It’s quite a pronouncement to call the House GOP Budget aka the Ryan Plan “the most fraudulent in history”…but I have a hard time disagreeing with the sentiment.  As we have written about before – the Ryan plan is based off of fantasy projections that are not even remotely close to reality.  And to add insult to injury – the budget will not detail out what programs specifically that it would cut…it has an implicit promise built within that says “Trust me”.  When policy experts conclude that this would require significant cuts to Medicare for future seniors, Medicaid, early education programs for pre-kindergarten and post high school financial aid like Pell Grants….all to pay for the Republican plan to give an average of $265k in tax cuts per year to anyone making more than $1 million a year.

We’ve written a lot about the Ryan plan – which you can find HERE.

Krugman writes:

So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.

To be sure, we’ve had irresponsible and/or deceptive budgets in the past. Ronald Reagan’s budgets relied on voodoo, on the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would somehow lead to an explosion of economic growth. George W. Bush’s budget officials liked to play bait and switch, low-balling the cost of tax cuts by pretending that they were only temporary, then demanding that they be made permanent. But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?

Greg Sargent has his own thoughts:

The key point about the Paul Ryan budget is not just that it doesn’t bother telling you how it would reduce the deficit — even though we keep being told how Very Serious Ryan is. It’s that the Republican Party has doubled down on the larger vision and ideology that Ryan’s budget represents, another sign of how far to the right the GOP has moved.

Comments

comments