The Republican budget crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan would be a disaster for low-income and middle-class people, and Democrats are prepared to campaign on that fact. But
driving the message home in ways easily understood by people who don't read think tank reports is not an easy task:
"If you talk about budgets, people's eyes glaze over. If you talk about, 'Your child's going to be paying another 1,200 bucks to go to college, that doesn't glaze over," Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday. "The budget is sort of a big number and a big sort of gobbledygook type of thing for them. But when you talk about the consequences, I think that resonates."
The large-scale point to remember about the Ryan budget is this: When he talks about balancing the budget, it's through cuts. And those cuts disproportionately hit low- and moderate-income families:
We're talking about raising the Medicare age and ending Medicare as we know it, replacing it with vouchers that won't keep up with costs. Cutting Pell Grants and student loan funding. Cutting Medicaid while also repealing Obamacare. These are cuts that would hit a vast number of Americans hard. In fact, the cuts would be so broad and deep in people's lives, it can be hard to believe that this is seriously the budget plan of one of the major parties. But it is, and you don't need to exaggerate anything in Ryan's budget to make a very real case that we should be scared by it.