Paul Ryan's Austerity Budget, 2013 Edition is pretty much the end of the New Deal, a budget that obliterates spending from Medicare, Medicaid, nearly every aspect of the social safety net, education, infrastructure, public safety, and more. It's nothing less than Paul Ryan telling America's 310 million people "
You're on you're own, deal with your own problems." Ezra Klein rocks the bad news:
Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He
cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination
of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income
programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the
military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual
tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25
percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or
increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague
corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25
percent.
But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its
savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food
stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants
managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like
infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level,
and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to
encourage home buying and health insurance.
Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally
transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That,
and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s
real point throughout his career.
And yes, we'd see
catastrophic cuts in Medicaid, 50% by 2023. Tens of millions of people who would have gotten health insurance under Obamacare will go back to being uninsured, and they'll be joined by tens of millions more who would certainly lose their Medicaid health insurance as states simply toss them off the rolls.
Ryan would balance his budget on the backs of tens of millions of the poorest Americans, in order to cut the one percent's tax load to 25%. It gets worse, his crushing Austerity would last a generation, surpluses that wouldn't go to help the scores of millions of American poor, with no schools, no roads, no cops, no hope of getting out of the hell they're in.
It would all go to pay off the national debt over the next 35 or so years.
It isn't just austerity. It's soulless cruelty that will simply sacrifice the poorest Americans by the trainload to be fed to the Randian altar.
In short, Paul Ryan is pretty much as evil as it gets. And he's assuming that the voters who rejected this plan wholesale when it was the Romney platform don't have any say now.
Austerity by the minority. Awesome.
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