Conservative Budget Lunacy

alternet.org — Conservative policies don't poll well, and the movement took a thumping in 2006 and 2008. Looking forward, the Republicans see their party sailing into some powerful demographic headwinds. Their true base are married white Americans who identify themselves as Christian, and that group is in a free-fall decline in the American electorate. Conservatives have always done a better job playing the “long game,” and they have their eyes set on a future in which majorities will be harder to come by. Thanks to a moribund economy, the Tea Party swept into Congress and state-houses across the country, and they want to take the opportunity to grab the prize while they can — restructuring government in a way that will endure beyond a single election. It's the Shock Doctrine at work, complete with trumped up deficit “crisis” as the Right's cassus belli.

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slate.com — Rep. Paul Ryan's 2012 budget has ambitions far beyond 2012. It aims not just to set priorities for a single year, but also to wrench the country back into the black. The theory is straightforward enough: Tax cuts to wealthy Americans foster prosperity that moves millions of (less wealthy) Americans back to work, with increasing wages. High earnings and employment bolster tax revenue. When combined with huge cuts in domestic spending and radical changes to Medicaid and Medicare, the budget balances out in about 20 years. Ryan's plan relies on economic forecasting from the Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis. Unfortunately, at least for Ryan, some of its numbers have been exposed as a bit fantastical. Which raises at least two questions: How did Heritage get it wrong? And can we trust its other numbers?

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nytimes.com — Many commentators swooned earlier this week after House Republicans, led by the Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, unveiled their budget proposals. They lavished praise on Mr. Ryan, asserting that his plan set a new standard of fiscal seriousness. Well, they should have waited until people who know how to read budget numbers had a chance to study the proposal. For the G.O.P. plan turns out not to be serious at all. Instead, it’s simultaneously ridiculous and heartless. How ridiculous is it? Let me count the ways — or rather a few of the ways, because there are more howlers in the plan than I can cover in one column.

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truthdig.com — What the meteoric career of Paul Ryan demonstrates is how easily impressed we are whenever a politician purports to restore solvency by punishing the poor and the elderly (while coddling the rich). The Wisconsin Republican congressman’s fiscal plan has won rave reviews from both the usual right-wing suspects and some self-styled centrists, who have praised him and his proposals as “serious,” “courageous” and even “uplifting.” By now, however, those who have actually examined the Ryan plan with care and competence know that those acclamations are highly exaggerated, which is probably a far too polite description.

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guardian.co.uk — Some writers whom I respect and who are friends of mine have written of Ryan's undeniable courage, a word that seems apt at first blush because he is a) taking on sacred crows and b) doing the opposite of pandering in some ways by presenting a plan that's politically risky. I suggest respectfully that these folks haven't yet completely thought this through. Ryan is still pandering with this plan. The question is to whom. And the answer is, as usual with Republicans, the top 1% or 2% of the income ladder. Unsurprisingly for a devout Randian, he is pandering to precisely the people he believes have earned his pandering, our John and Jane Galts who have demonstrated their "superiority" through their higher incomes. But to be fair, he's not only pandering to the top 1%. It actually gets worse.

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huffingtonpost.com — One of the nice things about Republicans when they get into positions of power is that they do our side favors by clarifying very quickly how extreme their ideas are. Newt Gingrich did it in 1995 with talk of sending kids to orphanages and cutting school lunch programs, along with his whining about having to sit in the back of Air Force One and that little shutdown-of-all-government thing. Now Paul Ryan, on behalf of the entire Republican Caucus in the House, is joining Scott Walker and other GOP Governors in doing the same.

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