Charlie Pierce annihilates the new Republican budget
"Back when he was a teenager living off Social Security money chipped in by your parents and mine -- You're welcome again, dickhead -- Paul Ryan must have had nights where he had dreams like this, followed by a funny feeling Down There and a sneak-trip to the laundromat in the morning. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has revealed its budget plan, and that plan has as its apparent goal the cruel, blasted dystopia of Paul Ryan's fondest dreams. This budget is in no way either sensible or patriotic. It is not patriotism to throw so many of your fellow citizens out On The Road, as the old Irish used to say. This is a gombeen's budget, a slumlord's budget, an evictor's budget, an auctioneer's budget of a kind that emptied towns all over the Great Plains. It assumes the existence of a propertied class and a servile class, both of them eternal and immutable. It is as democratic as a brick through a window.
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This budget proposes to hand Medicaid money to governors who rejected it when it simply was offered to them for free. You want to guess where that Medicaid block-grant money's going to end up if you simply hand it over to Scott Walker, or Greg Abbott, or, worst of all, "Bobby" Jindal? "Patient-centered," my Aunt Fannie. You're going to end up with "patient-centered" open-pit mines in Wisconsin, "patient-centered" tax cuts in Texas, and "patient-centered" Bible schools in Louisiana.
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There should be no compromise from the Democratic minority on any of this. It should be rejected, root and branch, because it is based on an economic philosophy, and an overall view of the relationship between people and their government, that has failed the country and its people savagely in the past and inevitably will do so again. But, even if this budget goes nowhere, it should doom the Republican party as a serious governing party for the next two decades, but it won't. Its basic philosophical foundation has been treated as a serious intellectual exercise for so long that it is now beside the point that it stands revealed (again) as a plutocratic charade. Pieces of it will be debated gravely. Some of them may even survive as "compromises" because Americans want "the government to work again." (I just saved Joe Manchin's press staff a ton of work right there.) But the philosophy itself is so deeply embedded in our politics that I'm not sure that enough people can sicken and/or die before we pry it out again."
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33709/the-gop-goes-for-broke/
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