Rep. Paul Ryan released yet another of his signature budgets Tuesday, and it's
the same old story: an unserious attempt to balance the budget through vicious cuts to programs that working people rely on, paired with
cuts to taxes for the wealthy.
Overall, Ryan would cut about $5.1 trillion from projected spending over the next decade, with nearly $3 trillion coming from repealing the health-care law and revamping Medicaid. Still, Ryan's proposals fell short of balancing the budget, forcing him to resort to a vague promise of new revenue from "economic growth" to meet his goal of wiping out deficits by 2024.
Of course, if you slash the programs like food stamps and Medicaid that help many working families get by on poverty wages as Ryan and the Republican Party continue to block a minimum wage increase, if you increase elder poverty by turning Medicare into a voucher program, you weaken the country economically and new revenue from economic growth doesn't materialize. Not to mention that if economic growth was strong, Republicans would use that as an excuse to cut taxes. Already, Ryan's new budget is having to
cope with:
... slower economic growth forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office, which predict $1.4 trillion less in tax revenue collections over a decade compared to forecasts made a year ago.
And obviously, if you're Paul Ryan, the answer to lower predicted tax revenue is not to increase tax revenue but to cut cut cut, just as he's proposed repeatedly in the past. Naturally, though,
Republicans won't let this stop them from campaigning against Democrats even in the cases the two parties are pursuing similar policies.
In other words, when it comes to the Republican budget, it might as well be 2013, or 2012, or 2011. We know from 2012 just how popular Ryan's budgets are when they're put under the spotlight. The challenge is forcing a real discussion of just how extreme the cuts Republicans are pushing are. Because let's be clear: Ryan's plan would impoverish Americans and America.
