Conquer Club

Paul Krugman wrote: Many commentators swooned earlier this week after House Republicans, led by the Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, unveiled their budget proposals. They lavished praise on Mr. Ryan, asserting that his plan set a new standard of fiscal seriousness.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Well, they should have waited until people who know how to read budget numbers had a chance to study the proposal. For the G.O.P. plan turns out not to be serious at all. Instead, it’s simultaneously ridiculous and heartless.

How ridiculous is it? Let me count the ways — or rather a few of the ways, because there are more howlers in the plan than I can cover in one column.

First, Republicans have once again gone all in for voodoo economics — the claim, refuted by experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves.

Specifically, the Ryan proposal trumpets the results of an economic projection from the Heritage Foundation, which claims that the plan’s tax cuts would set off a gigantic boom. Indeed, the foundation initially predicted that the G.O.P. plan would bring the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent — a number we haven’t achieved since the Korean War. After widespread jeering, the unemployment projection vanished from the Heritage Foundation’s Web site, but voodoo still permeates the rest of the analysis.

In particular, the original voodoo proposition — the claim that lower taxes mean higher revenue — is still very much there. The Heritage Foundation projection has large tax cuts actually increasing revenue by almost $600 billion over the next 10 years.

A more sober assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells a different story. It finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

And about those spending cuts: leave health care on one side for a moment and focus on the rest of the proposal. It turns out that Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are assuming drastic cuts in nonhealth spending without explaining how that is supposed to happen.

How drastic? According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — but including defense — to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.

That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.

The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.

And that neither should nor will happen. Mr. Ryan and his colleagues can write down whatever numbers they like, but seniors vote. And when they find that their health-care vouchers are grossly inadequate, they’ll demand and get bigger vouchers — wiping out the plan’s supposed savings.

In short, this plan isn’t remotely serious; on the contrary, it’s ludicrous.

And it’s also cruel.

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.

So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.

Victor Sullivan wrote:Why should we care that much who the vice presidential candidate is?

-Sully

BigBallinStalin wrote:Krugman's very skilled in rhetoric.

Symmetry wrote:

rockfist wrote:Given that most of what our government spends its money on is at best waste and in most cases immoral - it would be immoral to pay more taxes than you are legally obligated to. It is immoral to advocate higher taxes. If Romney paid only 14% the question isn't how do we get him to pay a higher percentage - its how do we limit everyone to that percentage at most? Any taxation beyond a minimal amount is just state sanctioned theft.

I'm not sure I give your given on this one- looks like you're starting out from an ideological premise and ending up at your ideal outcome, then fitting in logical steps, which are kind of a stretch, to fit.

Where's the waste, if you had to look at a table of gov't spending?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_federal_budget#Total_revenues_and_spending

Hint- just saying "most of it" ain't gonna do you well, unless you're Paul Ryan, where it gets you a nomination for VP, just like Sarah Palin.

And which parts are immoral?

Night Strike wrote:

Victor Sullivan wrote:Why should we care that much who the vice presidential candidate is?

-Sully

Because it's really the first concrete decision a presidential candidate must make to indicate how they may govern if they win election. Bush picked Cheney and Obama picked Biden because those VP picks were seen to shore up an area the presidential candidate was weak on: military and foreign affairs. Romney picking Ryan indicates that Romney is looking to run on a platform that includes concrete ideas on how to cut government spending to restore fiscal sanity rather than just running as "Not Obama".

heavycola wrote:

BigBallinStalin wrote:Krugman's very skilled in rhetoric.

Isn't he the guy who predicted the subprime meltdown?

rockfist wrote:I am starting from the view that all government spending is waste. It is not up to me to prove it is, it is up to the government to prove to me that it is not - or I will be voting for those who want to lower taxes and cut spending as should every other American. The government is taking our money to fund its spending. If you want something from me - prove that you deserve it - if you can't or won't the answer is no.

It is immoral to take money from one person and give it to another. It is moral and right for people to freely give money to those in need, when the government compels it - it becomes immoral.

Juan_Bottom wrote:Now you might call Medicaid a wasteful program because it pays for hospital visits for poor children and such, but these kids will be full citizens one day. A country's success isn't measured in how much money a single person can make, but in how it treats it's own people. This country is wealthy, it doesn't do the country good to lock that wealth up in 10 individual bank accounts.

Juan_Bottom wrote:

rockfist wrote:I am starting from the view that all government spending is waste. It is not up to me to prove it is, it is up to the government to prove to me that it is not - or I will be voting for those who want to lower taxes and cut spending as should every other American. The government is taking our money to fund its spending. If you want something from me - prove that you deserve it - if you can't or won't the answer is no.

