Nothing pleases him more than tax cuts for rich people.
Now that he's freed from having to come up with actual budgets that are supposed to add up, Rep. Paul Ryan is free to do what he really loves—create tax breaks for the wealthy. He's moved from the House Budget Committee to Ways and Means, where he can propose all the tax cuts he wants.
Blowing up the deficit isn't a problem anymore, because blowing up the deficit with these tax cuts also gives Republicans the rationale to hike middle class taxes and slash programs.
[I]n his first legislative act as head of the committee that will be central to expected tax reform efforts over the next two years, Ryan pushed through a package of seven tax cut bills that would add $93.5 billion to the deficit in the next decade.
The largest, a measure that lets small business write off expenses more quickly, would add $77 billion to the deficit.
Other measures would allow companies to inflate the value of food donations (including things like old Twinkies), make it easier to donate retirement savings, and conserve land, among other things. […]
"This Republican ploy selects almost $100 billion of favored tax provisions to benefit a small portion of taxpayers by borrowing more money from abroad," Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Huffington Post as the hearing wound down. "Their package eliminates enough revenue to fund life-saving medical research through the National Institutes for Health for more than two years. Instead of a bipartisan commitment to comprehensive tax reform, they continue on a partisan path to promote the privileged."
Tax cuts, according to Republican House Rules, don't have to be offset by spending cuts elsewhere because tax cuts are magical fairy dust. This goes along with their new rule that the CBO must use "dynamic scoring" when they evaluate legislation—assuming that unloading a bunch of old Twinkies on poor people will allow the "job creators" to do their thing of creating jobs. Some of the cuts included in Ryan's package have been in place as temporary tax relief, and some do have Democratic support.
The problem now is that making all of these cuts permanent and enshrining them in the tax code will give Republicans more ammunition to target other tax cuts that primarily help lower and middle income people. And the rationale for doing that, of course, will be the deficit. Funny how it always works out that way with Republicans, isn't it?