You suppose he could get a job in Mitt's cabinet, shoud he win?
David Stockman savages Paul Ryan's budget
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Before the ascendancy of Rep. Paul Ryan as the GOP's latest 'budget guru," there was a similar self-annointed "boy genius" congressman a generation ago, David Stockman. He combined blind faith in supply-side "trickle down" economics with green-eyeshade budget credentials, and became the living symbol of GOP efforts to dismantle the New Deal/Great Society programs. Stockman served as Ronald Reagan’s OMB director until 1985. Today,
Stockman Savages Ryan:
Stockman only occasionally bursts into public view these days,
but has now done so with a vengeance in a New York Times op-ed column blasting Ryan’s budget plan as a complete fraud. Though using Ryan’s Veep selection as his point of departure and the Ryan Budget as a major talking point, Stockman is generally indicting his own former party and the conservative movement that once praised him in terms identical to its current love-fest with Ryan:
Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.
[H]e certainly knows his budget numbers, and isn’t afraid to challenge Ryan’s deficit-cutting street cred:
Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.
A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.
Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.
Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.
This is a large and angry revival of Stockman’s constant theme in
The Triumph of Politics that
Republicans were only interested in cutting federal spending or tax subsides that benefitted someone other than their own constituencies. And as in the 1980s,
he’s more than happy to go after the supply-side faith he once shared as well:The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station
