Liberals wasted no time attacking House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan’s fiscal reform plan. On Tuesday morning, an hour before the proposal was publicly released, the liberal Campaign for America’s Future sent out a press release dubbing it “Ryan’s Roadmap to Ruin.”
In the release, the group’s co-director Robert Borosage attacked the plan as “corrupt,” fuming that “Rep. Ryan is not charting America’s Future; he is burying the American Dream.”
The assault has not abated. Liberals and Democratic lawmakers have continued to tee off on Ryan, arguing that his GOP budget would cut the deficit on the backs of the poor and elderly, while doling out benefits to the rich.
Yet conspicuously absent from most liberal criticisms is any comparable attempt to confront the nation’s unsustainable long-term debt crisis.
This is no accident.
It’s much easier to attack a plan when the comparison is an imaginary world in which Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security can remain intact with little action from Washington, than it is to present a counterproposal that itself could become a target.
But thanks to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, we may soon have an idea of what a liberal deficit reduction plan would look like.
Next week, the group of progressives plans to introduce its alternative to Ryan’s proposal, called “The People’s Budget.” Based on an advanced peek provided by a senior Democratic aide, it promises to return the nation to surpluses by the end of the decade and reduce the debt, only with a much different approach from Ryan’s.
To extend the long-term solvency of Social Security, it would propose dramatically increasing payroll taxes on both the employer and employee side, and funneling the money into even more generous benefits.
Payroll taxes are economically destructive, because they make it more expensive for employers to hire new workers, meaning lower real wages and higher unemployment.
Yet the tax increases wouldn’t end there. The People’s Budget would rescind last year’s tax deal to raise rates on higher income levels, boost taxes on capital gains and dividends, increase the estate tax, institute three “millionaire tax rates,” with the highest reaching 47 percent, tax corporate foreign income, impose a “financial crisis responsibility fee,” and institute a “financial speculation tax.”
Overall, taxes would rise to 22.3 percent of the economy, compared with 18.3 percent under the Ryan proposal.
The plan would also build on Obama’s most notable initiatives. It includes an additional $1.45 trillion in economic stimulus spending. On health care, the plan would add a government-run plan, or “public option,” to Obamacare and have the government negotiate drug prices.
Yet while other parts of government would grow, the defense budget would be gutted. The proposal would “reduce baseline defense spending by reducing strategic capabilities, conventional forces, procurement, and R&D programs.”
If liberal activists and Democratic lawmakers rallied around this plan, or something similar, then there could be an honest debate contrasting Ryan’s vision of lower taxes and entitlement reform with liberal plans to raise taxes, slash the military and further expand the role of government.
Should they decide to avoid that debate, it would be quite telling.
Philip Klein is an editorial page staff writer for The Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
