Ezra Klein has, as usual, been busy. First he provides Paul Ryan’s budget in summary which is nice and short. Then he points out that CBO looks at RyanCare. "Medicare beneficiaries will be left paying more for less and...Medicaid’s are simply getting less." "As the CBO recognizes, a lot of what Ryan is doing isn’t saving money so much as shifting costs. Poor people and seniors don’t need less health care because Medicare and Medicaid are providing less health care. They just have to pay for more of it on their own."
He then gets more into Paul Ryan’s funny numbers. "For one thing, he’s assuming repealing the Affordable Care Act will save $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office says keeping Affordable Care Act saves more than $200 billion over the same period...So something is wrong there." "Then there’s Ryan’s admission, on page 59, that’s he’s using dynamic scoring, which is a scoring model in which the cost of tax cuts is blunted by assumptions about future growth caused by the tax cuts...What we do know is that the model is returning some truly off-the-wall results. It assumes, for instance, that Ryan’s budget will bring unemployment down to 2.8 percent in 2021. That’s just bananas."
FDL writes Ryan’s Budget Plan Is Ridiculous, But It Could Shift the Debate. "So this is a pretty pathetic budget. And it also happens to be a complete fiction. The numbers are not to be trusted at all. Ryan assumes $1.4 trillion in savings from health care repeal when the Congressional Budget Office scores repeal as increasing the deficit. He uses "dynamic scoring"; to perpetuate a fiction that tax cuts will increase tax revenue. He sets unrealistic spending caps without determining how to get there or how future Congresses not bound by his budget will abide by them. Worst, he assumes a world-historical low unemployment rate based on a Heritage Foundation study that claimed the Bush tax cuts would lead to the same kind of prosperity (hint: they didn't). Indeed, by 2021, Ryan assumes a 2.8% unemployment rate, which is how he achieves the revenue needed to make the numbers work. Included with this projection is an implausible housing boom. Jim Tankersley and Katy O'Donnell, middle-of-the-road journalists, say in their headline that the plan "pushes optimism to the outer limits."...As long as everyone's throwing around the word "serious," this is the least serious budget proposal in recent history. It's made up of unicorns and rainbows. That's aside from the fact that kicking 32 million Americans off their health insurance is fundamentally immoral."
Robert Reich makes the case Paul Ryan's Plan, the Coming Shutdown, and What's Really at Stake "That’s why it’s so important that the President have something more to say to the American people than ‘I want to cut spending, too, but the Republican cuts go too far.’ The ‘going too far’ argument is no match for a worldview that says government is the central problem to begin with. Obama must show America that the basic choice is between two fundamental views of this nation. Either we’re all in this together, or we’re a bunch of individuals who happen to live within these borders and are mainly on their own."
Mathew Yglesias explains Conservative Opposition To Human Happiness. He quotes two reports of two conservative conferences. Comparing life now to that in the early 60s people are lazy and playing video games instead of working hard (I'm summarizing badly here). "In both cases the conservative conceit seems to be that a decline in human suffering is a bad thing because it leads to a corresponding decline in admirable anti-suffering effort."
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