The new Republican House Majority

And you don't think the President was also trying to "score partisan points"?

In this instance it is you who have become the chief consumer of your own propaganda.

I note that for the third or fourth post in a row, you haven't challenged my assertion that your comments were born from the Conservative meta-analysis of his statement, though you pretended differently when I first took issue with it. This is generally a sign that I was correct and you are avoiding admitting it.

The thought he expressed was directly contrary to the constitutional structure of our still democratic government, and the metaphor he used was both stupidly awkward and offensive.

"While our new majority will serve as your voice in the people's House, we must remember it's the president who sets the agenda for our government."

"They can ride but they'll have to sit in the back seat."

Obama's direct threat was to entirely ignore the Republican minority (or majority) in the Congress - contrary to our constitutional structure. In effect to do even worse to the political opposition than he has accused them of doing to him. "They can ride but they'll have to sit in the back seat."

Neither of us knows Bonner's inner intentions. However, on the face of it, it appears that he is explicitly acknowledging the Preident's role and that of the Democrat majority in the Senate - the very thing the President denied in his crude and puerile remarks.

JPB wrote:

I've just printed out the mega version and will read through it. From the Executive Summary and the high point versions of each section, though, I don't see much I disagree with (and, I'm currently under 55 and in the target group to expect less public support as I age).

His own party can't embrace it because it's politically dangerous for Republicans to talk about reducing benefits to the elderly --- even the future elderly. They get all jumpy about unplugging grandma and death panels and crap.

Cool, let me know what you think when you're done. I can't figure out how his plan actually accomplishes any goal other than cutting taxes.

Cycloptichorn

Every American should have access to affordable health insurance, and the ability to acquire preventive health care and treatment – regardless of employment, health status, or income level. No one should face bankruptcy because of a catastrophic illness; no one should be denied health coverage because they are branded “uninsurable.” Yet few will be able to afford health care or insurance if rising costs continue to spiral out of control. The only way to ensure that all Americans have access to quality health care is to confront these rising costs and the market distortions that created them. Such an approach will not solve every problem in the complex network of health care delivery and financing, but it will correct the most fundamental flaws.

Modernizing the Benefit. Medicaid, the Federal-State health care entitlement program for qualifying low-income and indigent individuals, is outdated and fiscally unsustainable, and is a leading cause of State budget deficits. Worse, the program serves its intended beneficiaries poorly: Medicaid patients only receive the basic treatment they require, with costs set by Washington or State bureaucrats; and Medicaid patients often end up in the emergency room for basic needs simply because they cannot get access to up-front health care services. The right changes can form a more effective program, strengthen the health care safety net for the neediest populations, and bring fiscal relief to States.

As the long-term fiscal burden of Medicare becomes more unsustainable, it is clear that – to fulfill the mission of Medicare – small and gradual changes to the program will not suffice. The entire methodology of the program must be converted away from a program that shelters providers and consumers from prices – and is therefore inefficient in restraining rising costs – into one in which beneficiaries choose the most affordable coverage that best suits their needs.

Just as the Medicare Program requires a new methodology, so too does its structure of financing. In this proposal, the Part A and Part B trust funds are combined to create one unified trust fund. The new Medicare Program and the existing program continue to be financed by trust fund revenues, Medicare payroll taxes, and general revenue contributions. The measure of solvency is converted away from one based on the unfunded liability of the Part A trust fund and into one in which the program’s solvency is measured as a percentage of gross domestic product [GDP].

Medicare Payment. For future Medicare beneficiaries who are now under 55 or younger (those who first become eligible on or after 1 January 2021), the proposal creates a standard Medicare payment to be used for the purchase of private health coverage. Currently enrolled Medicare beneficiaries and those becoming eligible in the next 10 years (i.e. turning 65 by 1 January 2021) will see no changes in the current structure of their Medicare benefits.

Social Security’s shrinking value and fragile condition pose a serious problem that threatens to break the broader compact in which workers support the generation preceding them, and earn the support of those who follow. To maintain the program’s significant role as a part of the retirement security safety net, Social Security’s mission must be fulfilled somehow. The legacy envisioned by President Roosevelt must be completed without bankrupting future workers.

