Yesterday I vented my frustration with the right-wing budget proposal (labeled "path to prosperity" but bearing the obvious stench of "path to prosperity for the rich and their hangers-on, and who cares about the rest"). Read it at The Budget Crisis (Apr. 6, 2011).
There was also a discussion of the Ryan proposal on Salon.com, by Andrew Leonard, that is worth reading. Paul Ryan's Plan to Erase the Great Society. Leonard examines the politics that have made it possible for us to go from an election in 2008 centered on finding a way to address the abysmal failure of the existing health care model that relies on private health insurers for most health care needs to a discussion in 2011 that is focused not only on repealing the Affordable Care Act that made some progress towards addressing that goal, but also on slashing Medicaid and replacing the highly successful Medicare program with a "scrawnily funded voucher program." As Leonard notes, "the inevitable outcome [of Paul Ryan's plan] is that even fewer Americans will have healthcare coverage than before Obama's election, and those who do still qualify will likely be paying more for less." Meanwhile, the wealthy will continue to enjoy the stellar health care that their obscenely disproportionate accumulation of the country's wealth can provide. Rationing a la right-wing GOP planning is a much more dastardly world than the bugaboo they created to defeat the cure for our ailing health care system, the public option of a Medicare-like plan for all. (A public option would mean rationing, they claimed, which would be evil and awful.)
The punditocracy, of course, owned mostly by Big Business and leaning further to the right with every passing issue, is a big factor in the play that Ryan's ridiculous purported budget proposal has received. As Leonard puts it,
[D]espite the fact that Republicans control only one chamber of Congress, the punditocracy is treating Ryan's proposals with the kind of obsessive focus that suggests Ryan's plan isn't a mere pipe dream. The proposals set forth in Obama's own Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission set off a damp squib of reaction in response to the firestorm that has erupted in the wake of Ryan's budget release.
Leonard has three "key elements" for how we got from 2008 to our current situation: "The economic crash, the successful generation-long Republican campaign to cut taxes, and the failure of Democrats, Obama very much included, to articulate their own vision for the future."
What is so distressing is the following. The crash was a direct result of the failed Reaganomics of tax cuts, privatization, militarization and deregulation. The GOP campaign to cut taxes has been funded by Big Business and wealthy advocates like the Koch brothers and has utilized a stream of misleading statements that are repeated ad nauseum even after they are shown to be false (just as Paul Ryan smilingly talked on the PBS NewsHour Tuesday night about the economic growth and jobs that would be created by a budget that eliminates the safety net for vulnerable Americans and gives yet more ridiculously huge tax cuts solely to Big Business and the wealthy through a rate reduction to 25% instead of the rate increase on really high incomes to 45 or more that we should see). And the failure of the Democrats to articulate a vision for the future is a failure of will and a failure of empathy. Too many Democrats are too wealthy to understand the issues. There are too many like Max Baucus who has actively advanced the Republican agenda on corporate taxes, estate taxes and similar wealth-favoring provisions. There are too many Democrats who were not willing to support a bill to tax Private Equity Fund managers on their billions in "carried interest" compensation as the compensation for services that it is rather than at the favored low rates for capital gains. And Obama has too often admitted defeat before he started, in a stupid scramble for "bipartisanship" that suggests he never intended to fight in the first place, and has too often accepted the advice of the Wall Street cartel that influences the Democrats rather than listening to the needs of Main Street.
Leonard has it right when he notes that the GOP has designed the current deficit "disaster" and is delighted with it.
You can't keep cutting taxes and provide decent government healthcare. That's just not sustainable. Republicans know this -- and are delighted by it. We're witnessing the final apotheosis of Grover Norquist's starve-the-beast theory of government. Since the election of George W. Bush, Republicans have been remarkably successful at choking off the flow of government revenue. When you combine the purposeful reduction of revenue with the costs of the economic disaster, it's easy to see how Obama ended up in a bad strategic position.
I would just add--for which ordinary Americans will be the losers if the Republicans are ultimately successful. Leonard suggests that Obama should be paying attention to this, else there's little reason to support his recently announced re-election plans.
The wealthiest Americans and corporations are getting tax breaks while healthcare for the most vulnerable Americans is under assault. That should not be a hard message for Obama to use as a rallying cry. The timing is perfect: He declared his plans for reelection this week. Why not tell us why we should care?
Other links of interest on this topic:
Mark Thoma's Economist's View excerpting the CBPP comments: Ryan's Path to Prosperity is a Cruel Joke, Apr. 7, 2011
CBPP in full at this link includes a great chart on "Rising Inequality Since 1970s a Sharp Break from Shared Prosperity of Earlier Era".
Yglesias, ThinkProgress.org, Here we go again (about the entitlement battle at stake given the radical Ryan approach to slash and burn Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security), an excerpt of which follows.
For example, you might be wondering about this notion of cutting Medicaid spending. Maybe Medicaid is a wasteful boondoggle. Maybe the marginal family would actually be better off buying health insurance out of pocket rather than relying on it. But no! As you can see courtesy of this CBPP chart, Medicaid is actually a highly efficient way of delivering health care services to children and adults alike.
Of course this doesn’t mean that cutting Medicaid won’t save money. It very well might. Thanks to Paul Ryan some families who can currently afford to take their kids to see the doctor won’t be able to take their kids to see the doctor. That will reduce aggregate health care expenditures and increase aggregate “kids get sick and die” nationwide. Of course a lot of kids who get sick and don’t get treated won’t die. It’s not as if the death rate from illness and accidents was 100 percent in the era before modern health care. People just suffer and life goes on. And with the extra budgetary headroom created, rich people can pay lower taxes and buy more really expensive refrigerators.
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