That Was Easy

How do you know that the Ryan budget roadmap to Medicare elimination is not only ridiculous, but truly dangerous?  Because Jim Pethokoukis is in need of a post-coital cigarette at the prospect of throwing Grandma out into the street to pay for cutting taxes on our most precious resource, the millionaire.

Is Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” potentially the most important and necessary piece of economic legislation since President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981? Quite likely. The blueprint embraces free markets and individual choice to radically reshape America’s social welfare state for the 21st century and shrink government. Instead of looking for ways to finance an ever-expanding public sector, it would prevent Washington from growing to a projected 45 percent of GDP by 2050 (vs. 24 percent today) and instead reduce it to just under 15 percent by that year. Ryan would downsize government to its smallest size since 1950 and prevent the Europeanization of the American economy. The Ryan Path embraces dynamic growth, not managed decline and stagnation.

Yes, dynamic growth for the top 1% of Americans, and dynamic growth in poverty for just about everyone else.   And by "radically reshape America's social welfare state" he means anybody under 55 who has been paying Medicare taxes for decades as an American worker will get shafted.

That's not the funny part.  This is.

The risk is that Paul Ryan has created a plan only Paul Ryan can sell with his passion and deep expertise. He does make political concessions. The plan doesn’t, for instance, cut Medicare spending on current retirees or older workers. But austerity of that sort probably isn’t needed yet. Current trends, though, are leading toward a fiscal crisis that would result in both extreme and immediate benefit cuts and higher taxes.


And that, ultimately, is how the political case is made. The alternative to the Ryan Path isn’t the fiscally unsustainable status quo, but a future of harsh austerity beset by financial crisis, stifled by higher interest rates and marred by a lower standard of living. In short, the death of the American Dream and  the collapse of any social safety net.

So, we collapse the social safety net for anyone born after 1960 in order to save it for everyone older.  This is "shared sacrifice".  And Paul Ryan only has deep expertise in conning idiots like Jimbo here.  But he's right about one thing:  this budget would indeed finish what Reagan started, the end of the American middle class and the descent into social Darwinism.

The herd of Americans who are not millionaires ain't gonna cull itself, you know.  There's a reason it's called a budget axe.  At every juncture, at every opportunity, every Democrat in Washington should be saying "The Republicans are going to eliminate Medicare in order to give a massive tax cut to the wealthy."  Every Republican behind the Ryan plan should be forced to defend that point.

It's so bloody simple, the Democrats will find a way to foul it up.