This proposal addresses the shortcomings of the current system and strengthens the retirement safety net by providing workers with the voluntary option of investing a portion of their FICA payroll taxes into personal savings accounts. Due to the higher rate of return received by investments in secure funds consisting of equities and bonds, these accounts would allow workers to build a significant nest egg for retirement that far exceeds what the current program can provide. Each account will be the property of the individual, and fully inheritable, which will allow workers to pass on any remaining balances in their accounts to their descendants. Individuals 55 and older will remain in the current system and will not be affected by this proposal in any way... All other workers will have a choice to stay in the current system or begin contributing to personal accounts. Those who choose the personal account option will have the opportunity to begin investing a significant portion of their payroll taxes into a series of funds managed by the U.S. government. The system would closely resemble the investment options available to Members of Congress and Federal employees through the Thrift Savings Plan [TSP]

As is true of the major Federal entitlement programs, Federal tax law cannot be corrected by merely tinkering with an excessively complex and burdensome tax code. What is needed is a thorough restructuring of the tax laws – one that is broad and yet achievable.

This proposal eliminates the alternative minimum tax [AMT] and allows individuals to choose how they will pay their Federal income taxes. It eliminates the tax on savings and shifts toward a consumption tax for businesses, making it easier for U.S. businesses to invest and create more jobs in the U.S. Most important, this plan is designed to hold down the tax burden on the economy, limiting it to 19 percent of GDP – rather than allowing the tax burden to rise to unprecedented levels, as assumed under current tax law.

In addition to creating a simpler and fairer income tax system for individuals and families, this plan does away with the corporate income tax, which discourages investment and job creation, distorts business activity, and puts American businesses at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors. In its place, the proposal establishes a simple and efficient business consumption tax [BCT] that will enhance the international competitiveness of U.S. businesses and put the economy on solid footing to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The days when a college graduate could expect to join a company and climb its ladder for an entire career are gone. Also evaporating are the jobs on production lines that could instantly lift any high school graduate securely into the middle class. Regardless of how well or poorly the economy is doing, most Americans already know they will likely have to switch jobs, and even careers, more than once during the course of their lifetimes.
One reason is globalization. The world’s economies have become irrevocably interconnected from forces such advances in transportation, technological gains, the explosion of the Internet, and lowered trade barriers. All these have served to open the global economic playing field. Now that new markets have emerged in other countries, and money and work assignments can move around the world in a matter of seconds, Americans no longer compete only with their fellow citizens for jobs; they also are challenged by workers in India, China, Europe, and the rest of the world.

Further, as the U.S. economy becomes more complex and innovative, workers will have to be more knowledgeable and flexible to succeed – which means they will need additional education and/or job training throughout their careers. Life-long learning will be a necessary part of career development.

Government cannot insulate workers from the forces of globalization, but it can help facilitate the training needed to avoid, or push through, any period of uncertainty or unemployment. While the Nation’s existing job training system has been improved over ineffective strategies of the past, the government can better leverage and target existing resources, and make it more responsive to the effects of globalization.

One reason the Federal Government’s major entitlement programs are difficult to control is the way they are designed. A second is that current congressional budgeting lacks a means of identifying the long-term effects of near-term program expansions. A third is that these programs are not subject to regular review, as annually appropriated discretionary programs are; and as a result, Congress rarely evaluates the costs and effectiveness of entitlements except when it is proposing to enlarge them.

Nothing can substitute for sound and prudent policy choices. But an improved budget process, with enforceable limits on total spending, would surely be a step forward. This proposal calls for such a reform.

Specifics and details are included for each proposal. Are you saying we don't need these reforms, or simply that you don't like his proposals for how to achieve them? I have no problems with any of the goals and, to be honest, I liked many of the specifics as well. But then... I've already been accused of wanting to unplug grandma and set up death panels.

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.

And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.

Finally, let’s talk about those spending cuts. In its first decade, most of the alleged savings in the Ryan plan come from assuming zero dollar growth in domestic discretionary spending, which includes everything from energy policy to education to the court system. This would amount to a 25 percent cut once you adjust for inflation and population growth. How would such a severe cut be achieved? What specific programs would be slashed? Mr. Ryan doesn’t say.

After 2020, the main alleged saving would come from sharp cuts in Medicare, achieved by dismantling Medicare as we know it, and instead giving seniors vouchers and telling them to buy their own insurance. Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s the same plan Newt Gingrich tried to sell in 1995.

