Paul Ryan’s Plan for Millionaires’ Gain and Middle-Class Pain

[ProSense]

Paul Ryan’s Plan for Millionaires’ Gain and Middle-Class Pain

Andrew Fieldhouse

In January 2010, the incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) presented “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” in which he proposed drastic policy changes with the stated goal of “putting the nation on a sustainable fiscal course” (Ryan 2010, iv). If enacted, Ryan’s Roadmap would dismantle social insurance programs, raise taxes on the middle class, and transfer wealth from the middle class to corporations and millionaires.

Recent deficit reduction proposals, including those from President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the Fiscal Commission) and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Deficit Reduction Task Force, have contained a mixture of revenue increases and spending cuts to achieve long-term fiscal stability. The Ryan Roadmap, on the other hand, makes no pretense of a balanced approach. It would slash Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits and deplete tax revenue. It trades middle-class pain for millionaires’ gains.

The Roadmap is riddled with policies that ignore the lessons learned from the Great Depression and underscored by the Great Recession. Policy and market failures set the stage for a meltdown of the global financial system and the worst recession since the Great Depression, but Ryan’s plan still swears by the failed Bush-era economic policies of cutting taxes for the wealthy while neglecting the middle class and national investments. It even proposes the partial privatization of Social Security, an increase in taxes on the middle class, the elimination of corporate taxes, and the privatization of Medicare.

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Paul Ryan’s Plan for Millionaires’ Gain and Middle-Class Pain
The ‘Ryan Roadmap’ leads to an entitlement raid and middle-class tax hikes in order to enrich the wealthy

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Among other changes, the Ryan Roadmap proposes:

• Raising taxes only on those Americans making between $20,000 and $200,000, while slashing taxes in half for the wealthiest Americans. The middle class would pay higher average tax rates than millionaires – an unprecedented reversal of progressive U.S. tax policy.
  
  
• Eliminating taxation of corporate income and replacing it with a consumption tax that would disproportionately hit middle-class Americans.
  
  
• Placing the entire burden of deficit reduction on spending cuts. The Ryan Roadmap prioritizes dismantling social insurance programs, not balancing the budget.
  
  
• Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with inadequate vouchers to purchase health insurance in a broken marketplace.
  
  
• Privatizing Social Security for wealthy Americans and ending Social Security’s role as universal social insurance with benefits tied to lifetime earnings.
  
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Steve Benen on an article in the NYT yesterday:

In a piece on the health care fight, the New York Times tells readers today, "As floor debate on the repeal measure opened on Tuesday, Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Budget Committee, who is a respected voice on fiscal issues, declared that the health care law would 'accelerate our country's path toward bankruptcy.'"

There's a couple of problems with the sentence, most notably the fact that the second half helps debunk the first half.

Obviously, a law that's projected to reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars in the first decade, and a trillion dollars in the second decade, necessarily can't move the country closer to "bankruptcy." Anyone who thinks this way probably shouldn't be "a respected voice on fiscal issues."

Which is precisely why it's irksome when major news outlets make assertions like this. It creates a hard-to-shake public image, widely embraced by reporters, based on nothing but bogus perceptions.

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