Tag: path to prosperity
A Better Path To Prosperity

A Better Path To Prosperity

Washington politicos aren’t quite right when they say that federal budget proposals are “dead on arrival.”

Even if they don’t become law, budgets stand as living, breathing testimonies of the values and priorities of the people who write them.

And it may surprise you that the budget proposal that’s most likely to line up with your own values is also the one that’s most dismissed as “dead on arrival.”

The Congressional Progressive Caucus’ “Better Off Budget,” unveiled in March, is getting far less attention than the budget House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a few weeks later.

Ryan became a 2012 Republican vice-presidential candidate thanks to his rhetoric that promised to tame federal spending and stimulate the economy. But his “Path to Prosperity” plans have been broadly dismissed as strikingly out of touch with how the real world works and what real people want.

While the Better Off Budget stakes out the left flank of the budget debate, it’s far from radical. It follows the basic prescription that an economy still recovering from a devastating recession needs a push from government to boost economic demand. That means taking actions that will put people back to work quickly and allow people to have money in their pockets.

Its policies would support the creation of up to 9 million new jobs over the next three years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That would close the gap between where the job market is today and where it would have been had the misguided economic policies of the 1990s and 2000s not set the stage for the Great Recession.

The Ryan budget, on the other hand, wouldn’t increase federal spending on job creation efforts by one dime. In fact, by making spending cuts that would slow economic growth, enacting the Ryan budget would cost the economy 3 million jobs over the next two years, the Economic Policy Institute says.

Plus, the tax cuts Ryan’s budget would lavish on the wealthiest Americans average $200,000, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, while many programs that millions of middle-class and low-income Americans rely on would be cut dramatically.

The cost of the Better Off Budget would be covered by asking the wealthiest among us to sacrifice the loopholes and dodges that allow the rich to pay taxes at lower rates than the people who work for them. These tax breaks let some of our most profitable corporations escape paying federal taxes altogether.

The net effect over 10 years would be what conservatives say they want — a federal deficit that’s under control through the fruits of economic growth. The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s budget proposal would accomplish that feat by ensuring that the tax burden is shared equitably.

The Populist Majority website notes that broad majorities — between 65 percent and 80 percent, depending on the poll — believe that job creation and economic growth should be the government’s top priority.

Roughly three out of four Americans agree that we should be asking the wealthy to surrender their tax loopholes and shelters to help reduce the deficit rather than asking seniors to give up inflation adjustments to Social Security or the sick to sacrifice Medicare and Medicaid benefits. And the broad majority of Americans supports increasing spending on the things that matter — such as the roads and transit systems we travel on and the schools where our children are taught.

Themes from the Ryan budget will be sliced into talking points and bumpersticker slogans by Republican candidates as the nation lurches into the midterm elections.

Those slices, once reassembled, won’t add up to the values and priorities of most Americans. What this majority is looking for is simple: to get back to an economy in which people can get decent jobs and where we all feel we have an opportunity to do well.

The Better Off Budget has audacious, but common-sense, answers that voters would find compelling. All we need is for congressional candidates to start embracing them.

Isaiah J. Poole is the editor of OurFuture.org, the website of the Campaign for America’s Future.

Cross-posted from Other Words

AFP Photo/Michael Mathes

Georgia Republicans Take Another Step Towards Blowing A Senate Seat

Georgia Republicans Take Another Step Towards Blowing A Senate Seat

The Tea Party one-upmanship that has defined Georgia’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate reached its logical conclusion on Wednesday, when support for Paul Ryan’s ultra-right-wing budget became the mark of a RINO.

For months, the primary — which is essentially a tossup between U.S. Representatives Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, and Jack Kingston, former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel, and former Reebok CEO David Perdue — has taken the shape of a mad dash to the right, with each candidate trying to prove that he or she is the “true” conservative in the race. This has led to some startling moments, and convinced Democrats that their candidate, former Points of Light Foundation leader Michelle Nunn, could steal the seat currently held by retiring Republican senator Saxby Chambliss.

The three candidates who currently serve in Congress will get their latest chance to prove their right-wing bona fides on Thursday, when the House votes on Ryan’s latest “Path to Prosperity.” It appears that all three will take it; The Hillreports that Broun and Gingrey plan to vote “no” on the budget because it does not cut enough from the budget, while Kingston is a “definitely lean no” because the plan does not cut discretionary spending to at least sequester levels.

