Obama '08?

man-child in chief

http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/Plan/#Intro
INTRODUCTION
A Choice of Two Futures

Rarely before have the alternatives facing America been so starkly defined.

For the past year, Washington’s leaders have taken an already unsustainable budget outlook and made it far worse. They have exploited Americans’ genuine economic anxieties to justify an unrelenting and wide-ranging expansion of government. Their agenda has included, among other things, a failed, debt-financed economic “stimulus”; an attempt to control the Nation’s energy sector; increasing domination of housing and financial markets; the use of taxpayer dollars to seize part ownership of two nearly bankrupt auto makers; and, of course, the planned takeover of Americans’ health care, already heavily burdened, manipulated, and distorted by government spending and regulation. This domineering government brings taxes, rules, and mandates; generates excessive levels of spending, deficits, and debt; leads to economic stagnation and declining standards of living; and fosters a culture in which self-reliance is a vice and dependency a virtue " and as a result, the entire country weakens from within.

Increasingly, Americans are rejecting this approach, and for good reason. But the status quo is not acceptable either. The Federal Government’s current fiscal path is unsustainable: it leads to unprecedented levels of spending and debt that will overwhelm the budget, smother the economy, weaken America’s competitiveness in the 21st century global economy, and threaten the survival of the government’s major benefit programs. The President and congressional Majority are only hastening America’s march toward this reckoning, adding to trillions of dollars worth of unfunded liabilities, and accelerating the erosion of Americans’ health care and retirement security. Their “progressivism” ironically points backwards " to a future in which America’s best century is the past century.

There is another choice, as reflected by the proposal described in this report: A Roadmap for America’s Future. It is a comprehensive, alternative approach to the Nation’s most pressing domestic priorities. Specifically, the plan addresses the following:

Health Care. It provides universal access to affordable health coverage, not by expanding government, but by reinforcing the role of consumers " patients " in a truly competitive marketplace. In conjunction with this, the plan takes on the necessary task of restructuring the government’s medical entitlements, making them sustainable for the long term.

Retirement Security. It saves and strengthens Social Security, making the program sustainable for the long run, and helping expand investments needed for economic growth.

Tax Policy. It offers an alternative to today’s needlessly complex and inefficient tax code, providing the option of a simplified mechanism that better promotes and rewards work, saving, and investment.

Job Training. It helps the Nation’s workforce prepare for success in the global economy by transforming 49 job training programs, scattered across eight agencies, into a flexible, dynamic program focused on results, and accompanied by clear measures of transparency and accountability. The plan requires the development of performance measures, and gives each State the option to consolidate funding into one program, if such an approach can be shown to improve outcomes and achieve job training goals.

This plan is not simply a slimmer version of the “progressive” ideology. It is a true alternative, and a complete legislative proposal consisting of specific policies supported by Congressional Budget Office estimates of its fiscal and economic consequences. More important, it is based on a fundamentally different vision from the one now prevailing in Washington. It focuses government on its proper role; it restrains government spending, and thus limits the size of government itself; it rejuvenates the vibrant market economy that made America the envy of the world; and it restores an American character rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship, and opportunity " qualities that make each American’s pursuit of personal destiny a net contribution to the Nation’s common good as well. In short, it is built on the enduring truths from which America’s Founders established this great and exceptional Nation.

This proposal does not attempt to abandon commitments Americans established over the past century, or to dismantle government. It recognizes that government has a necessary role in supporting the institutions through which Americans live their lives, and in providing a safety net for those who face financial or other hardships. But it rests on the conviction that government’s principal role is to maintain the freedoms through which individuals can pursue their own destinies. As Jefferson put it: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

The balance of this introduction describes these two futures in detail. The remainder of the report describes the principal domestic challenges through which this choice appears at present, and then presents a full description and explanation of the policies embraced in this legislation.

Paul Ryan’s Budget Alternative: Massive Rationing

Paul Ryan has gone where I thought no Republican would dare to tread and put out an alternative budget proposal that would, in fact, balance the budget over the long term. Part of the program is draconian real cuts in all domestic programs"less money for Pell Grants, less money for local schools, less money for the FBI, less money for job training, less money for National Institutes of Health research, less money for food stamps, etc. And part of the program is cuts in Social Security"people work be getting what they’ve been promised. And part of the program involved Medicaid in a way I don’t really understand.

But over the long haul the most important thing here is Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicare.

