The Center on Budge and Policy Priorities concludes: "Contrary to claims that the Ryan plan is fiscally responsible — which reflect a misunderstanding of CBO’s analysis of the proposal — the plan would leave the federal budget in dire straits for decades as a result of its massive tax cuts for wealthy households and its diversion of Social Security payroll taxes to private accounts. The plan attempts to reduce deficits and debt many decades into the future by making deep cuts in Social Security’s defined benefits and by eliminating guaranteed Medicare benefits and substantially cutting back on medical assistance for low-income families and seniors. Yet even with these sweeping changes, the plan fails to achieve its fiscal goal, since federal debt under the proposal would rise over the next four decades to unsustainable levels far in excess of 100 percent of GDP. The proposal also would seriously erode employer-sponsored health insurance coverage for working Americans and their families without instituting the accompanying reforms in health insurance needed to create a viable substitute. All in all, the Ryan Roadmap charts a radical course that, if they understood it, few Americans likely would want to follow."
Krugman includes this graph:
2 comments:
I would like to see Krugman's graph broken down by actual income figures.
It would make it a lot less abstract and much easier for the Janitor, bus driver or factory worker (if there are any left in the US) to easily see that they would be taxed at a higher rate than a billionaire.
I wonder what the Peter G. Peterson Foundation has to say about Ryan and vice-versa. Oh wait, I just happen to have a joint interview the two gave (to CNBC).
Here's the video.
http://andrewgbiggs.blogspot.com/2008/07/paul-ryan-and-david-walker-on.html
Of course in the interview Walker and Ryan are talking about "entitlements" and not taxes directly, but I imagine that they wouldn't be that far apart on any issue. I had to put "entitlement" in quotes because the republican propaganda machine has now managed to turn "entitlement" into a "bad word" like "liberal". It took them about 20 years but they did it. If nothing else they are persistent.
In the clip, although Ryan does most of the talking, David and Paul sound pretty sympatico with each other. They clearly didn't disagree on anything, and didn't challenge each other in any way.
TT
The 5 minute interview with 2 people format doesn't given them time to say much. At least it wasn't a stupid back and forth of talking points.
Ryan's plan at that level sounds fine but it's of course in the details that problems come out as this post (and previous ones I've made) have pointed out. His plan is basically dismantling Medicare and SS over time.
Walker I'm still at a different place with. In the NPR interview he gave more specifics and talked about means testing just medicare B and D and specifically about keeping both Medicare and SS as safety nets and chided Bush's SS plan as forgetting what the second S stood for. Millionaires getting discounts on medicare B probably is something we can/should fix. The one point he made that gave me some caution was that paying for this stuff won't happen by just increasing taxes on those who make >$250,000, he claims the math just doesn't work. That may be the case, I don't know. Walker does seem to have an approach of lets figure out what we want, what we can afford and get those things to line up. At that level it's reasonable. If you have more details (and not just innuendo) about his plan, I'd like to hear it.
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