Paul Ryan’s “Budget”

I reminded of one of grandmother’s favorite phrases. It was I had to laugh. And that’s what I did laugh when I read about Paul Ryan’s “budget.” Because he cannot be anything other than a joke. A very cruel joke if it were ever to be implemented but a joke nonetheless.

This is the guy who thinks deep thoughts and is a great intellectual and thinker about what has to be done with the budget. One of his lead off items is the repeal of Obamacare. And this is likely to happen how exactly in the next four years. The House will repeal it. Then of course the Democrats in the Senate will vote with Republicans to repeal it. Then President Obama will sign that law and repeal Obamacare. Perhaps in the fantasy world of Paul Ryan that might happen. But in the real world. Let's see. Oh that’s right it’s not likely to happen at ALL. So from the get go this “budget” is a complete and total farce.

E.J. Dionne sums it up really well in a piece in the Washington Post:

Thanks to this plan, nobody can take the House Budget Committee chairman seriously anymore as a policy wonk or a true deficit hawk. His budget is the work of an ideologue. It’s a bargaining ploy that even Ryan concedes is merely “a vision.”

It is full of holes and magic asterisks, the biggest being his refusal to detail any of the middle-class tax deductions he would have to scrap to get to his 25 percent income tax rate. This would represent an astonishingly large cut from the current 39.6 percent rate for incomes of over $450,000 a year.

I read a little of it. In this document he expresses concern for people going to college and drowning in student loans. His idea to fix this is to cut student loan programs. So, yes, under his plan there would be fewer students with debt. Not from making college more affordable but because they couldn’t afford to go to college.

It also mentions health care that it costs too much. The solution to this problem repeal Obamacare and cut Medicaid. This would leave, as pointed out in Dionne’s column, an additional 40 million to 50 million poor or moderate-income Americans without health insurance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

More from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released his previous budget last year, I wrote that for most of the past half century, its extreme nature would have put it outside the bounds of mainstream discussion. It was, I wrote, ‘Robin Hood in reverse — on steroids,’ because it would have produced the largest redistribution of income from bottom to top in modern U.S. history. Ryan’s new budget is just as extreme. Its cuts in programs for low-income and vulnerable Americans appear as massive as in last year’s budget, and its tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans could be larger than in last year’s.”

Indeed I had to laugh that this was put forth as a "budget." It's time once and for all to show this man for what he is. He's not an great intellectual thinker. He doesn't think deeply about how to solve the problems of the deficit. He wants to re-make the federal government in the image of Ayn Rand. Something that the American showed in the last election they did not want. Otherwise Ryan would be vice-president now. But he isn't.

I think it is time to laugh. Time to laugh this guy right off the stage.