Spending on federal health care programs is the biggest driver of long-run projected deficits:


The reason for this is fairly simple. The way Medicare works is that if you’re old, and you’re sick, the government will largely pick up the tab for your health care. Back in 1975 “your health care” referred to something pretty cheap. By 2005, health care had become much more expensive. And by 2035 it will be even more expensive. And Ryan’s proposal, simply put, is for the government to not pay for it.

Rather than have the government pay for your health care, the government will give you a voucher with which to buy private insurance. Initially, the voucher will be worth the same amount as the average cost of providing health care to people. But the insurance company will have higher administrative costs than Medicare, and it will have profit margins and such that Medicare doesn’t have, and it will pay more for services than Medicare does. So on day one you’ll lose your Medicare coverage and instead get a voucher that costs the government the same amount, but buys you much less in the way of health care services.

The way the government saves money over the long run, however, is that over time the voucher won’t keep up with the cost of health care. As the CBO explains in its analysis (PDF) of Ryan’s outline, the voucher will be “indexed to grow at a rate halfway between the general inflation rate, as measured by the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U), and the rate of price inflation for medical care, as measured by the consumer price index for medical care (CPI-M).” That means the value of the voucher “would increase at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent for the next 75 years, in comparison with the average annual growth rate of nearly 5 percent that CBO expects for per capita national spending for health care under current law.”

In other words, Ryan is proposing to ration care for seniors. He’ll take the baseline level of per capita medical costs for seniors in 2020 and then draw a curve representing 2.7 percent annual growth and say that any costs above that won’t be covered. If grandma’s got a bunch of money, then she can spend her money. If not, then the plug is pulled.

One could speak about this in detail, but in brief my take is that it’s totally unworkable. The whole reason Medicare was put in place in the first place, rather than just hiking Social Security benefits, is that the individual insurance market doesn’t work and it especially doesn’t work for senior citizens. As I observed in a little-read December 29 post, this would change if congress passed the Obama health care plan. If Obama’s efforts to create a viable regulatory framework in which individuals can buy private health insurance (a) pass congress, and (b) turn out to work well and be popular, then you can imagine a version of Ryan’s plan being put into place. But in the absence of that kind of reform, I just don’t see how you can do this, which is presumably why the implementation is delayed all the way to 2021 which helps Ryan avoid needing to think about implementation details.

Okie- I must regretfully tell you that you were wrong. The Cyclops said so!

And he doesn't need any evidence or documentation. Why? Because he KNOWS.

He wrote:

John Ray is a moron who doesn't know his history and you already had this clearly pointed out to you, Okie, in your thread comparing Liberalism to Nazis.
end of quote

Cyclops is WRONG

MASSAGAT wrote:

Okie- I must regretfully tell you that you were wrong. The Cyclops said so!

And he doesn't need any evidence or documentation. Why? Because he KNOWS.

He wrote:

John Ray is a moron who doesn't know his history and you already had this clearly pointed out to you, Okie, in your thread comparing Liberalism to Nazis.
end of quote

Cyclops is WRONG

As I have heard a few people say, including Mitt Romney in the debates last year, "Facts are stubborn things," so yes, no matter what people say about John Ray or about the Nazis, the facts of history speak loudly and clearly, that Nazis were clearly lefties of the ultra sort. Libs hate these facts because they know their philosophy has been intimately associated with and bear the collective guilt of the the tragedies of history.

I don't know the details of these plans; but I am not opposed to cutting benefits to seniors...I mean, they are the ones who've allowed this mess of a government to develop and create all of these unpaid expenditures. If my grandmother thought it would be a good idea to implement something that her unborn great-grandson would be forced to pay for...she shouldn't be too surprised when that person decides that they got a raw end of the deal and will look to get out from under the crushing debt that previous generations laid on their backs.

John Ray doesn't quote facts. He just misinterprets stuff and makes assumptions that fit his pre-determined narrative, that modern Democrats are heirs to Nazism.

Do you not remember being thoroughly embarrassed on the other thread? Do you need me to link to examples of you being corrected by those who know this era of history much, much better then you?

This is what happens when people who have no formal training in history try and apply their amateurish analysis to a complex situation. Shitty info in leads to shitty results.

Cycloptichorn

Probably one of the biggest and most obvious leftist point of the Nazi Party is the following, which really comes very close to the central and overall philosophy of communism or Marxism, and that fact is inescapably obvious.

"COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD"