Things Fall Apart, The Ryan Unicorn Plan Cannot Hold

As Republicans continue to backpedal away from the Ryan Unicorn Plan to scrap Medicare, Brian Beutler notes that without the savings from cutting trillions from the social safety net, the Ryan Unicorn Plan doesn't exactly balance the budget anytime soon.

It turns out that if you strike the Medicare plan from the GOP budget -- authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) -- it doesn't achieve fiscal balance anymore.

"It certainly blows a major hole in his plan," said Paul Van de Water, a health care and budget expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in a phone interview.

If you take Ryan at his word, and assume that the tax-side of his plan is revenue neutral -- a big "if" -- his plan balances the budget over decades entirely on the spending side of the government's ledger. Van de Water explains that if you take the Medicare privatization plan out of the equation, the budget sinks -- dragged down by higher spending, and then higher interest payments as a result of larger-than-projected deficits.

"That plus interest gets you into a range where you no longer balance the budget," Van de Water said.
That's not to say Ryan's plan would blow up the deficit. "Would it turn [it] into a disaster? Probably not because he was cutting so much elsewhere in his proposal. He has very deep cuts in in Medicaid, he also has very, very deep reductions in the rest of the government as well."

Of course, eliminating deficits is supposedly Congress' entire raison d'etre at this point. But if phasing out Medicare is off the table, and tax increases are off the table, that's just not going to happen.

Shocker:  Republicans have no interest in balancing the budget.  Now destroying the New Deal social safety net and doing everything they can to all but eliminate taxes for the richest Americans and for corporations?  That's another thing entirely.  But their economic plan has nothing to do with balancing the budget at all.