And we already know, from experience with the Medicare Advantage program, that a voucher system would have higher, not lower, costs than our current system. The only way the Ryan plan could save money would be by making those vouchers too small to pay for adequate coverage. Wealthy older Americans would be able to supplement their vouchers, and get the care they need; everyone else would be out in the cold.

In practice, that probably wouldn’t happen: older Americans would be outraged — and they vote. But this means that the supposed budget savings from the Ryan plan are a sham.

So why have so many in Washington, especially in the news media, been taken in by this flimflam? It’s not just inability to do the math, although that’s part of it. There’s also the unwillingness of self-styled centrists to face up to the realities of the modern Republican Party; they want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense. And last but not least, there’s deference to power — the G.O.P. is a resurgent political force, so one mustn’t point out that its intellectual heroes have no clothes.

But they don’t. The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.

November 2, 2010, 11:18 pm
Was It Worth It?

We don’t know the final extent of the Democratic losses yet. But we do know the questions that liberals and Democrats will be asking themselves tomorrow morning. Was it all worthwhile? Was the 111th Congress’s flurry of legislative activity worth the backlash it helped create? Were the health care bill and the stimulus worth handing John Boehner the gavel in the House of the Representatives? Did it make sense to push and push and then keep on pushing, even after the polls and town halls and special-election outcomes made it clear the voters were going to push back?

Today, Ezra Klein made the case that the answer for liberals should be yes. A lot of Democratic politicians will lose their jobs tonight, he conceded. But “if you see the point of politics as actually getting things done,” rather than just trying to preserve a majority for as many years as possible, “the last two years, for Democrats, have been a stunning, historic success. Whatever else you can say about the 111th Congress, it got things done … if [its members] failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington to do.”

This is a powerful argument. Majorities come and go; big legislative achievements (and say what you will about the 111th Congress, but it wasn’t afraid to go big) can last a long, long time. Certainly there are many conservatives who wish that the Republican congresses of the Bush era had risked the public’s wrath to pass Social Security reform or tax reform, instead of playing it safe and eventually losing anyway amid the backlash against the Iraq War. Politics often gets covered as though the legislative sessions are just a long prelude to the real action of election season. But for all the breathless horse-race coverage, elections only matter to the extent that they produce (or forestall) actual legislation. And where the policies of the United States government are concerned, all the ground the Republicans regained tonight doesn’t change the fact that what liberals achieved in Barack Obama’s first two years in office was more consequential than any conservative victories in recent memory.

The question is what happens next. If the backlash persists into 2012, if the Republicans get serious about policy, if this cycle’s conservative gains are a prelude to conservative legislative successes down the road, then the Democrats’ decision to gamble their majority on health care reform may come to look reckless and self-destructive, and the victories of the 111th Congress will seem pyrrhic rather than enduring.

But that’s a lot of “if”s. For now, for tonight, Republicans need to keep a lid on their euphoria and recognize that while they’ve come out on top in this election, in the most important sense they haven’t won anything just yet.

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Specifics and details are included for each proposal. Are you saying we don't need these reforms, or simply that you don't like his proposals for how to achieve them? I have no problems with any of the goals and, to be honest, I liked many of the specifics as well. But then... I've already been accused of wanting to unplug grandma and set up death panels.

The problem is that his solutions in most cases don't actually solve the problems they are intended to solve. What they DO do is lower taxes, mostly for the rich.

...

Don't be fooled, JPB. Nothing like this plan will ever be put forth by the GOP for consideration, because it is - as Krugman pointed out - a fraud. It's designed to make the Republicans look serious on policy, but even in that it fails.

I would point out that if the nation returned to the levels of taxation under Clinton - hardly onerous or destructive levels of taxation - then we have no budget problem. The budget over the next decade would be instantly balanced, without cutting every single social and discretionary program to the bone. But the point of the Ryan plan isn't to actually balance the budget, let alone pay down the debt; it's to justify greedy tax policies and nothing more.

Forget the descriptions - do the math. You won't be able to put his plans into place and take the deficit seriously at the same time, and that just doesn't jibe with the message of austerity that Republicans constantly pump out.

Cycloptichorn

Quote:

"They can ride but they'll have to sit in the back seat."

reminds me of Harry Truman.