The fundamental flaw with Paul Ryan’s budget is not its horribly misleading numbers or its blatant disregard for the suffering of the working poor. Rather, it’s the fact that for the most part, most of Ryan’s radical reforms are simply unnecessary. Matt Yglesias writes:
I agree with Matt’s proposals, but I’d simply add that even they are not necessary even if they might be generally good ideas. The fact of the matter is, all you really need to do to balance the budget and close up the deficit is return defense spending to pre-Bush levels and raise taxes to Clinton-era rates. That’s it. Policy makers need to also tackle healthcare costs, but that can and should be done outside of the budget process, and certainly Ryan’s dismantling of Medicare and Medicaid is not the answer.
But Ryan’s numbers are also a problem. Setting aside how totally and completely unnecessary his most drastic cuts are, his most drastic assumptions are also unbelievable. Paul Krugman explains:
Then there’s the Medicare business. According to the CBO analysis, a typical senior would end up spending more than twice as much of his or her own income on health care as under current law. As Dean Baker points out, this means that seniors would end up paying most of their income for health care. Again, right.
Krugman calls the budget “a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.” And yet people all across the Beltway are swooning with its seriousness, writing various paeans to the handsome young congressman from Wisconsin.
This budget is not serious. It’s ideological, and I suspect that it’s intention is to shift the debate and make the Ryan budget the leaping off point for further budgets. Just as Democrats decided to abandon their own ideas for healthcare reform and instead use earlier Republican ideas, now Republicans are hoping to shift the budget debate into red soil. Democrats should use healthcare as a cautionary tale – no matter how much they compromise, no matter how much they throw their base under the bus, Republicans will always label their policies as socialistic and too far left.
Democrats need to propose something equally bold, equally radical, and let the chips fall where they may.
