Rep. Paul Ryan must be liking his prospects for a VP nod as Mitt Romney's plan for entitlement programs becomes clear. Call it a lack of imagination or a pander to the tea party, but Romney has largely embraced the House budget plan engineered by Ryan. In a recorded meeting with the Las Vegas Review Journal editorial board, he laid out not just an horrific vision for the foreclosure crisis, but a dystopian vision for the 99 percent. Here he is on Medicare.
ROMNEY: You have a program like Paul Ryan has proposed, which says we’re going to give people vouchers to let them choose among private plans. I would not at the same time would want to remove the option for people who have standard Medicare. But I would probably move to a more managed care approach even in Medicare itself.
That's, as Igor Volsky points out, just a tweak to the Ryan plan. It would still not actually do anything to reduce the cost of care, it'd just shift more and more of those costs to seniors. His idea of allowing traditional Medicare to continue is, on its face, a great improvement from Ryan's plan, but would likely create a serious adverse selection problem for the program: younger, healthier Medicare recipients would be pushed into his managed care, voucher program, taking their premiums with them and leaving the sickest and most expensive patients in traditional Medicare.
That's not all, as Romney goes all in for austerity on Social Security and Medicaid, as well. He'd both means test Social Security and raise the retirement age, effectively turning it into a welfare program that served fewer and fewer Americans. Raising the payroll tax cap is straight out.
"Arithmetically, there are probably three ways of making Social Security permanently solvent," Romney said. "One would be simply raising taxes. I don't favor that one. Number two would be to increase the retirement age. Number three would be to have a little slower growth in benefits for higher income beneficiaries.... Some combination of those last two is the place we can go in my opinion to solve Social Security for future retirees." [...]
Elsewhere, Romney would turn Medicaid into a block grant program, and hand it over to states to make their own plans; phase out 10 percent of federal jobs; reduce discretionary spending on all other non-defense programs to the levels they were at in 2008, and undermine collective bargaining by federal unions with the stated goal of diminishing their benefits.
Romney still might have a hard time convincing Republicans that he's the real conservative deal, but he's doing his damnedest by appropriating the extremes of the Ryan plan, with a dash of Govs. Walker and Kasich. Which gives President Obama and the Democrats a pretty clear path forward when it comes to budgeting for entitlement programs: do the opposite of Romney/Ryan.