It is immoral to take money from one person and give it to another. It is moral and right for people to freely give money to those in need, when the government compels it - it becomes immoral.

Are you a libertarian?

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are the three spending programs that are hot topics at this point in the thread, and there's nothing "immoral" about them. People pay into them their whole lives and they deserve the full benefits of the programs. And I hope that when I reach the age of retirement that most young people feel the way that I do. That old man in the video got arrested for espousing as much. I find his red-hot bravery heartening.

Now you might call Medicaid a wasteful program because it pays for hospital visits for poor children and such, but these kids will be full citizens one day. A country's success isn't measured in how much money a single person can make, but in how it treats it's own people. This country is wealthy, it doesn't do the country good to lock that wealth up in 10 individual bank accounts.

rockfist wrote:

Juan_Bottom wrote:

rockfist wrote:I am starting from the view that all government spending is waste. It is not up to me to prove it is, it is up to the government to prove to me that it is not - or I will be voting for those who want to lower taxes and cut spending as should every other American. The government is taking our money to fund its spending. If you want something from me - prove that you deserve it - if you can't or won't the answer is no.

It is immoral to take money from one person and give it to another. It is moral and right for people to freely give money to those in need, when the government compels it - it becomes immoral.

Are you a libertarian?

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are the three spending programs that are hot topics at this point in the thread, and there's nothing "immoral" about them. People pay into them their whole lives and they deserve the full benefits of the programs. And I hope that when I reach the age of retirement that most young people feel the way that I do. That old man in the video got arrested for espousing as much. I find his red-hot bravery heartening.

Now you might call Medicaid a wasteful program because it pays for hospital visits for poor children and such, but these kids will be full citizens one day. A country's success isn't measured in how much money a single person can make, but in how it treats it's own people. This country is wealthy, it doesn't do the country good to lock that wealth up in 10 individual bank accounts.

I am a proud libertarian - are you a statist? Those are three programs that never should've been born, but now we need to figure out how to reduce the spending on them before they implode. The current levels of growth are unsustainable. Statists should be more interested in figuring out how to keep the programs alive than anyone else.

rockfist wrote:I am a proud libertarian - are you a statist? Those are three programs that never should've been born, but now we need to figure out how to reduce the spending on them before they implode. The current levels of growth are unsustainable. Statists should be more interested in figuring out how to keep the programs alive than anyone else.

Victor Sullivan wrote:Why should we care that much who the vice presidential candidate is?

heavycola wrote:

BigBallinStalin wrote:Krugman's very skilled in rhetoric.

Isn't he the guy who predicted the subprime meltdown?

Juan_Bottom wrote:

rockfist wrote:I am a proud libertarian - are you a statist? Those are three programs that never should've been born, but now we need to figure out how to reduce the spending on them before they implode. The current levels of growth are unsustainable. Statists should be more interested in figuring out how to keep the programs alive than anyone else.

Wow that is incredibly short-sighted.

Before Social Security, almost half of all Senior Citizens lived below the poverty line. Today it's less than 10%. It's done everything it was designed to do.

Juan_Bottom wrote:

rockfist wrote:I am a proud libertarian - are you a statist? Those are three programs that never should've been born, but now we need to figure out how to reduce the spending on them before they implode. The current levels of growth are unsustainable. Statists should be more interested in figuring out how to keep the programs alive than anyone else.

Wow that is incredibly short-sighted.

Before Social Security, almost half of all Senior Citizens lived below the poverty line. Today it's less than 10%. It's done everything it was designed to do.

I can't even begin to understand how you rationalize that this country doesn't need Medicare or Medicaid.

I'm not sure why you think that these programs are unsustainable. I don't believe that you've ever looked into why Social Security or Medicare was loosing funds or what we need to do to replenish them. At a glance it seems you're opinions are reactionary rather than "let's find the best solution" because you've offered no information except that you're against the poor, elderly, and sick.


Libertarianism as a Philosophy requires ignoring great swaths of history (AMERICAN HISTORY) and the state of world Affairs. Somalia has free markets, and the Wild West also had Libertarian freedom. None of this is a good thing. As a Modern Philosophy, it reminds me of the Communist-Socialist push that came following the great Depression. Except today we have a Libertarian push after the great recession. It all looked great on paper, but thank God smarter men prevailed.



Nice sig. What part of the Constitution do you think that I oppose? The part that says the government has the right to tax you?
I'll make-up my own too, but I'll give you an option. Do you prefer I put your name after "I despise the coloreds" or "The elderly are an unnecessary drain on the productive."

thegreekdog wrote:Most statists have a good idea on how to keep those programs going - tax people more. I'm just saying, it's not like statists don't have ideas in mind; it's just that politicians don't like saying "let's raise taxes" because then their chances of reelection dwindle.