Paul Krugman looks at three stages of the proposals for action by the For Profit administration of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. What really would happen if the Romney-Ryan prescribed dosage were to be taken by America over the next years?
-In the first decade, the big things are (i) conversion of Medicaid into a block grant program, with much lower funding than projected under current law and (ii) sharp cuts in top tax rates and corporate taxes.
-Is this a deficit-reduction program? Not on the face of it: it’s basically a tradeoff of reduced aid to the poor for reduced taxes on the rich, with the net effect of the specific proposals being to increase, not reduce, the deficit. ... Whenever you hear people talking about Ryan’s deficit reductions, bear in mind that over the first decade all of the alleged deficit reduction comes from revenue and spending numbers that are simply asserted, not the result of any policies actually described in the “plan”. ...Paul Krugman
So is this attempt at a plan really a plan or is it just old grudges being played out at the expense of the less fortunate?
-Ryan basically proposes three big things: slashing Medicaid, cutting taxes on corporations and high-income people, and replacing Medicare with a drastically less well funded voucher system. These concrete proposals would, taken together, actually increase the deficit for the first decade and beyond.
All the claims of major deficit reduction therefore rest on the magic asterisks. In that sense, this isn’t even a plan, it’s just a set of assertions. ...Paul Krugman
Doesn't reduce the deficit, except "supposedly."
-...Much of the supposed deficit reduction comes not from Medicare but from further cuts in discretionary spending relative to GDP, with the number eventually falling to 3.5 percent of GDP (see Table 2 in the CBO report). There is, once again, no specification of how this is to be accomplished ...Paul Krugman
And the Romney-Ryan "plan" doesn't serve the people -- the people whose taxes, by the way, would be paying for the experiments of these two rich kids with very rich sponsors who right now are buying themselves an opportunity to rip us off. They don't believe they really need plans. They just need the right interviewer, the right camera, and enough gullible voters who don't want to know what the plans are, anyway.
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