coverage) people with preexisting conditions.
The plan would carve an additional $19 billion out of next year's "discretionary" spending over and above what Democrats agreed to last year. Needless to say, discretionary spending includes most of programs for lower-income families.
Not surprisingly, the Pentagon would be spared.
So what's the guiding principle here? Pure Social Darwinism. Reward the rich and cut off the help to anyone who needs it.
Ryan says too many Americans rely on government benefits. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency."
Well, I have news for Paul Ryan. Almost 23 million able-bodied people still can't find work. They're not being lulled into dependency. They and their families could use some help. Even if the economy continues to generate new jobs at the rate it's been going the last three months, we wouldn't see normal rates of unemployment until 2017.
And most Americans who do have jobs continue to lose ground. New research by professors Emmanual Saez and Thomas Pikkety show that the average adjusted gross income of the bottom 90 percent was $29,840 in 2010 -- down $127 from 2009 and down $4,842 from 2000 -- and just slightly higher than it was forty-six years ago in 1966 (all figures adjusted for inflation).
They could use better schools, access to higher education, lower-cost health care, improved public transportation, and lots of other things Ryan and his colleagues are intent on removing.
Meanwhile, America's rich continue to grow richer -- and many of them (and their heirs) are being lulled into lives whose hardest task is summoning the help.
Anyone who thought the Great Recession might reduce America's wild lurch toward wild inequality should think again. The most recent data show that just 15,600 super-rich households -- the top 1 tenth of 1 percent -- pocketed 37 percent of all the economic gains in 2010. The rest of the gains went to others in the top 10 percent.
Republican Social Darwinists are determined that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 be made permanent. Those cuts saved the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (roughly 1.4 million people) more money on their taxes last year than the rest of America's 141 million taxpayers received in total income.
Thank you, House Republicans, for "sharpening the contrast" between your radical Social Darwinism and those of us who still cling to the belief that the most fortunate have a responsibility to the rest.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
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You can own it all, but can you keep it?
That's always the trick.
We need to do both but we can't even get congress to do one.
"Thank you, House Republicans, for "sharpening the contrast" between your radical Social Darwinism and those of us who still cling to the belief that the most fortunate have a responsibility to the rest.'
I would say to hell with those more fortunate and let us without them vote in the era of the 99%--- or is it really the 90%? as another 9% rake in what the 1% leaves.
The money we are talking about was produced by the brains and muscles of the working class.Most of that disappears and is called profit.
With good people like you, I am hopeful that good will ALWAYS over comes evil...
Obama in 2012!
Do they really believe the American public is that ignorant?
And do they expect to gain the independent vote (which they will desperately need in November) by presenting THIS?
If everybody paid taxes then this country would be able to start reversing the debt and holding certain administrations accountable to how that tax money is spent
...the more debt we have the more we borrow and the more interest we have to pay leaving us with less and less money for our own national needs.
Keep those wars and trickle down coming.
Well, yeah..the corporate tax rate is 35% now which is why companies flee this country and go overseas..
the income tax burden now falls grotesquely on the top ten percent earners.. so it is time in this equal opportunity world of Reich for everyone to pay taxes and pull their fair share.... not just the wealthy
Thats right: Warren Buffett
Due to loopholes the effective rate is 10%, making it the lowest in the Western world.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harlan-green/corporate-tax-rates_b_1365489.html?ref=business
Life is so easy if you don't care that your worldview contains fundamental contradictions.
Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.
What DO the wealthy have a use for? Well, their egos are pretty much the same as even the poorest folk: they have a well-defined use for MORE. And here's the political process for Pure Social Darwinism: the wealthy will be happy to execute flag-burners, build a wall around the country, put same-sex advocates to death or better, put guns in your hands so you can do it yourself, start a war with Iran, paint a Christian cross on the capital building, and do or say absolutely anything else you'd like them to say (which they really don't give a hoot about) as like as they get your vote for their anointed con man.b This person will ensure that they get more... and the rest of us get the cross.