Broun — who infamously trashed Ryan’s previous budget for “nibbling around the edges” — has already released a web ad trumpeting his opposition to “a budget that spends billions we don’t have,” in typically over-the-top fashion:

That spirited opposition could very well make a difference in the crowded Republican primary. But by insisting that Ryan’s budget does not cut enough, the three congressmen are essentially writing Nunn’s next campaign ad for her. The Ryan plan is genuinely extreme: 69 percent of its $4.8 trillion in non-defense budget cuts would come from programs that benefit Americans with low or moderate incomes, such as Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, the Social Services Block Grant, and Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled. It would end Medicare as we know it by converting it to a premium-support voucher. And while the poor are asked to pay through the nose, it would give millionaires an average tax cut of $200,000.

Even in reliably red Georgia, this is well outside of the mainstream. But in the Republican primary, it’s now the liberal position.

Thus far, Nunn has ridden her carefully constructed moderate image to a virtual tie in the polls. If her Republican rivals go through with their austere suicide pact, she could find herself in the lead before long. And Republicans could find themselves wondering why they once again let their right flank ruin a golden chance at a Senate majority.

Screenshot: YouTube

Meet The New Paul Ryan, Same As The Old Paul Ryan

Meet The New Paul Ryan, Same As The Old Paul Ryan

Over the past several months, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has attempted to rebrand himself from an austerity-obsessed weak link in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign to the Republican Party’s foremost anti-poverty warrior (with limited success, at best).

But as Ryan’s latest “Path to Prosperity” budget plan makes clear, the House Budget Committee chairman’s priorities have not changed at all. Ryan is still committed to radically downsizing the government — and shafting the working Americans with whom he claims to empathize.

As in past years, Ryan’s plan is less of a budget and more of a “vision document.” (TheWashington Post helpfully describes it as a “personal manifesto on government austerity from a man who has emerged as the GOP’s leading light on fiscal policy.”)

Among other proposals, the new Ryan plan once again suggests fully repealing the Affordable Care Act, converting Medicare into a block grant program for states (while aiming to privatize it in a decade), and slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for food stamps, federal welfare programs, FEMA, Pell Grants, and federal pensions, among many other cuts (the details of which he largely leaves to Congress to sort out). Overall, the budget would shear more than $5 trillion in federal spending over the next decade (for a more detailed breakdown of the cuts, see Time’s helpful overview here).

While Ryan calls for steep cuts to programs that benefit working and middle-class Americans, he once again declines to ask the military or the wealthiest Americans to bear significant costs. In fact, he actually proposes cutting the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans, from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. Due to a combination of that unbalanced approach and the CBO’s revised deficit forecast, the former vice-presidential nominee failed to come up with enough cuts to balance the budget. Instead, Ryan promises that new revenue from “economic growth” will wipe out the deficit by 2024.

Like Ryan’s past plans, the 2015 budget displays a startlingly cruel worldview. It’s hard to justify, for example, stripping health insurance from millions of people in order to stave off an imminent debt crisis that — by Ryan’s own admission — doesn’t actually exist (indeed, we’re still waiting for budget scold Alan Simpson’s infamous debt bomb to detonate). Especially for a man who professes to view poverty as a genuine crisis.

It’s also politically unpalatable to an electorate that does not want to repeal Obamacare, and overwhelmingly opposes cuts to public education, Medicare, health insurance subsidies, and other programs that Ryan targets.

To be clear, Ryan’s budget has absolutely no chance of becoming law. Although House Republicans will be loath to vote for a bill containing such politically divisive measures — 10 members of the GOP majority voted against the 2014 Ryan plan (although, in fairness, at least four thought it was insufficiently extreme) — they will likely pass Ryan’s proposal for the fourth consecutive year. It will then die a swift death in the Senate.

Even though it will never be enacted, however, the plan from the GOP’s top budget expert provides a clear reminder of the Republican House majority’s priorities: Shrink the government (except for defense spending), refuse to raise even a penny of new revenue, and repeal Obamacare. Never mind the fact that the math doesn’t add up, and it will never actually be passed.

Ironically, just hours before Ryan announced his latest “vision document,” Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) — the last House Republican to offer a serious fiscal plan — announced his intention to retire at the end of this term. Weeks ago, Camp proposed a comprehensive tax reform plan that used actual numbers to propose actual changes to the system — and was instantly shunned by both parties for his trouble.

When Camp leaves Congress next year, his powerful position as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to go to — you guessed it — Paul Ryan.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr